IMPENDING POPPY CROP PROMPTS COUNTRIES TO WRING HANDS

The Afghan Spring Opium Is As Good As Harvested

Noor Mohammad Khan Charai, Afghanistan

Mohammad Gui, tattered shoes planted in the mud, will keep a close watch on
his two little acres in the coming weeks, waiting for the buds to bloom. He
won't be alone.

Five hundred miles up, racing silently through space, U.S. reconnaissance
satellites will be watching, too, camera eyes cocked for the first signs of
vivid red, the flowering of opium poppies.

Here on the edge of Afghanistan's Desert of Death and on east and north
across this deeply poor land, the deadly narcotic is again the raw material
of life and livelihood for hundreds of thousands of people.

"All my land is in poppy. I've grown it for 30 years," Mohammad Gul said.
"Every year except one."

That one was last year, when the Taliban, the Muslim zealots who ruled most
of Afghanistan, banned poppy growing as unIslamic.

Now the Taliban have been scattered to the harsh Afghan hills, ousted from
power in a lightning U.S.-led war, and America and its allies, including the
new Afghan regime of Hamid Karzai, have inherited the dilemmas of the land
of poppy.

Mohammad Gul, who sowed his seed's as he saw the old regime fall, is
thankful.

"We hear that this government's a good one, not cruel like the Taliban,' he
told :a visitor. They banned our poppy. I don't think this new government
will come and tear up our crops."

The rout of the Taliban is only one reason this poppy farmer is indebted to
the United States. It was that rich distant nation, after all, that sent
engineers here in the 1950s to build a vast irrigation project that turned
the arid wastes green. Today those canals and gates channel water to
countless fields of poppy along the banks of the Helmand, the slow, silty
river that snakes through the biggest opium-producing area of the biggest
opium-producing country in the world.

On the banks of the far-off Potomac, the challenge of Afghanistan has kept
lights burning late in government offices since Sept. 11, not least in the
glass-sheathed tower of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in suburban
Virginia.

It was a stunning turn of events. From one of the great success stories in
decades of drug wars -- when the Taliban in July 2000 "just said no" --
Afghanistan has reverted overnight to its role as the Iowa of opium, the raw
stuff of heroin. Early indications are that this spring's crop will reach
the high levels attained before the Taliban edict, drug enforcement
officials say.

Across the Potomac from DEA headquarters, at the State Department,
specialists are conferring with the British, French and other allies about
how to attack the Afghan problem. The Europeans are vitally concerned; it's
their addicts who consume the great bulk of Afghan heroin.

The British have floated the idea of a straight buy-out of spring opium
production. That might cost several hundred million dollars. Others stress
the need for immediate aid programs steering farmers to alternative crops.
The U.N. Drug Control Program is reopening its office in Kabul, the Afghan
capital. The DEA is planning to move staff to the U.S. Embassy there.

The DEA is hopeful that a law enforcement presence will be put in place
there that is friendly to work with, that will work with the international
community to combat drug trafficking," said DEA spokesman Will Giaspy.

Despite all the talk and action, however, the spring opium is as good as
harvested. The current interim regime in Kabul is too weak to stop it.

A few miles from Mohammad Gul's village, in the Helmand province center of
Lashkar Gah, a dust-blown place of donkey carts and earthen houses, the new
local administration takes a pragmatic view.

This year we're not able to destroy the crops. If we try to enforce a ban on
the farmers, it wouldn't be good for us," Haji Pir Mohammed, top deputy to
Helmand's governor, said in an interview.