CENTRAL ASIA'S OTHER FIGHT

Extremist Groups Also Tied to Lucrative Drug Trade

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan -- Six men in rubber boats slid quickly across the
Panj River, carrying bulky packs. The wild Afghanistan border is a porous
one; hundreds of such crossings go unseen. But this one, on Oct. 12, had
bad luck. A squad of Russian border guards spotted the boats and closed in.

As the guards approached, the intruders opened fire with automatic weapons.
A Russian border guard was killed. So was one intruder, and beside his
body, still clutching his Kalashnikov rifle, was 90 pounds of heroin. Cut
and sold on the streets of New York or London or Moscow, it would be worth
millions of dollars.

"Only armed groups traffic the drugs now," said Lt. Col. Petrovich
Gordiyenko, an officer of the Russian guards who patrol the border between
Tajikistan and Afghanistan. "The narcotics they carry are in such large
quantities now, they don't want to give it up. They fight."

The opium trade has endured in Afghanistan through decades of unending
conflict and shifting power, enriching tribal leaders and strengthening
clans that command a share. Drug profits contribute significantly to
weapons purchases by competing factions, intelligence sources have long
reported.

"If you go back historically, this is the main resource of the region. This
is the closest thing to the oil of the Middle East or the coca of Latin
America," said a well-informed U.S. official. "Is anybody here a good guy? No."

In Central Asia, authorities assert that drugs are supplied and smuggled by
the same Islamic extremist groups that the United States has now targeted
in the war against terrorism. "How can we fight against terrorists if we
don't fight against the drug trade?" Uzbekistan's foreign minister,
Abdulaziz Kamilov, said last year in Tashkent, the capital, at a meeting to
plan strategy to battle the drug trade. "By selling drugs, [Islamic
militants] earn billions of dollars."

The Bush administration's vow to cut off the finances of accused terrorist
Osama bin Laden and other such militants faces a big obstacle: A major
source of their funding is an illicit and underground drug trade conducted
in cash and impervious to financial controls. But Northern Alliance
factions opposed to Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia, which has
sheltered bin Laden, also have been involved in drug traffic.

"The drug trade makes a lot of money. These extremist groups control the
drug channels, and profit from them," said Kamol Dusmetov, of Uzbekistan's
National Center for Drug Control. "The Taliban have said the drugs are a
weapon against non-believers."

The Taliban last year banned the growing of opium poppies in Afghanistan,
which for years was considered the world's leading opium-producing country.
Although the ban served to slash output -- and was welcomed by the United
States -- stockpiles remained. But Afghan farmers now are preparing a new
poppy crop, and since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States,
officials have reported a surge of opium and heroin moving out of Afghan
warehouses.

Recent pitched gun battles on the borders indicate drug smugglers are
trying to get their inventories of heroin out of Afghanistan and out of the
line of fire.

Uzbekistan and other Central Asian states have waged their own battles
against militant Islamic groups. President Islam Karimov has cracked down
on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Led by allies of bin Laden, the
group was cited by President Bush on Sept. 20 as a terrorist organization.
The group has staged bloody attacks in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in the
last two years, and is suspected of setting off bombs in Tashkent in 1999
that killed 16.

Uzbek authorities assert that the group seeks not only to overthrow
civilian governments, but uses the drug trade to pay for its campaigns.
"During armed clashes, when we have liquidated the extremists, we have
found a lot of drugs," Dusmetov said in an interview here.

"Terrorism, organized crime and the illegal drug trade are one interrelated
problem," Abdurahim Kakharov, a deputy interior minister of Tajikistan,
said at the drug meeting last year. "The terrorist groups and drugs were
exported from the same source" -- Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is estimated to be the source of 70 percent of the world's
heroin, and the major supplier for Europe and Russia. Drug control experts
say the Taliban has taxed the farmers who grow the opium poppies, helped
distill the raw product into heroin and shared in the smuggling profits.

