AS CASH CROP, POPPIES FLOURISH ANEW

DARA-E-NUR, Afghanistan - The work is so hard, Begham says, that on some
days she wants to die. But she has to live so her family can survive. And
because of what she lives and toils to produce, countless others thousands
of miles away from her home in eastern Afghanistan will suffer and die.

Begham is a farmer who grows opium poppies for a living. Each day before
dawn, she drags her tired, thin body to the carefully terraced fields that
descend from her packed mud family compound and tends to her crops. Just as
all the other villagers here do.

''My three children are crying and I have to leave them to go to the
fields. But I have to do it to feed the children,'' she said in the
cramped, dim kitchen of the house in which her family lives. ''I wish we
had enough money so that I wouldn't have to do this job.''

The demise of the Taliban has provided a victory in the US-led coalition's
war against terrorism. But it has resulted in a setback for the war on drugs.

Afghanistan's foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, said yesterday that the
nation's interim government will wipe out narcotics trafficking. But the
new leaders in Kabul have their hands full with many other priorities.

And all across Afghanistan, farmers already are planting poppies again now
that the Taliban, which had banned harvesting the deadly opiate, are no more.

Hundreds of newly seeded poppy fields dot the rocky mountain slope to which
the mud-brick homes of Dara-e-Nur cling like crumbling sand castles.
Thousands more fields stretch into the sun-drenched valley below that
extends 30 miles south to Jalalabad. Three months from now, this valley
will turn scarlet with poppies. By June, buyers will come to purchase the
opium-rich seedpods.

The crop, and the deadly heroin it produces, will begin its journey to
Western Europe and the United States. And families like Begham's will have
enough to buy clothes and eat for another year.

To understand how something so destructive as heroin can come from
something so simple as a mother's need to care for her three children, one
merely has to look at the wreck that is Afghanistan's economy.

Three years of drought has turned much of Afghanistan's arable land into
sand. More than 22 years of nonstop warfare has wrecked whatever industry
the country ever had. Many Afghans, like Begham, long ago turned to
cultivating opium poppies to make a living. Before the Taliban enforced its
drug ban, Afghan farmers cultivated more than 197,000 acres of poppies last
year, producing 75 percent of the world's heroin, according to the United
Nations Drug Control Program.

The ban on planting poppies, about the only law the puritanical Islamic
militia enforced that won international approval, cut Afghanistan's poppy
production by 90 percent in 2001. But there is no evidence to indicate
Afghanistan's new rulers will crack down on farmers as hard as the Taliban did.

This year, according to a UN report released in October, poppy production
increased threefold in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance, whose
troops, backed by the US-led bombing campaign, have since driven the
Taliban from power. The warlords who make up the alliance have long been
reputed to control much of the processing and smuggling of opium and heroin
to the former Soviet Central Asian republics to the north, from which the
drugs travel on to Western Europe and the United States.

The UN has also reported the presence of 417 heroin factories in
Afghanistan, many of them in Northern Alliance territory. Their existence
more than offsets the antidrug message that the new government in Kabul has
been sending out, in official statements and in posters covering the
capital's streets, that proclaim, ''Drug Addiction is Foreign to Islam.''

But if Afghanistan's new masters are unlikely to control drug production as
ruthlessly as the Taliban did, the Islamic militia's ban also has come
under scrutiny. Some antinarcotics officials believe the Taliban was
secretly stockpiling opium to increase the price of heroin. The market
price of a kilogram of raw opium rocketed from $30 last year to $700 in
September, according to the UN. And in Begham's town, the Taliban did not
exactly ban poppy planting; its officials merely levied a tax of more than
50 percent on all the money farmers earned.

Even then it made more sense to plant poppies than winter wheat. Wheat
requires four times the water poppies need. No one comes out to Dara-e-Nur
to buy wheat. Begham knows that the only income her extended family of 12
will see next year will come in June, when buyers from Pakistan will come
here and give her $2,400 in exchange for the 90 pounds of opium-rich
seedpods she expects to harvest.

Begham's husband and his brother have spent the past five years as fighters
in local anti-Taliban militias; that work does not provide a paycheck.
Begham's mother-in-law and sister-in-law have no jobs. They tend to the six
children when Begham is in the field, driving the oxen that pull her crude
wooden plow, planting and weeding. During the harvest, she seldom leaves
the fields.

''Whenever I go to my field, I feel like I'm going to the graveyard,''
Begham said. ''Except when you die, you stay in the grave forever, and you
don't suffer. This job causes me to suffer greatly. I have mental illness
and pain in my heart.''

Whatever money she makes for her labors is not even enough to repair the
two rooms the Taliban destroyed in a rocket attack three years ago. That
part of her rickety house now ends in a pile of sand. Chickens wander in
and out of the kitchen, which is also the living room, looking for
something to pluck out of the sand floor.

Begham is illiterate; when a visitor asked about her age, she hesitated,
then said, ''20.'' Then, sensing disbelief, she gave an embarrassed smile
and said, ''I don't know how to count my age.'

She has never seen an opium addict. People in Dara-e-Nur sometimes chew on
poppy seeds to keep warm in cold weather, but no one smokes the resin. Only
her husband, Najibullah, who spends much of his time in Jalalabad with his
commander, expressed moral concern about the family business.

''All the Western countries should help us because this opium goes to the
West and causes great grief there,'' he said.

Begham does not care about the destruction wrought by the poppies the
family grows. But she knows the work she does is killing her. As she waved
goodbye from the frail parapet of her castle of sand, her last words spoke
of the desperation and futility of the life of an Afghan poppy farmer:

''Sometimes I wish I had a gun to shoot myself.''