HOW TALIBAN PROFITED FROM OPIUM TRADE

Kabul, Afghanistan - For the first time, Afghanistan's drug control
officials are able to tell the truth. In the Taliban era, if the men whose
job it was to reduce the world's largest supply of opium and heroin had
talked frankly to UN officials or journalists, the consequences would have
been fatal.

"Killed," said Najibullah Shams, the former secretary-general of the
country's High Commission for Drug Control, drawing a finger across his neck.

The reality of the Taliban regime's drug policy, Shams and colleagues said
yesterday, was this: The Taliban did nothing to prevent the cultivation and
trafficking of more than half of the world's supply of opium and heroin.
They took 10 percent of the opium crop from farmers for themselves. They
taxed the traffickers on each kilogram of opium. They lied repeatedly to
the world about their efforts to stop poppy cultivation. And when the
Taliban did eventually eradicate most of the poppy harvest last year, it
was to curry favor with the international community, not to prevent the
flow of drugs to the Western world.

As for the High Commission for Drug Control, it had a budget only to keep
the office running and no funding to curtail the drug trade. It was just a
public relations front for the Taliban regime, the officials said.

"When I was secretary-general, unfortunately I had no authority or
finances," said Shams, who quit his job two years ago in frustration. "I
couldn't spend one Afghani ... I was just like a symbol. I could do
nothing. I could not help my country and my people, so I left."

Drug control officials around the world have long implicated the Taliban in
the Afghan drug trade, but until now, Afghan officials have been unable to
speak about the Taliban's role. They acknowledged yesterday consistently
lying to UN officials during the Taliban regime out of fear for their lives.

Shams and his colleagues sat in the small office of the High Commission for
Drug Control and described how the Taliban profited from the poppy fields
of Afghanistan.

After the farmers produced the raw opium, the Taliban would take 10 percent
of the product. This was an Islamic levy that spanned all agricultural
products, and the Taliban were not so secretive about this part of their
involvement in the harvest.

"We raised it officially with the Taliban," said Bernard Frahi, the United
Nations' top drug control officer for Afghanistan and Pakistan, speaking
via satellite phone from Islamabad yesterday. "The Taliban told us that
[it] was an Islamic tax. And they have to do it on all crops."

Neither Shams and his colleagues nor Frahi said they knew what the Taliban
did with the opium they took. Shams said he suspected the Taliban sold the
opium to traffickers. Frahi noted that in spite of the vast quantities
produced, the total value of the tax was only about $18 million two years
ago, and less last year, when the Taliban's efforts to eradicate the crop
took hold.

The second major way the Taliban made money off the opium crop was by
taking a fee from traffickers for each kilo they were transporting out of
the country, the Afghan officials said. Frahi said that the UN always
suspected the Taliban were taxing traffickers.

"They have never admitted it, but we had intelligence reports that
suggested it," he said.

Frahi also said it remained unclear why the Taliban had prevented farmers
from cultivating opium last year, but the acting director of the High
Commission for Drug Control believes he knows. In an attempt to appear less
of a pariah regime to the international community - sheltering terrorists,
violating human rights and supplying the world with 70 percent of its
heroin - the Taliban chose to eradicate the crop.

"In the first years of the Taliban, they paid no attention to drugs," said
Ghazi Mohammed Aref. "But under international pressure they had to prefer
political benefit to the financial benefits of drugs."

It was not just the Taliban, however, who allowed opium harvesting to
flourish. UN figures show that the areas under control of the Northern
Alliance produced enough opium, once most of the Taliban-controlled fields
had been cleared, to keep Afghanistan the second-largest opium producer in
the world.

And so when Frahi comes to Kabul on Sunday to meet with senior officials in
the alliance, which now controls the capital and is likely to be a key
element of any future government of Afghanistan, he will deliver a message
born of anxiety about Afghanistan's potential to become, once more, the
world's biggest producer of opium.

That new government, he said, could be tempted to permit the poppies to
flower again. "We have to ensure that all the factions and parties in the
new consensual political process have the understanding of what they have
to comply to here," Frahi said. "The point is to face the authorities with
their own responsibilities."

Already there are signs that Afghans are returning to poppy cultivation,
Frahi said. He said some farmers have begun to replant poppies in the past
two months. "They know that there is a kind of legal vacuum today," Frahi said.

If lawlessness remains in Afghanistan, Frahi said, one pressure on farmers
may come from the terrorists who continue to live in the country. "The key
funding source [for terrorists] in Afghanistan - one might worry that it
will become drug trafficking," Frahi said.

Aref said the establishment of a new and stable government would be crucial
to prevent the drug trade from flourishing anew. Without development aid to
help farmers plant other crops, they could fall back on the reliable
profits of the poppy.

"I look forward to a new, broad-based government," Aref said. "The farmers'
problems will be solved, and they won't grow poppies. But if they're not
solved, they will start again."