WAR AND DRUGS

With the Taliban gone, Afghan farmers turn back to an old cash crop.

In the sheltered valleys of the rugged Hindu Kush mountains, life is
lying dormant under the parched soil, awaiting the first spring in
seven years that Afghanistan will be free of the Taliban.

But many of Afghanistan's starving farmers have not planted winter
wheat on their terraced plots that run from draught-plagued valleys
well up the steep, rugged sides of the mountains.

With the Taliban gone, farmers have resumed the ancient tradition of
planting poppies. From the poppy's seed pods is harvested a gooey
resin that becomes opium, which in turn is processed into heroin.

By April the poppies that sip a fraction of the water needed by grain
crops will bloom, turning the hillsides crimson. By summer the pods
will be snapped up by buyers who will process and smuggle the
finished product out to waiting customers in the Western world.

The Taliban had officially banned poppies as unIslamic. But as the
Boston Globe reports, the Taliban didn't ban growth so much as cut
production by taxing farmers for 50 percent of their profits.

The Taliban, which had no visible means of support save terrorists'
money, presumably was caching drugs to raise the world price.

It worked. Last year the price of one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of raw
opium jumped from $30 to $700.

The Taliban no doubt intended to use drug profits to keep financing
its religious and social oppression, even as it bragged to the world
that it had outlawed the trade.

The United Nations Drug Control says Afghanistan produced 75 percent
of the world's heroin pre-ban.

With the Taliban gone and the new government in Kabul preoccupied
with rudimentary issues, the drug dealers have a green light to
resume the trade.

They will no doubt be aided by the Northern Alliance warlords who, it
is estimated, ran more than 400 heroin processing labs in their
territory prior to Sept. 11.

Assuming there are no other economic alternatives for Af-ghans and
everyone falls back into their old ways, the U.S.-led war on terror
will have contributed to a bitter irony -- the revival of the drug
trade.