The Northern Alliance controls territory responsible for about 4 percent of
Afghanistan's opium production, said Mohammed Amirkhizi, a senior policy
adviser at the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Vienna.
The crop increased slightly last year, Amirkhizi said, even as cultivation
in Taliban-held areas declined in response to a prohibition on opium
production.

Uzbek authorities are unsure what effect a change in Afghanistan's
leadership could have on the region's drug trade, and whether a new
government could be expected to try to curtail it. "It depends on what kind
of regime takes its place," Dusmetov said.

There is also concern among other Central Asian countries that the United
States may prevail against the Taliban, but leave the drug trade intact, to
be taken over by others, such as the commanders of the Northern Alliance.

"Producing drugs in Afghanistan as an industrial basis worries everybody,"
said Erlan Idrisov, foreign minister of Kazakhstan. "It's a real threat not
only for us, but also for the whole world."

The transport routes for drugs from Afghanistan have traditionally gone
through Pakistan and Iran; Pakistan has reported a significant drug influx
since Sept. 11. But increasingly, smugglers have used the mountainous
borders to the north.

The route has obvious advantages. Afghanistan has thousands of miles of
unguarded border with its Central Asian neighbors "which we can't even
think of sealing," said one official. Furthermore, the former Soviet
republics, which became independent states just a decade ago, lack
extensive border controls.

A map of drug seizures at the U.N. drug control agency office in Tashkent
shows the clear pattern of distribution through the Afghan border. There, a
ring of storehouses -- usually just rooms in people's houses -- are fed
from larger caches in Faizabad or Taloqan. From there, the drugs are
"bundled" into larger shipments to be taken across the Tajik border.

"They are consolidating it into convoys," said Roberto Arbitrio of the U.N.
office here. "They move in armed groups. Three or four in the front with
Kalashnikovs. Maybe five in the middle carrying up to 400 pounds on their
backs. Then maybe five more in the back, heavily armed."

"They are well-equipped," agreed Gordiyenko, the officer of the Russian
guard that patrols the Tajik-Afghan border under an agreement with the
Tajik government. "They have night-vision equipment. They have modern
weapons. They have good intelligence."

Gordiyenko's forces offer an armed but incomplete defense. He said there
have been 55 shooting clashes with drug dealers along the border in the
first nine months of this year, more than in all of last year.

"They are very determined to cross the border," he said. "They are willing
to fight, and they have everything they need to do it."

Once into Tajikistan, smugglers can take their goods by railroad to
Samarkand in Uzbekistan and then on to Russia. Or they can take them into
Kyrgyzstan and north to Russia or through Uzbekistan en route to Europe.

At Post Number 5 in Uchkurjan, a border crossing from Uzbekistan to
Kyrgyzstan, the ease of that route is clear. Uzbek customs guards, their
weapons slung over their backs, check identities from a wooden stool and
table set up beside a large willow tree by the road.

But on the other side of their white concrete guard shack, a cotton field
stretches uninterrupted to the foot of the mountains in Kyrgyzstan. A
farmer blithely bypasses the border guards to stroll across the field;
laughing children follow.

"There's no real way to stop people," acknowledges the head of the border
patrol there, Col. Wahid Irgashiv. "We're starting to build a fence." But
that construction is not in evidence, and he does not know when it will be
done.

Officials in Central Asian countries are realizing the drugs do not just
pass through without leaving a trail of problems.

"The Central Asia countries are transit countries. But when you have
transit, drugs spread," said Galina Fomadi, who runs a U.N. drug awareness
program from Tashkent. "You can now buy drugs all over Central Asia -- on
the streets, in discos. It's becoming a big problem for the younger
generation, which thinks it's 'modern' to try drugs."

The growth of the problem in Central Asia is aggravated by business changes
among the smugglers, according to Arbitrio. Instead of working for fees,
smugglers are now getting a cut of the load -- one or two kilograms of
heroin, which they are selling locally, he said.