U.S. TAKES AIM AT AFGHAN OPIUM

Worries Grow About Bumper Crop

With the harvest due to begin next month, preliminary estimates are that
Afghanistan is about to produce a "substantial amount" of opium poppy,
perhaps approaching the near-record levels immediately before the Taliban
government banned cultivation 18 months ago, a U.S. official said yesterday.

"The challenges are enormous," said Rand Beers, assistant secretary of
state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. With little
time left, he said, the United States is considering providing financial
and other incentives to farmers to plow under their fields before harvest,
an admittedly difficult undertaking since much of the cultivation is in the
most lawless parts of Afghanistan.

Stopping the cultivation of poppy and production of raw opium, the basic
ingredient of heroin, is a principal goal of U.S. reconstruction policy in
Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, Afghanistan produced about three-quarters
of the world's opium supply.

Beers's comments came in a briefing on yesterday's release of the annual
presidential certification of countries cooperating in U.S.
counter-narcotics efforts. Congress requires such certification of major
drug-producing or transit countries as a condition of receiving U.S. aid.

Twenty-three countries have been so designated, and President Bush
yesterday named three of them -- Afghanistan, Haiti and Burma -- as having
"failed demonstrably to make substantial counternarcotics efforts over the
last 12 months." Only Burma, which receives no U.S. assistance, was
actually barred from assistance. Bush said in a written message to Congress
that he was exercising his authority to waive aid bans on the other two on
grounds it was "vital to the national interests of the United States."

Complaints by a number of countries, supported by some members of Congress,
led to a change in the certification procedure this year. Rather than
certifying which of the 23 countries were cooperating, the president
"decertified" those that were not.

Mexico, which protested the previous "guilty until certified innocent"
system, made significant progress under the new administration of President
Vicente Fox in arresting drug traffickers and assisting interdiction
efforts, Beers said. The overall efforts of police and military forces in
Colombia, the source of most of the world's cocaine, had been "superior,"
he said.

In his report to Congress, Bush wrote that total poppy cultivation in
Afghanistan had decreased 94 percent following the Taliban ban. But "opium
trafficking and heroin processing continued unabated through 2001,
indicating the existence of large stockpiles." At no point, the report
said, did the Taliban take steps to interrupt the opium trade. Since
certification is based on activity last year, Afghanistan was placed on the
decertification list.

Moreover, even as cultivation decreased in Taliban-controlled areas of the
country, "cultivation and opium production increased in former Northern
Alliance territory" in the northern part of the country, Bush wrote. Since
the Taliban were driven from power last fall, "drug traffickers in
Afghanistan have switched allegiances from the Taliban to local commanders
and warlords."

Although the new interim Afghan government of Hamid Karzai has said it
would not tolerate poppy cultivation, Beers said preliminary estimates of
the U.N. Drug Control program, which provides an annual survey, were that
cultivation this year could approach that of 2000. That crop, which
produced about 3,600 tons of raw opium, was surpassed only by 1999's
all-time record.

"That indicates the magnitude of the problem," Beers said.

Planted in the fall and harvested from late March through May, poppy has
long been Afghanistan's most profitable cash crop, and destitute Afghan
farmers, whose food crops and stock animals have been decimated by drought
and war, are unlikely to want to give it up. In addition, Beers said, much
of this year's crop is believed to be located in Helmand province, in
southwestern Afghanistan, "one of the last areas to become secure."

Although the United States and other reconstruction donors plan eventually
to launch food crop development programs in Afghanistan, they are far from
being underway.

U.S. law does not permit the actual purchase of the opium crop, but "we are
talking about possible remuneration" to those farmers who can be reached
"for the cost of their labor to plow the crop under," Beers said. He said
the United States would also assist efforts to interdict drugs smuggled
through Pakistan and Central Asian countries bordering landlocked
Afghanistan, although he acknowledged that one of Afghanistan's longest
borders is with Iran, with which "U.S. relations are not the best in the
world."

"Other countries have been working with Iran" on interdiction, he said. "I
hasten to add that U.S. assistance will not go to Iran in any of these
programs."