Drug Trade, Militants Thrive in Pakistan’s Rugged North : South Asia: Bhutto government has little control where opium becomes heroin and students become fighters.

Muhammad Jalal, 23, is a grocery store clerk, one who learned how to shoot a G-3 rifle with the Pakistani army. Now he daydreams not of inventory but of jihad--making Muslim holy war.

Where and against whom, it is clear, is secondary.

“I’d be ready to go fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Kashmir. Anywhere for the sake of the faith,” proclaims the young Pakistani with the toothbrush mustache.

For 36 hours, this determined native of the port city of Karachi rode trains to reach Peshawar, a city virtually synonymous with adventure and lawlessness for more than a century.

In the days of the British Raj, Peshawar was a rough-and-ready outpost on the colonial “frontier.” All of Queen Victoria’s regiments were not enough to impose British rule on the rugged, remote places where the fierce Pathan tribes dwell.

Today, Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province is a problem of a different order for Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her democratically elected government.

Largely outside the control of central authorities, the region has become a hotbed of Islamic extremism and narcotics production; a haven for Muslim volunteers who honed their combat skills during the war in Afghanistan, and a breeding ground for a generation of militants who, like Jalal, dream of jihad.

As many as 1,000 hard-core veterans of the anti-Communist jihad in Afghanistan live in Peshawar, a city of 1.2 million people. Throughout the province, about 1.3 million Afghan refugees live in camps and mountainside villages.

One veteran of the Afghan War, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, 27, the alleged brain behind the World Trade Center bombing, was no stranger to Peshawar’s narrow, bustling streets and densely packed and animated bazaars. According to U.S. prosecutors, he developed his bomb-making prowess in this city, which had served as the headquarters-in-exile for many of the Afghan moujahedeen groups in the 1980s.

In the months before the Feb. 26, 1993, bombing, acquaintances recall, Yousef cut a very visible figure in Peshawar, flitting from party to party and attending weddings.

Peshawar’s province, which Pakistanis commonly call NWFP, is awash these days in firearms and drugs. With a land area almost twice as big as Denmark, it is a throbbing center of what Bhutto calls Pakistan’s “Kalashnikov culture.”

At the ritziest hotel in town, the Pearl-Continental, a lobby sign alerts visitors that “personal guards or gunmen are required to deposit their weapons with the Hotel Security.”

The United States and the Soviet Union shipped billions of dollars’ worth of arms into Afghanistan between 1979 and 1992, and weapons in the area have become so plentiful that police just wrapped up a deal to buy seven Soviet-made armored personnel carriers from one of the Muslim factions warring in Afghanistan.

Top price: $3,500 per armored vehicle, or less than what a Pakistani would pay for a good Japanese-made used car.

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Only nine miles west of Peshawar, the “tribal areas” begin--districts where Pakistani law does not apply. In the Tirah Valley of the Khyber district, 100 mud forts have been converted into heroin labs.

There, using large rusty vats, men in pajama suits cook the highly addictive morphine derivative that will find a ready market from Amsterdam to Los Angeles.

These days, business is booming. According to international drug control experts, in the past decade Pakistan and Afghanistan have surpassed the heroin production of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos, the infamous “Golden Triangle.”

Last year, U.N. drug coordinator Giorgio Giacomelli estimated the Pakistani drug trade at $2.25 billion--about 5% of gross domestic product. Last month, in a single raid in the Choora Valley, 15 miles west of Peshawar, Pakistani troops seized a mind-boggling 6.3 tons of white, highly refined heroin.

Bhutto, who is currently visiting the United States, claims the narcotics barons are bankrolling “drug-fueled ethnic strife” in Karachi and trying to destabilize her Pakistan People’s Party government. Since January, she and her ministers have undertaken a wide array of actions to stymie the production and shipping of heroin and hashish.

Bhutto, a moderate Muslim leader whose nation is now buffeted by several currents of Islamic radicalism, is also greatly worried by the growing appearance of religious schools known as madrasas --Arabic for “places of study”--in the province and throughout Pakistan.

By one count, 1,700 madrasas were created from 1976 to 1990, whereas only 870 were set up in the first three decades after independence.

“They’ve just mushroomed,” says Rahimullah Yusufzai, Peshawar bureau chief for the News, a national daily.

At some, the emphasis is on education, and pupils sweat over the normal state curriculum, plus Islamic studies and readings from the Koran. But too many other madrasas “are trying to poison the minds of young people with sectarianism,” Bhutto said last month.

Some of the schools even send their students to Afghanistan for “practical training--that is, real warfare,” the prime minister said.

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On the road to the storied Khyber Pass, 30 miles west of Peshawar, the Zia-ul-Madaris Arabia (Large Arabic Madrasas) makes no secret of its function as a recruiting station for the Taliban, a faction in the Afghan civil war.

It was to the battered, corrugated metal gates of Zia-ul-Madaris that Jalal, the grocery store clerk, came one recent day, clad in a long brown smock and with dreams of doing battle for Islam in his head.

From Zia-ul-Madaris, young Afghan refugees are shipped off in the mornings for combat training with the Taliban, which began as a movement among Afghan madrasa students.

In Zia-ul-Madaris’ unfurnished classrooms on two floors, barefoot pupils seated on the floor intone the Koran in singsong voices for hours at a stretch, committing the Muslim scriptures to memory. One Afghan adult there sees the school as a mighty lever that will shift the global balance of forces in favor of Islam.

“After they win in Afghanistan, these same Talibs will go on to the West to eliminate the Christians and the Jews,” Maulvi Bismillah Jan said.

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The same Islamic radicalism and black-and-white world view are instilled at another madrasa in Peshawar whose name means the “Door to Knowledge.” There, Masood Khan, 20, from the Khyber area west of Peshawar, dons a white skullcap to study the Koran.

Khan has developed strong views--for instance, that every one of Pakistan’s problems is the work of American and Indian agents and that Bhutto is not a good Muslim.

“In my country,” the bearded young zealot says, “we need a revolution. A revolution to bring us Islam, the Koran and the Sharia (Muslim law).”

Bhutto and her government are clearly worried about the madrasas breeding yet another generation of Islamic militants. Officials have decided to require the schools to register, so genuine educational institutions can be separated from indoctrination centers.

The government also is working with international agencies to draw up rules governing the foreign funding of madrasas , so countries like Iran cannot finance Islamic radicalism in Pakistan.

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The madrasas should be everybody’s concern, Bhutto stressed in an interview with American correspondents last month. The implication was that if the world doesn’t help her government now, it could rue the consequences.

“The international community has an obligation to work with Pakistan, in these (Afghan) refugee camps and in these madrasas where these schools are existing, to try and have alternative teachers hired, alternative curriculum introduced and so on,” said Bhutto.

“We in Pakistan simply don’t have the resources on our own to have this entire cleaning operation.”