AFGHAN OFFICIALS STRUGGLE TO STOP OPIUM BONANZA

Officials Struggle To Stop Production

SANGIN, Afghanistan -- The world's heroin pipeline is preparing for an
unprecedented Afghan bumper crop despite the new government's proclamations
outlawing it and the international community's promise to destroy it.

The illegal but very public and defiant growing of opium is a major source
of embarrassment for the interim Afghan government and the Western allies
supporting the new administration with money and military might. It shows,
too, the vast extent of lawlessness that continues unchecked in much of the
country after 23 years of civil war and shadow governments.

"We are powerless to stop it," said Haji Pir Mohammed, the top assistant to
the governor of Helmand province, center of the region where up to 90
percent of the world's heroin originates. "So we will do nothing."

Opium produces at least 10 times the profits other crops do, and even
farmers who had never planted poppy fields are getting in on the bonanza
this season.

"God willing, this will be the best year we have ever had," said Haji Ala
Mohammed, 65, standing in the rows of plants on his land, which has
produced opium for a quarter-century.

The American-led bombing of Afghanistan was designed to rid the country of
the Taliban regime, the Arab terrorists it harbored and the flourishing
drug network supported by them. British Prime Minister Tony Blair made
destroying Afghanistan's opium fields a key part of his pitch for national
support of the war on terrorism.

Vowing that "violators will be dealt with severely," the interim Afghan
government announced with great fanfare in January that the cultivation and
trafficking of opium were banned. But Afghan leaders have no muscle to
enforce the declaration.

Anti-drug patrols are mostly a ragtag army of provincial soldiers who have
not been paid in months because the government is broke. Thousands of the
military men work behind the scenes in support of opium business, the
government acknowledges.

Meanwhile, outlaw warlords--thrilled that the U.S. got rid of the Taliban
for them--are the guardians of the drug trade. There are reports in the
Helmand region of weapons and rocket launchers being stockpiled to protect
growers, sellers and smugglers from government or foreign assault.

In this dusty village, which thrives solely on opium production, buyers and
sellers in the markets are already calculating their huge takes from the
spring harvest. Smugglers are plotting routes and hiring couriers to ferry
the plastic bags of opium to heroin labs in Afghanistan and then ship the
finished product to neighboring Iran, Pakistan and the former Soviet republics.

The opium trade has flourished here for decades. Profits helped pay for the
resistance movement against Russian occupation, militant Arab training in
Afghanistan and the financing of the brutal Taliban regime.

"Everyone I know is involved in this trade--tens of thousands of people,"
the government's Mohammed said from the provincial seat in Lashkar Gah, 40
rugged miles to the south. "We can't throw a whole population in jail.
There are not enough jails in the world to hold all of them. And if we
throw just one of them in jail, we will have a revolt that we cannot handle."

Interim Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai said recently that he will not
hesitate to call for American or international troops to help fight enemy
warlords destabilizing the country. But the U.S. role is mostly confined to
hunting down terrorists and advising Karzai. The international peacekeepers
patrol only in Kabul.

U.S. bombs concentrated mostly on terrorist targets and did not aim for
opium fields so as not to inflame passions among thousands of poor farmers,
a Western diplomat in Kabul said. The Karzai government does not favor
aerial eradication and says it will be used only as a last resort if
growers resist government orders.

Troops And Tractors

In neighboring Kandahar, provincial officials said they would take it upon
themselves to send Afghan troops and tractors to destroy opium fields in
Helmand as the crop grows taller this spring.

When pressed on specifics, however, provincial leader Yusef Pashtun said
only: "Let's just say we will do it. We will enforce the government ban."

But a clearly chagrined Bush administration admitted last week that
Afghanistan continues to fail miserably in combating drug cultivation. U.S.
law prohibits paying foreign farmers for their opium or its destruction.
But as American officials push Afghanistan's neighbors to be more vigilant
in drug interdiction at the borders, they are considering a program to
reimburse growers for the cost of plowing their crops under.

"Then what am I supposed to do? Go beg in the bazaar?" said farmer
Mohammed, who like many farmers in these dusty parts scoffed at suggestions
that they would take a pittance for a crop that is worth about $150 per
pound on the open market.

Promised alternative crop plans by aid agencies have been hamstrung by a
painfully slow bureaucracy, Afghan officials charge. But it has been years
since a foreign aid agency has worked here because of the threat of danger.

Outsiders are viewed with suspicion here. The few who visit usually come
with an entourage of armed guards in army fatigues who keep a finger on the
triggers of their automatic weapons and a close watch on crowds that
quickly form around visitors.

Still, a team from the United Nations is expected this month to begin an
assessment of how much money and convincing it would take to get opium
growers to switch to wheat, cotton, potatoes, carrots and other crops.

Preliminary UN estimates put the cost of such a replacement program at $200
million for Helmand province, the cradle of the world's opium production.

"We need to wean the peasants of Afghanistan away from growing the opium
poppy, so crop substitution is required," said Herbert Okun, the U.S.
member of the International Narcotics Control Board.

"It has to be serious, and it has to be sustained," Okun said at the UN
last week. "We hope it will happen soon, and we hope it will be successful."

But under the most optimistic of timetables, tens of thousands of kilograms
of opium will be sold and processed this year before initial UN assessments
are finished.

The very Taliban that Western intelligence accuses of promoting and
expanding the opium business took little time to stop it. According to U.S.
drug enforcers, opium production fell up to 90 percent last year after the
Taliban burned some fields and issued a strict order against opium growing.

The reasons behind the ban were unclear. But it forced the price of opium
to increase tenfold and made opium dealers richer. The high demand, along
with the lack of enforcement, has encouraged production.

Farmers and opium dealers plead the threat of poverty as the reason they do
not want to grow alternative crops. While most opium growers still are
poor, this bustling village, a two-hour drive over the desert from the
nearest paved road, is prosperous by Afghan standards.

Shiny tractors and expensive four-wheel-drives thump through the muddy
streets. Sometimes purchases are made with opium barters. Eight kilograms
of opium will buy a used Toyota Land Cruiser. Vehicle repair shops are
thriving. So, too, are the opium markets.

Lure Of Money

Twirling worry beads in his shop, opium dealer Tor Jhan says that opium may
be bad for the rest of the world but it is good for poverty-ridden
Afghanistan. In a country where a quarter of the 21 million Afghans depend
on handouts, the gold watch on Jhan's wrist is worth more than the average
Afghan earns in a year.

Jhan says he earns $10,000 to $12,000 annually, a princely sum for Afghans.
His actual take may be three times as much, experts say. Three garbage bags
filled with opium powder rested next to a scale.

"Without opium, this town is no more," he said. "There won't be a car in
the street. Shops will close. We will go into the desert and die."

Ahmadullah Alizai, who runs one of the country's few drug prevention
programs, in Kandahar, said few in the opium trade are willing to make
sacrifices for a new government they don't trust. The local
administration's token effort to combat the opium trade has been to shutter
some markets in Kandahar.

"This opium crop is in the ground longer than we have had a new
government," Alizai said of the 2-month-old administration. "We will stop
the opium, but it will take a long, long time."