NEW AFGHAN OPIUM PLANTING VEXES U.S. DRUG OFFICIALS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The law of unintended consequences has U.S.
anti-narcotics officials wrestling with an unsavory side-effect of
the Afghan bombing campaign -- heroin supplies may rise again.

Women are now free to peek out from behind burkas and children can
unfurl kites but farmers have shaken off the Taliban yoke to ignore a
ban imposed a year ago that slashed poppy cultivation almost to zero.

The State Department's international narcotics and law enforcement
bureau, informally known as "drugs and thugs," and sister agencies in
the U.S. government, want to recreate the Taliban opium ban using
incentives, instead of fear.

Before the ban, more than 197,000 acres of poppies were cultivated
last year, producing 75 percent of the world's heroin.

The Bush administration plans to pair influxes of aid to Kabul with
calls for a new government to promote legal crops like winter wheat
to feed its famine-stricken people.

"It's a rare opportunity that we have, to influence 70 percent of the
world's supply of heroin," the head of the Justice Department's Drug
Enforcement Administration Asa Hutchinson told Reuters.

The Taliban's depiction of opium as un-Islamic was possibly the only
policy it adopted that the rest of the world liked.

But U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers, head of the
department's international narcotics and law enforcement bureau, said
the Taliban imposed its ban at the end of a gun. "They did it
entirely by coercion."

"What we need to be doing now is to try to create conditions in
Afghanistan that would be equivalent to continuing the opium poppy
ban," he told Reuters.

Alternatives will have to be found fast as the opium poppies are in
many cases the farmers' only currency.

"We recognize that there's a long history of drugs production in
Afghanistan and it's not going to be switched off
overnight...Hopefully we'll be able to have a strong influence on the
future direction in that regard," Hutchinson said.

He said he was optimistic there would be a big international push to
tackle the long-term heroin supply problem in Afghanistan and the
surrounding region.

But he added, "It's so ingrained in the economy of Afghanistan and
the economy is so wrecked, that it's an easy thing for the population
to turn back to."

OPIUM INDUSTRY PERMEATES AFGHAN SOCIETY

A senior State Department official said the Northern Alliance was a
far smaller player in the drugs trade than the Taliban but "we
certainly wouldn't say they are uninvolved."

One tool in the U.S. diplomatic arsenal is a sanction waiver program
under which countries are punished if they are deemed to fail in the
war on drugs, as the Taliban were.

The bombs may also have helped the international community keep
Kabul's future government out of the drugs trade.

"It has been much more difficult to carry out the processing
operation. Much of that has been disrupted at least temporarily,"
since the bombing began Oct. 7, Hutchinson said.

But the Taliban reserves of opium may be a hard temptation to resist,
assuming they were not destroyed in the bombing.

A strange paradox of Taliban rule was that despite the poppy ban,
heroin prices and supply abroad were unaffected.

"We think they've been sitting on huge stockpiles due to
over-production," Beers said.

A factor in his thinking is that opium prices inside Afghanistan have
leapt tenfold since the ban was imposed.

"We think that went into Taliban coffers," a senior U.S. drugs
official said, putting Taliban profits at $40 million. "We liked the
ban. We didn't like the profiteering on the stocks they held," he
added.

U.S. officials believe the only people who felt the heat from the ban
were the farmers who U.S. officials say were offered no alternative
to poppy planting by the Taliban.

Small wonder then that with the Taliban looking the other way, the
farmers returned to their opium poppies.

While Washington lacks solid information from inside Afghanistan, it
shares a view expressed by the U.N. Drug Control Program last month
that farmers have resumed planting poppies, the State Department
official said.

"I guess they will do whatever they can to stay alive," the senior
drugs official said of the farmers' plight.