US BOMBING OF LABORATORIES CUTS HEROIN OUTPUT

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

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 state department official yesterday 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 US 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 UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP),
the opium price in Afghanistan had risen from $30 a kilo in June 2000 to
$700 (about £21 to £500) in the week before the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Within days, as soon it became clear that military retaliation in
Afghanistan was likely, the opium brokers began selling their stocks.
Within a fortnight of the attacks, the price fell to $90 a kilo. The cash
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 the ODCCP's Kemal Kurspahic.

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

There are already signs that poppies are advancing 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 following the Taliban 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 in the coming months will be tied to
crop substitution programmes. However, much of that money may already be
too late. Most Afghan farmers have already had to decide what to plant for
next spring, poppies or winter wheat, and many have decided opium is the
most promising crop.