WITH TALIBAN GONE, POPPY CROPS RETURN

SORUKH ROAD, Afghanistan -- The muddy waters of the Red River are eked out
carefully in the fields of Sorukh Road, a parched farming village largely
depopulated by two punishing years of drought.

Some of the irrigation water trickles into plots of cauliflower. A little
is channeled to struggling crops of winter wheat. But a growing volume of
the precious liquid is being diverted--as it is in hundreds of other Afghan
villages today--to fields greening with tiny new leaves.

"It is good to be growing poppies again," said Muhammad Tauib, a barefoot
farmer who is replanting his fields with the narcotic plant once banned by
Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime. "At least my family will be able to eat."

In fact, Tauib's family never stopped relying on the illicit crop, even
when the Taliban outlawed all drug cultivation in Afghanistan last year. To
survive the drought, he and other villagers simply fell back on sales from
their large hoards of opium gum, the source of heroin.

As the political seasons change in Afghanistan, a troubling new crop of
drugs is sprouting once more, boding poorly for the return of law and order
to this war-battered country.

With the recent defeat of the Taliban regime by the United States and its
Afghan allies, the harsh anti-drug laws imposed by the old Islamic
government have fallen by the wayside. According to United Nations
drug-control analysts, poppy plantations that had been abolished on
religious grounds are under renewed cultivation.

Of particular concern is a surge of drug-growing in the former heroin
strongholds of Kandahar and Nangarhar provinces, experts say.

The trend worries global law-enforcement organizations because of
Afghanistan's appalling track record: Until 1999, the year before the
Taliban decreed a ban on drug growing, Afghanistan was exporting more
heroin than any other nation--some 5,000 tons annually, or 75 percent of
the world's supply.

"We clearly face major new challenges in Afghanistan," said Bernard Frahi,
a UN drug-control expert who traveled to Kabul last month to hurriedly
consult with the new leadership. "But we have been promised complete
cooperation."

Yet, just as clearly, the UN and other drug fighters have their work cut
out for them in the lawless fields of Afghanistan.

Taliban Profited

The UN's own research shows that many of the Northern Alliance commanders
who dominate the interim government have long histories of growing poppies.
And the deeply entrenched roots of the trade, whose immense profits in a
poor land even corrupted the ultra-pious Taliban, are nowhere more evident
than in hard-bitten villages such as Sorukh Road, which means "red river."

"The Taliban were very hard," said Abdul Wakil, 23, a farmer who has
started planting small plots of his land openly with poppies. "They threw
us in jail and they shaved the heads of our tribal leaders if they caught
us growing.

"But they were dealing in it too. They bought and resold the refined opium."

Like other villagers, he accused a senior Taliban official in the nearby
city of Jalalabad of running a heroin-processing lab out of his car repair
garage. An opium dealer in the town's bazaar, speaking on condition of
anonymity, added that Taliban authorities often looked the other way when
he resold villagers' stockpiled opium gum in neighboring Pakistan.

The allegations support recent U.S. State Department reports that the
fundamentalist regime may have been earning as much as $50 million a year
by quietly skimming drug profits--an essential source of cash for buying
weapons to fight the Northern Alliance.

Still, even American drug-enforcement officials admit that the Taliban's
ban on opium cultivation, imposed by supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in
July 2000, was remarkably successful.

According to the UN International Drug Control Program, heroin exports from
Afghanistan had plummeted 90 percent by October.

Yet why that drug-free status is fading fast is obvious in the mud- walled
villages and cracked fields around Jalalabad.

Besides the irresistible economics of the drug trade--a pound of wheat
earns a local farmer 3 cents while a pound of raw opium brings in at least
$15--nature and war have conspired against growing legitimate crops.

"I have a big field where I can grow lots of wheat or cotton, but I have no
water," Shukrudeen, a local farmer, said of the region's brutal drought.

"So what should I do with my few drops of irrigation water?" said
Shukrudeen, who has only one name. "Grow a small bag of vegetables? Or a
small bag of opium?"

He decided to finally give up growing food a month ago, he said, after
trying to sell his cauliflower crop in a nearby village. Impoverished by
years of war, the residents couldn't afford his produce. So he gave it
away. Now he is planting drugs for export.

Before the Taliban decree, most of Afghanistan's opium and heroin was
smuggled to addicts in Pakistan, Iran and Russia, say trafficking experts.
Roughly half ended up on the European market. Some 20 percent of the U.S.
heroin supply was believed to come from Afghanistan.

New Crops Already Growing

More appears to be headed that way via dirt-poor villages such as Sorukh
Road, which is only 6 miles outside Jalalabad, the eastern administrative
center of the new government.

In plain view, hundreds of new poppy fields on the city's outskirts are
fuzzed with green shoots that will be ready for harvest come springtime.

Farmer Batin Shah, who gave his age as "80 or more," hoped Afghanistan's
new leaders would clamp down on the trade before it spiraled out of control.

"In our religion, growing poppies is sinful," the white-bearded Shah said
during a break from hoeing his wheat field. "The government needs to tell
this to the people instead of just letting them do it."