A WAR ON TERROR MEETS A WAR ON DRUGS

FROM the first days of the war in Afghanistan, United States 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, American 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
American-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 American 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, C.I.A. 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
Mullah 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, United Nations 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 United
Nations 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."

American 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
American 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.

The problem that Afghanistan posed under the Taliban was not an
isolated one. Over the last decade or so, as anti-drug campaigns have
advanced in relatively coherent states like Pakistan, Iran, Thailand
and Bolivia, more of the world's drug supply has begun to come from
so-called rogue states, or from regions that government authority
simply doesn't reach. After Afghanistan, the world's biggest opium
producer these days is Burma. Most of the world's supply of coca, the
raw material for cocaine, comes from regions of Colombia dominated by
leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary forces.

American hands-off policies toward these producers have often
confounded law-enforcement officials, who make a habit of dealing with
criminals in order to solve crimes. But drug-enforcement officials are
more accustomed to seeing their plans subordinated to other diplomatic
goals. It was in Afghanistan, after all, that C.I.A. officials looked
the other way in the 1980's while anti-Soviet guerrillas smuggled
opium out of the country on the same convoys that brought in
American-bought arms.

THESE days, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Asa
Hutchinson, has been calling Afghanistan "a rare opportunity" for
antidrug efforts to take advantage of successes in the war on terror.
With a friendlier government in Kabul, there will be chances to try
some obvious measures to help Afghanistan's farmers: crop-substitution
programs, development aid, and rebuilding irrigation systems that were
destroyed after the 1979 Soviet invasion.

But however they proceed, efforts to curtail opium production will
almost certainly cut into the livelihood of military commanders,
village leaders and others whom the United States needs as allies
against terror. American drug enforcement officials can expect a long
struggle. And they will be lucky to replicate the Taliban's success.