OPIUM PROPS UP WARLORDS, ADDS TO AFGHAN WOES

Drug Trade Foils Struggle To Stem Chaos

Washington -- As Afghanistan's nascent government struggles with increased
violence and unrest, officials also face a deepening problem with the opium
trade.

It is, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday, "a whale of a tough
problem."

With Afghanistan now the world's leading opium producer, warlords are using
the enormous cash generated by the drug trade to solidify their power,
according to experts. And that could make the task of imposing order even
harder for the central government.

"There have got to be an enormous number of changes before anything gets
better," said Cindy Fazey, professor of international drug policy at the
University of Liverpool in England.

The United Nations puts Afghanistan's opium production at about 3,400 tons
a year -- roughly three-fourths of the global total. The crop is
responsible, by some estimates, for nearly 20 percent of the country's
gross domestic product. According to U.N. figures, the annual total income
derived from opium exceeds $1 billion in a country where the average wage
is $2 a day.

Fazey traced the boom in poppy cultivation to the devastation wrought by
the nearly constant warfare that began with the 1979 Soviet invasion.
Orchards were wiped out, and drugs became a way to make a living.

"Spawned after decades of civil and military strife, it has chained a poor
rural population -- farmers, landless labour, small traders, women and
children -- to the mercy of domestic warlords and international crime
syndicates that continue to dominate several areas in the south, north and
east of the country," a U.N. official wrote earlier this year. "Many, many
peasants would love to grow and do something else," Fazey said, "but
they're locked in to it. . . Too many people are making money off of this."

Major trafficking operations have taken hold in Central Asia and Russia as
the drugs are smuggled through to markets in Europe.

Earlier this summer, the governments of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan signed up with the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime to undertake
five drug control projects for $17 million. Other programs aimed at Afghan
production also are proceeding.

Rumsfeld -- asked at a Pentagon "town hall" meeting about coalition efforts
to deal with Afghanistan's opium problem -- said the solution probably lay
in education and in attacking the supply-and-demand issues. "I wish I had a
quicker, better, easier answer," he said, "because it's a vicious problem."