The collapse of the Taliban has relaxed dress and social life in Afghanistan. It could also mean boom times for Central Asia's heroin trade.

After the Taliban suppressed opium growing for over a year, many Afghan farmers have once again seeded their fields with poppy. One of the many dilemmas that post-Taliban Afghanistan poses for Central Asia is the likely resurgence of Afghan heroin businesses. Heroin addiction, and the HIV that comes with it, are growing public health problems throughout the former Soviet Union. And farmers in a chaotic country have ample reason to ratchet up supply. "The total absence of any order at all is propitious for poppy farmers," says Bernard Frahi, who directs the United Nations' anti-drug effort in Afghanistan. According to Frahi, who is based in Islamabad, many farmers in southern Afghanistan - still technically Taliban territory - have already planted poppy.

The farmers' motivation is survival: poppy is about 30 times more profitable than, say, wheat. "If you and I were in their position, we would do the same," says a United Nations official who asked for anonymity. "The alternative is to starve." Most experts say that opium is probably Afghanistan's second-leading industry (behind smuggling), generating several hundred million dollars a year. And unlike the Taliban, which relied on financing from the al Qaeda network to run the country, opium economics have a long local history. Until last year, Afghanistan produced almost three-quarters of the world's heroin.

The Taliban choked the national opium-producing system, though. No one outside the regime knows exactly what motivated the militia to ban poppy production in July 2000. While Taliban spokesmen said they were simply following the strictures of the Koran, others suspected the regime of timing the market or seeking international favor. But the Taliban made the ban stick, using their brutal reputation to scare farmers into complying. The annual opium harvest fell 98 percent in 2001, from more than 4000 tons to 80 tons. Fewer than 20,000 acres remain under poppy cultivation, down from over 200,000 acres. Even suspicious US officials, watching via spy satellites, took notice. "This was something unprecedented," says a State Department analyst who tracks the Afghan drug trade.

But Americans cannot necessarily expect that their influence will produce the same compliance. Their allies, the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, never mimicked the Taliban's measures. In fact, poppy cultivation in 2000 tripled in Alliance areas, producing over 80 percent of Afghan opium, according to the United Nations.

And because these areas abut former Soviet republics, experts predict that renewed Afghan poppy production will bring more misery to the north. With largely unguarded borders, and severely under-equipped and corrupt police forces, former Soviet republics have become the favored routes for moving heroin to the Balkans, Europe and Russia. The trade spreads corruption, addiction, crime and AIDS, but it is very hard to track. According to Fred Starr, who runs the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University, smugglers, couriers, corrupt officials, and the like are usually paid in kind. They sell the heroin to their friends and neighbors, or end up using it themselves. Either way, cities and towns along trafficking routes suffer. "It's nearly impossible to transport drugs without leaving a residue of addicts," says Starr.

Moreover, observers fear that a geopolitical "balloon effect" will concentrate opium production in former Soviet states. "When you squeeze a balloon, the air simply moves to a different part of the balloon," says Antonella Deledda Titchener, a UN anti-drug official in Uzbekistan. "If, as I expect, the new [Afghan] government is forced to take a hard stand against drugs, then the effect will be to push it over the borders," says Starr. And since heroin has wreaked havoc in Iran and Pakistan - Iran has 1.25 million addicts, according to the United Nations, while Pakistan has almost 2 million - those countries have resolved to fight opium farming. "The push is going to be more toward the northern countries," says a State Department official.

Tajikistan looks like the chief target, experts say. It shares a long, mountainous border with Afghanistan, and is reeling from its own 1991-97 civil war. "There's a lot of [fertile] land there, and not a whole lot of people," says a State Department official. UN officials already have reported indications of some cultivation in a limited area. Tajik police, perhaps mindful of antiterrorist concerns, reportedly made 23 drug-related arrests in the week ending December 3. But drug corruption, which already roils the country, keeps arrests relatively weak. "The trade and the processing, and now probably the growing, [are] already deep into the political system," says Starr.

Of course, the United States will probably provide more drug-control aid to the region. In the past, the United States paid relatively little attention to the Central Asian heroin trade. Because almost none of the opium grown there ends up in North America, the problem seemed less pressing than trafficking in Latin America. But now, American officials seem to recognize their ability to seize drugs while the region remains in disarray. "We have an opportunity to move 70 percent of the world's heroin supply off the market," says Steven Casteel, the intelligence chief for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). "Nobody is going to let Afghanistan go back to what it was, which is a fertile place for terrorism," agrees a State Department official. "And drugs are part of that same problem, which is general lawlessness."

As part of the anti-drug effort, US planes have reportedly bombed Afghan opium stockpiles, which may hold over half the harvest since 1998. Although journalists cannot assess what these sorties achieved, Casteel said that merely bombing would not eradicate the stockpiles. "A stockpile is a suitcase full of opium," says Casteel, who spoke December 3 after participating in a DEA-sponsored symposium on narco-terrorism. "It is very easy to move. Don't expect some smart bomb to sniff out every opium stockpile."

Indeed, fighting drug traffickers is primarily an economic campaign rather than a military one, notes Casteel, who planned to meet with British antidrug officials on December 5. An official with the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), a US State Department agency, says the Americans will use both diplomacy and developmental aid - the latter available in exchange for reducing or ending poppy cultivation.

Such swaps will not get very far, though, if farmers believe they can only make a living by growing poppy. As Central Asian states watch power in Afghanistan shift yet again, they must worry about the chaos that the latest "liberation" can bring.