We've seen the images of kids flying kites again in Kabul, and brave women baring their faces, and shopkeepers offering satellite dishes made from tin cans. We've seen the statesmen in Germany smiling as they named an interim government. We've seen the bombing of Tora Bora and the white flags of surrender in Kandahar. We've heard hourly bulletins about the search for Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden.

But nobody yet has used the one word that is crucial to understanding Afghanistan.

The word is heroin.

The various warlords now sporadically killing one another in different parts of the country — and on the streets of Kandahar — are almost certainly fighting to control the heroin racket. Forget about such marvelous abstractions as freedom, liberty and democracy. The true goal is far more familiar to those of us who have lived in a major heroin market for five decades. They're killing for the same reasons that mob families have killed for two generations: to control the supply of smack.

The great prize for the warlords is supposed to be hidden in those endless networks of caves in the north and west of the ruined country. According to the UN, the British Home Office and the Drug Enforcement Administration, some of it is pure morphine base. Some has been processed by Afghan labs into heroin. Tons of hashish are there, too, say the experts, ready to flood the postwar domestic market.

Up to 100-Pound Busts

Nobody is certain. So far, says Steven Casteel, the DEA's assistant administrator for intelligence, seizures have been small, between 40 and 100 pounds. Over the weekend, he said of the Taliban: "They are not dumb. This is their savings account, and for that reason obviously a lot of them have made every effort to move that savings account to a safe haven outside the country."

But even Casteel is uncertain about the basic information. Some of the stockpile might have been destroyed by American bombs aimed at Afghan and Arab fighters. Some must await the end of the shooting war.

Certainly, the sheer numbers of potential profits reduce the $25 million reward for Bin Laden to tip money. Last year, the State Department estimated that the Afghan crop was 3,656 metric tons, which was 72% of the world's supply (Myanmar/Burma was a distant second.) The United Nations estimated in 1999 that the value of the Afghan opium crop was $265 million as it left the poppy farms, and that the Taliban extracted from that sum about $40 million in taxes. A recent BBC report by Richard Davenport-Hines stated that the profit margin for Afghan drug traffickers is about 300%. We are talking here of potential profits in the billions.

Stashing it Away

Last year, under pressure from UN development agencies, the Taliban banned the growing of poppies. They actually took some steps to enforce the ban, but first permitted the creation of a strategic reserve. They stashed many tons of drugs in caves in northern and western Afghanistan. The intent was clear: to supply the outside world while keeping prices at a high level.

But in the late summer of this year, the puritanical students of Mullah Omar made a big shift. On Sept. 2, the Voice of Shariat — run by the Taliban — announced that the ban on poppy growing was over. This might have been because Mullah Omar and his fellow holy men had been tipped about what would happen nine days later. We won't know for many months. But there was a practical short-term reason for the lifting of the ban. The planting season for poppy farmers would begin in late September and they needed to buy seeds.

Meanwhile, through the years of Taliban domination, the drug trade flourished. Their rivals, the heroic freedom fighters of the Northern Alliance, had a piece of the action. On some levels, the exchange was simple: You give us guns and we'll give you heroin. Trucks arrived with food, dropped off their humanitarian cargoes, and nobody asked what might be hidden in wheel casings when the vehicles left Afghanistan. Certainly, by all reports, every border was corrupt.

Millions of Addicts

In spite of the war, smuggling routes still exist. One western route drives into Iran, which has 3 million heroin addicts of its own among a population of 60 million. From Iran, after local markets are served, the cargo is eventually dispersed into Turkey, Europe and the United States. Iran says it has lost 15,000 dead soldiers and policemen trying to stop the Afghan drug trade, an additional reason for its fierce opposition to the Taliban regime. The smuggling continues.

The southern route pushes into Pakistan, which also contains an estimated 3 million addicts in its cities and refugee camps (with twice the population of Iran). Supplies of morphine base and refined heroin are often taken to ships operating out of Karachi on the Arabian Sea for movement to the West. Corruption is general, on high levels and low.

The northern route moves easily through the Central Asian republics — with our ally, Tajikistan, a virtual narcorepublic. The shipments are often guided by Muslim gangsters from Chechnya toward Kosovo-Albanian syndicates, or to the hard men of the Russian Mafia. In turn, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, heroin passes through Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania or Hungary on its way to the lucrative markets of the West, including America.

80% From Afghanistan

Through these complicated, shifting routes, much Afghan heroin finds its way to the drug supermarkets of Amsterdam, where the DEA says it is auctioned among British, Irish, Israeli, Turkish, Nigerian and Kurdish gangsters. By all accounts, heroin addiction is spreading in Europe, with 80% of the supply traced by drug agents to Afghanistan. And, of course, New York gets it share.

So far, we've heard no reports of the bombing of existing poppy fields in Kandahar or Helmand provinces. We haven't heard about a single major drug seizure in opium storage caves around Darunta, Bhesud or anywhere else. No significant drug busts have been made along Afghanistan's porous borders.

All of which creates a ripening odor. As Afghan warlords fight one another in Kandahar for the spoils, we still don't know what private arrangements were made by the U.S. to create its anti-Taliban alliance. We certainly don't know if the continuity of the heroin trade was part of the deal. If it was, we will live with the terrible exports of Afghanistan long after Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar are tossed into the rubbish heap of history.