Two decades of war have devastated the Afghan economy, but the drugs trade has thrived amidst the chaos. For the past few years, the country's poppy fields have produced 70-80% of the world's (and virtually all of Europe's) supply of opium - the base material for heroin.

Winning the battle

Nowhere is the impact on Afghanistan's illegal drugs trade more obvious than on the border with Iran, where thousands of troops have been doing battle with traffickers for almost 20 years.

In the past year or so, Iran has begun to win this battle, with a marked decline in drug flows, and Iranian officials say this has continued since the start of US military action,

However, that is where the good news ends, because Afghanistan's drug traffickers have not given up, Antonella Delledda, head of UN drug control operations for Central Asia, says they have simply stockpiled their supplies and moved north, to the more lightly-policed Tajikistan border.

Heroin labs

The growing prevalence of heroin - processed inside Afghanistan - is particularly worrying. In the past, this most lucrative stage in the drugs trade was generally carried out outside the country.

But many of the new heroin labs are in areas long controlled by the West's new friends, the Northern Alliance. What is more, poppy cultivation has increased fourfold in Alliance territory in the past year.

Farid Amin, the Alliance's Vienna representative, claims that they fully intend to continue the fight against the drugs trade, although he thinks it is too early and the situation too uncertain to be discussing the issue at present.

But there are many who fear the Northern Alliance has neither the power nor the will to clamp down on the illegal drugs trade, not least because some of the faction leaders within it are believed to have links to the drug barons.

Irony

Ironically, it was the Taleban leader Mullah Omar, who was seen to be taking the drugs issue more seriously. Just before the September 11th attacks, he made his ban on poppy cultivation permanent.

Hamid Ghodse, president of the UN's international narcotics control board, revealed that only days before the suicide attacks in New York and Washington, he secretly visited Kabul to press the Taleban to do more to crack down on the drug bosses.

Now, he says, the international community has a real chance of putting an end to the country's illegal drugs trade once and for all.

The window of opportunity will not last - in less than three months time, the spring planting season begins and farmers will be deciding whether to plant a new crop of opium poppies.