LANGAR KHANA, Afghanistan -- When Shah Zada spotted the team of Afghan policemen surveying his field in April, the young farmer grabbed a fistful of cash and raced toward them.
"I found the officer in charge and I begged him, 'Please don't destroy my poppies. I'll give you 3,000 afghanis,' " recalled Zada, 28, whose skin is weathered like an old man's from years of plowing, weeding and harvesting in the sun.
The officer pocketed the bribe, worth $70, with a noncommittal shrug. But several days later, when police brought in tractors to mow down the tall stalks sprouting around this tiny village in Balkh province, Zada said his five-acre plot was among those spared.
"They didn't destroy my neighbor's poppy either -- I guess because they thought it was mine as well. I ought to charge him for half the money!" Zada said with a laugh.
His account, like those of many poppy farmers interviewed in a string of hamlets on the dust-blown steppe of northern Afghanistan, underscores the intractability of Afghanistan's drug problem seven months after President Hamid Karzai declared a holy war on the opium trade there.
Late last year, U.N. experts reported that Afghan farmers had grown record levels of poppy in 2004, with the amount of land dedicated to poppies reaching 323,570 acres -- a two-thirds increase over 2003. Afghan opium poppies were used to produce nearly 90 percent of the world's heroin, they said.
In January, Karzai and his ministers launched a marathon of meetings to persuade local officials and tribal leaders to curb poppy planting in their regions. Their pitch included appeals to national pride and religious faith, promises of international aid and threats of crop destruction.
U.S. officials followed suit, pledging $761 million in aid to farmers and support for law enforcement to combat the drug trade, which they fear could turn this fledgling democracy into a narco-state and fuel insurgents linked to the ousted Taliban militia. That package came on top of several hundred million dollars already budgeted for drug fighting by the United States, Britain and other nations.
Meanwhile, traffickers were keen to boost opium prices after a sharp drop, and farmers whose crops were afflicted by diseases last year were wary of replanting this year.
Within weeks, surveyors were reporting impressive findings: Farmers had almost completely stopped planting poppies across major growing provinces -- Nangahar and Laghman in the east, Uruzgan in the central part of the country and Helmand in the south -- that together accounted for more than 50 percent of national poppy cultivation in 2004.
But like a balloon that expands on one end when pinched on the other, poppy cultivation has substantially increased in several other provinces, such as Kandahar in the south, long a major source of poppy, and Balkh in the north, which had never been a major growing center. In 2003, farmers in Balkh cultivated 2,717 acres of poppy; in 2004, the number leapt to 6,163 acres.
"There has definitely been a major, major increase" in Balkh, said Doris Buddenberg, the Afghan representative for the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, although experts in her office said that nationwide, the amount of land used to grow poppies in 2005 could still prove to be substantially less than last year.
