After the Taliban, the Drug Lords

In Afghanistan today, the Taliban has been vanquished, with scattered bands of defeated Al Qaeda soldiers either retreating into the mountainous north or escaping across the border into neighboring countries.

But in the vacuum of power that has resulted, another enemy has literally risen from the rocky soil to seek its own grip on the region: poppies planted to feed the always-ravenous opium industry.

United Nations and Afghan officials estimate that since the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., such planting in the country has doubled. They say that up to half the civilians living in the fertile areas near Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are involved in some aspect of the drug trade.

At 8 tonight on KCET, the PBS series “Wide Angle” takes viewers into those fields while exploring how the crushing poverty of a country devastated by a quarter-century of war created the ideal conditions for the opium industry to take root.

The episode, “Bitter Harvest,” has an air of futility as it lays out the difficulties in fighting the drug lords: terrain too rugged for fences; roadside guards with hand-held X-ray machines but no electricity to run them; poor neighboring countries still struggling with post-Soviet independence.

And yet the war goes on.