OPIUM PRODUCERS 'FREE TO PLANT'

Afghanistan Is Almost Certain To Return To Its Dubious Distinction As
The World's Top Supplier As The Taliban Are Displaced

KARIZ, Afghanistan -- No one could be more delighted about the
departure of the Taliban than the opium poppy growers in eastern
Afghanistan.

In July 2000, the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, issued an
edict banning poppy cultivation across Afghanistan, then the world's
largest producer of the flower pod used to make heroin.

For years, the Taliban had used taxes on drugs to finance their
military. That all changed, however, with Omar's eight-line message.

According to a recent report by the U.N. Drug Control Program, the
decree brought raw opium production in Afghanistan to a virtual halt,
dropping from 3,276 tons to only 185 tons in just one year.

But now that the Taliban have retreated to the mountains, there is an
eagerness among farmers in the irrigated lowlands south of Jalalabad,
the capital of Nangarhar province.

Last week, farmer Ahmed Shah and his neighbors were busy fertilizing
and tilling their small plots of land, preparing to plant poppy seeds
to be harvested next April, processed into heroin in neighboring
Pakistan and delivered to overseas markets.

"I can make 10 times more with poppy than I can with wheat," Shah said
as two teen-age boys turned the soil nearby.

The farmers of eastern Afghanistan are fully aware of the epidemic
they feed with their beautiful flowers.

They see the hollow-eyed addicts in the bazaars of Peshawar when they
travel to Pakistan.

"We know we are creating addicts," Shah said. "The only reason we are
doing this is because we are poor. If I could find another job, I
would stop growing poppies."

Samsul Haq, deputy director of the Nangarhar Drug Control and
Coordination Office, estimates that before the Taliban edict, 85
percent of the Jalalabad agricultural economy was driven by opium production.

"This is a great opportunity for poppy growers," Haq
said.

"The Taliban is gone. There is confusion about what kind of new order
is coming in. The farmers are free to plant poppies."

Haq said that unless poppy production is checked by massive foreign
aid to provide the farmers with an alternative, Afghanistan is almost
certain to return by next summer to its dubious distinction as the
world's top supplier.

The farmers in Kariz, a mud-walled village of 600 families where
everyone grows poppies, see opium as the fastest, surest way out of
the wrenching poverty brought on by more than two decades of war and
turmoil.

On one side of the farmland is an irrigation canal built under a 1950s
Soviet foreign aid program.

In the distance are two twisted and broken high-tension towers that
date to a time when this area had electricity.

Everywhere are signs of war: carcasses of downed Soviet aircraft and
armored personnel carriers; a military base pocked with huge craters
from more recent U.S. bombing attacks; desiccated groves of olive and
orange trees abandoned more than a decade ago during the mujahedeen
fight with the Soviet-backed government.

Haji Saifuddin, a 60-year-old farmer, has been growing poppies for
more than 20 years on several plots he owns near Kariz.

He alternates poppy planting with cotton, corn and wheat. As he
inspected his poppy field Wednesday, he carried stalks of corn, used
locally as animal fodder, behind his back.

"When the Russians returned to their homeland," Saifuddin said,
referring to the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, "I was a
refugee in Pakistan. I started growing poppies when I got back."

He said it costs him about $100 for fertilizer and seed for each
"jerib" (about half an acre) of poppies he cultivates. Saifuddin said
his return on each jerib is about $5,000, a small fortune.

The Kariz villagers, Persian-speaking members of the Afghan "Arab"
tribe that claims to be descended from Arab traders who traveled and
settled in Kariz centuries ago, live modestly in compounds with
courtyards planted with mulberry and date trees.

But a few miles away along another farm road are massive homes that
jut up above high, gated walls with sentry towers on each corner.

Haq said these mansions are occupied by opium traders, Afghanistan's
drug barons. Some are of modern, Western style.

One was made from the traditional adobe but many times grander,
appearing on the horizon like a giant sand castle complete with turrets.

The Taliban ban on poppy cultivation, instituted four years after the
movement came to power, had an instant, devastating effect on the
local farmers.

Nangarhar province is the second-biggest producer of opium poppies in
Afghanistan, topped only by Helmand province west of the Taliban
spiritual center, Kandahar.

"I took an advance on opium before the ban," Saifuddin said. "I was
forced to sell 12 jeribs of land to pay it back."

Another farmer, Abdul Shakoor, 70, said he lost the equivalent of
$6,500 because of the ban.

Because of the decree, the Taliban lost much of its support among the
poppy growers. The villagers said there were only two active Taliban
left in the village.

The farmers are more hopeful about the new political order being
created.

The post-Taliban governor of Nangarhar province, Haji Abdul Qadir,
also served as governor from 1992 to 1996, in what is known as the
warlord period.

Qadir, an educated mujahedeen commander, started out ambitiously with
a staggered program to cut poppy production.

Under promises from Western governments that his province would be
given technical and financial assistance in exchange for opium
controls, he cut poppy production by 25 percent in his first year as
governor.

But when the promised foreign aid did not materialize, Qadir became
enraged, lecturing a visiting delegation of international drug experts.

"Next year," Qadir told the drug experts, "our farmers will not only
cultivate poppies in their fields but on the roofs of their homes and
in their flowerpots."

This kind of talk was music to the ears of the farmers of Kariz
village.

Earlier this week, several of the local elders, including Saifuddin,
trooped into the governor's mansion in Jalalabad to declare their
support for Qadir.

But uncertainty about the stability of the new order also has them
worried.

If the current Nangarhar government, composed of a triumvirate of
three former mujahedeen commanders, including Qadir, fails, that might
open the door to rule by a countless collection of local commanders
and warlords.

"Most of the farmers are happy because they now grow poppies," Haq
said, "but they are also fearful that these commanders will steal
their income from opium."