Setting the Stage 31

narcotics, the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Pre-vention in Vienna reported that Afghanistan had more thandoubled its production of opium in the past year, and nowaccounts for three-quarters of the world opium crop.13

The size of the opium crop in Afghanistan over thenext two years went up and down. For the most part it wascultivated in areas under the control of the Taliban, but theNorthern Alliance also encouraged poppy growth. At onepoint in early 2001, the Taliban sharply curtailed its pro-duction of opium, but their motives were never clear, andthey apparently never reduced their stockpiles. A dispatchfiled by New York Times correspondent Barry Bearak on 24May 2001 is filled with praise for the mendacious mullahsof Kandahar: American narcotics officials who visited thecountry confirmed earlier United Nations reports that theTaliban had, in one growing season, managed a rare tri-umph in the long and losing war on drugs. And they did itwithout the usual multimillion dollar aid packages thatfinance police raids, aerial surveillance and crop subsidiesfor farmers.14

On 26 September 2001, just fifteen days after the ter-rorist attack on the World Trade Center, the Times reportedonce again on the Talibans wonderful work, but this timewith a bit more skepticism. Michael R. Gordon and EricSchmitt wrote that although a UN panel visiting the area inspring 2000 had concluded that poppy cultivation in Af-ghanistan had been largely eradicated, the UN also notedthat production in the first part of 2000 had increased sub-stantially from the previous year before the ban took effect.In the view of the Times reporters, this incongruity raisedthe question of whether the Taliban was stocking up.15

Ironically, Bearaks story was probably correct in assert-ing that poppy eradication in Taliban areas occurred with-out crop subsidies for the farmers, since the Taliban most