US TARGETS HEROIN LABORATORIES AS PART OF BOMBING CAMPAIGN

After bombing Taliban tanks, headquarters and troops, pilots from the
United States were given a supplemental list of targets deemed to be almost
as important to American and European security -- opium-processing
laboratories, US officials said last week.

The bombing sorties have helped to disrupt the production of heroin from
the opium harvest, which had already been reduced by the Taliban edict
against poppy cultivation last year. A US state department official last
weekend confirmed that the opium and heroin industry was one of the
strategic targets of the bombing campaign. 'To the degree where we knew
where the processing laboratories were, they were taken out -- if they were
in areas which were not close to anywhere where collateral damage would
occur,' the official said.

The Taliban prohibited poppy growing in July 2000, but did not put an end
to the drug trade. The state department's international narcotics and law
enforcement bureau believes that 60% of Afghan opium production over the
past four years was not sold but warehoused. The ban may have been
motivated by religious concerns, but it was also a sound commercial
decision in a saturated market.

According to the United Nations office for drug control and crime
prevention, the opium price in Afghanistan had risen from $30 a kilogram in
June 2000 to $700 in the week before the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Within days, as soon as it became clear that military retaliation against
Afghanistan was likely, the opium brokers began selling their stocks.
Within two weeks of the attacks the price fell to $90 a kilogram. The cash
that the drugs brought in almost certainly went to the Taliban and al-Qaida
war chest. "In such a tightly controlled society, it's difficult to think
that huge stockpiles of opium would be controlled by anyone other than
those with close links with the regime itself. So yes, the sales were with
the complicity of the regime," said Kemal Kurspahic of the UN office.

In recent weeks the price of opium has started rising again, indicating
that the wartime stockpiles may have been depleted. Meanwhile the price of
heroin has risen even more sharply, probably reflecting the damage done to
the laboratories.

There are already signs that poppies are growing in the footsteps of the
retreating Taliban fighters. Desperate farmers have started planting in the
traditional growing region, Helmand, where the principal
warlord-traffickers have defected to the anti-Taliban side.

The Northern Alliance has been an enthusiastic sponsor and beneficiary of
the trade in opium and its derivatives, heroin and morphine. In the first
nine months after the Taliban's opium ban, 83% of Afghanistan's opium was
grown in the northern province of Badakhshan, mostly under Alliance
control. As a new Afghan government is assembled, Washington and the UN are
anxious to have a commitment to ending the drug trade built into its
charter, and much of the agricultural aid offered will be tied to crop
substitution programmes. But much of that money may already be too late.
Most Afghan farmers have already decided what to plant for next spring,
poppies or winter wheat, and many have decided that opium is the most
promising crop.