AFGHAN OPIUM TRADE UNLIKELY TO END

U.S. officials give up hope of substantially reducing the crop this year.

American officials have quietly abandoned their hopes of reducing
Afghanistan's opium production substantially this year and are bracing for
a harvest large enough to inundate the world's heroin and opium markets
with cheap drugs.

While U.S. and European officials have considered measures like paying
Afghan opium poppy farmers to plow under their fields, they have concluded
that continuing lawlessness and political instability will make significant
eradication all but impossible.

Instead, U.S. officials said, they will pursue a less-ambitious strategy:
persuading Afghan leaders to carry out a modest eradication program as
opium poppies are harvested over the next two months.

The campaign is being strongly backed and even to some extent led by
Britain, which traces nearly all the heroin on its streets to Afghanistan.

But the continuing upheaval in and around Afghanistan will limit the
effectiveness of those strategies, American and British officials admit,
making it likely that Afghanistan will produce enough opium to dominate the
world supply once again.

Until the Taliban banned the cultivation of opium poppies in their last
year in power, Afghanistan produced as much as three-fourths of the world's
supply.

So long as the drug trade flourishes, law enforcement officials said, it
will fuel political rivalries, foster corruption and undermine the
authority of the central government. But because opium poppy farming
remains one of the few viable economic activities, any intense eradication
effort could imperil the stability of the government and thus hamper the
military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida.

"The fight against terrorism takes priority," one British law enforcement
official said. "The fight against narcotics comes in second."

The challenge that U.S. and European officials face is compounded by the
surprising success the Taliban achieved in banning poppy cultivation two
years ago.

That prohibition, which came after several years in which the Taliban
quietly encouraged poppy farming, cut the country's opium output from an
estimated 4,042 tons in 2000 -- about 71 percent of the world's supply --
to just 82 tons the next year, according to the CIA.

Diplomats and relief officials in Afghanistan said a considerable number of
refugees fleeing into Pakistan with their families were opium farmers who
could not pay their debts. But as soon as the Taliban's military resistance
began to crumble last fall, many other farmers rushed to plant opium once
again.

On Jan. 17, with strong encouragement from the United States and the United
Nations, Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, announced a new ban on
poppy cultivation.

In a preliminary survey in February, the U.N. International Drug Control
Program estimated that Afghanistan's poppy fields could reach 111,000 acres
to 161,000 acres, an area about the size of that cultivated in the
mid-1990s Afghanistan's record harvest in 2000 was so large that opium
dealers and traffickers were able to set aside huge amounts of the drug,
keeping heroin prices remarkably stable in countries like Britain and
Germany even when the world supply plummeted the next year because of the
Taliban ban.