NYT misleads on Taliban role in opium trade

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4067.shtml



From what I've read, our best bet for an eventual "exit strategy" (remember those?) from Afganistan involves bringing the Taliban into the effort to diminish Al Qaida's influence. This would mean gaining the active assistance of those tribal elders who are currently making it possible for Al Qaida to hide out in those mountains.. By making them more the "bad guy" than necessary, the NYT is setting us up for another unending involvement in places we don't want to be.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F06E3D7163DF933A15756C0A9679C8B63

Taliban's Ban On Poppy A Success, U.S. Aides Say

Published: May 20, 2001

The first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban rule have concluded that the movement's ban on opium-poppy cultivation appears to have wiped out the world's largest crop in less than a year, officials said today.

The American findings confirm earlier reports from the United Nations drug control program that Afghanistan, which supplied about three-quarters of the world's opium and most of the heroin reaching Europe, had ended poppy planting in one season.

But the eradication of poppies has come at a terrible cost to farming families, and experts say it will not be known until the fall planting season begins whether the Taliban can continue to enforce it.

''It appears that the ban has taken effect,'' said Steven Casteel, assistant administrator for intelligence at the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington.

The findings came in part from a Pakistan-based agent of the administration who was one of the two Americans on the team just returned from eight days in the poppy-growing areas of Afghanistan.

Mr. Casteel said in an interview today that he was still studying aerial images to determine if any new poppy-growing areas had emerged. He also said that some questions about the size of hidden opium and heroin stockpiles near the northern border of Afghanistan remained to be answered. But the drug agency has so far found nothing to contradict United Nations reports.

The sudden turnaround by the Taliban, a move that left international drug experts stunned when reports of near-total eradication began to come in earlier this year, opens the way for American aid to the Afghan farmers who have stopped planting poppies.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced a $43 million grant to Afghanistan in additional emergency aid to cope with the effects of a prolonged drought. The United States has become the biggest donor to help Afghanistan in the drought.

''We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans,'' he said in a statement, ''including those farmers who have felt the impact of the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome.''

The Afghans are desperate for international help, but describe their opposition to drug cultivation purely in religious terms.

At the State Department, James P. Callahan, director of Asian affairs at the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs who was one of the experts sent to Afghanistan, described in an interview how the Taliban had applied and enforced the ban. He was told by farmers that ''the Taliban used a system of consensus-building.''

They framed the ban ''in very religious terms,'' citing Islamic prohibitions against drugs, and that made it hard to defy, he added. Those who defied the edict were threatened with prison.

Mr. Callahan said that in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, where the Taliban's hold is strongest, farmers said they would rather starve than return to poppy cultivation -- and some of them will, experts say.

In parts of Nangahar province in the east, where the Taliban's hold is less complete, farmers told the visiting experts that they would flee to Pakistan or risk illegal crops rather than watch their families die.

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