IN AFGHANISTAN, FARMERS ARE ONCE AGAIN EXPECTING A BUMPER CROP OF OPIUM POPPY

NOOR MOHAMMAD KHAN CHARAI, Afghanistan - Mohammad Gul, 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 un-Islamic.

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 seeds 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 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.

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.

Poppy has been cultivated in Afghanistan for centuries, but it wasn't until
the wars of the 1980s and 1990s that the red and white flowers began taking
over large swaths of prime farmland. By 1994, the United Nations' annual
survey reported that Afghanistan was supplying more than 70 percent of the
world's opium. The narcotic had become the country's major source of income.

Heroin use worldwide grew steadily as well. The U.N. Drug Control Program
now estimates 9 million users globally, 3 million of them in Europe.

After the Taliban swept the warlords from power in 1996, the hardline
Islamists opened on-and-off negotiations over opium with the U.N. drug
agency. Finally, in July 2000, Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammad
Omar announced the ban on the crop.

Diplomats believe the Taliban, pariahs because of their violations of human
rights standards, were seeking international respectability and financial
aid. They may have acted, too, because of the upsurge in addiction in
Afghanistan itself.

Last spring, the U.N. agency sent out hundreds of trained workers to
inspect more than 10,000 Afghan villages in its annual survey. In mid-2001
it reported that the Taliban edict had been almost totally successful:
Opium production was off by 96 percent. The American DEA agreed, relying on
satellite imagery. Fear of the Taliban's stern hand had all but rid the
countryside of poppy.

Then, last October, Washington began its war on the Taliban for sheltering
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorists, and the drug fighters saw the sudden
remarkable gains in Afghanistan explode among tons of bombs dropped by
American B-52s.

The new Karzai administration did declare its own opium ban on Jan. 17, but
it was too late. The farmers had already done their fall poppy planting.