A WAR ON TERROR MEETS A WAR ON DRUGS

U.S. To Inherit Drug Trade Issue As Opium Farmers Return To The
Fields

From the first days of the war in Afghanistan, U.S. officials have
pointed to a dangerous weapon in the desolate Afghan countryside: the
poppy fields that have spread over thousands of acres in recent years,
turning the nation into by far the largest source of opium and heroin
in the world.

For the Taliban, U.S. officials said, taxes on poppy farmers and opium
dealers helped to finance the movement's rogue state. For al-Qaeda
terrorists, the officials warned, the opium trade might also be a way
to move money or fund attacks. At the least, Afghanistan's mix of
political radicalism and diplomatic isolation had made for a drug
threat that appeared to be well beyond America's reach.

Now, with the Taliban's resistance faltering, the opium problem will
soon be America's to solve. Even as the fighting continues, opium
farmers are returning to their fields, tilling the ground for what had
been their most reliable cash crop. Warlords of the Northern Alliance
may supplant warlords loyal to the Taliban, drug experts say, but in
the absence of a strong central authority it seems unlikely that the
next regime will view the rewards of the drug trade differently than
did the last.

"Nothing indicates that either the Taliban or the Northern Alliance
intend to take serious action to destroy heroin or morphine-base
laboratories, or stop drug trafficking," the State Department said
last spring, pointedly spreading the blame.

Since the start of their bombing campaign, allied officials have tried
to link the new war on terror to the old war on drugs. In Washington,
some officials have likened Afghanistan to Colombia, where drug money
and terror tactics have both been essential to enemies of the U.S.-
backed government. In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair reminded his
countrymen that their enemy in Afghanistan was also responsible for
much of the heroin on British streets.

But as the fighting in Afghanistan continues, battle lines in the two
wars are only becoming more confused. The emerging political
landscape, in which power may well be fragmented among rival groups,
may actually prove better for traffickers than the Taliban was.
Already, the flow of opium from Afghan stockpiles has risen sharply,
with most headed north across the porous borders of America's new
allies: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

If U.S. officials have any cause for optimism, they probably owe it to
the Taliban.

Eighteen months ago, in an apparent bid for wider diplomatic
recognition, the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar,
ordered the country's farmers to stop growing opium poppies. And they
did. Within a year, CIA figures show, estimated opium production
plunged from 4,042 tons to 81.6 tons, with most of the remainder grown
in the small corner of the country that was then under Northern
Alliance control.

Western law enforcement officials were initially skeptical; many said
the ban, which was not accompanied by a crackdown on traffickers, was
merely a ploy to drive up the value of Afghanistan's huge opium
stocks. Indeed, drug prices remained stable in Europe, the Afghans'
chief market.

But more important than the Taliban's sincerity may have been the fact
that drug production could be regulated at all. With little more than
Omar's decree, poppy cultivation stopped virtually overnight with
surprisingly few reports of repression against the farmers. Had such a
thing happened almost anywhere else in the world, it would probably
have been hailed as one of the greatest achievements in the history of
drug enforcement.

Taliban leaders could afford to speak softly, of course, given their
reputation for brutally enforcing their will. But their effectiveness
also owed something to the relatively compact dimensions of the
country's poppy fields -- a factor not likely to change much now. The
United Nations estimates that Afghanistan produced more than 70
percent of the world's opium supply last year from barely 200,000
acres, a relatively tiny area, and with the labor of perhaps 50,000
families in a population of 27 million people.

For several years, U.N. drug-control officials have said facetiously
that they could probably buy up Afghanistan's poppy crop as cheaply as
they could eradicate it. In 1998, a study by the U.N. International
Drug Control Program concluded that poppy cultivation could be phased
out over a 10-year period at a cost of about $25 million a year. "The
price tag was extremely small," the head of the program, Pino
Arlacchi, recalled. "But most member states thought it simply wasn't
worthwhile to work inside Afghanistan."

U.S. officials considered the Afghan problem remote, if only because,
as one official put it, "It wasn't our dope." Surveys by the Drug
Enforcement Administration showed that most of the heroin in U.S. drug
markets came from Colombia and Mexico. The State Department was wary
about working with the Taliban on any issue, given its poor human
rights record and its hospitality toward Osama bin Laden. So too were
officials in northern Europe, even though their cities were awash in
Afghan heroin.