KABUL: Afghanistan will take a generation to wipe out the opium trade, which is fed by graft and the grip of a small but increasingly powerful band of drug lords with political connections, a new UN and World Bank report says.

Efforts to wipe out opium fields often hit poor farmers the most and care must be taken to avoid making the situation worse, said the report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the World Bank on Tuesday.

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U.S.-Backed Efforts at Eradication Fail

Opium production in Afghanistan, which provides more than 90 percent of the world's heroin, broke all records in 2006, reaching a historic high despite ongoing U.S.-sponsored eradication efforts, the Bush administration reported yesterday.

In addition to a 26 percent production increase over past year -- for a total of 5,644 metric tons -- the amount of land under cultivation in opium poppies grew by 61 percent. Cultivation in the two main production provinces, Helmand in the southwest and Oruzgan in central Afghanistan, was up by 132 percent.

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KABUL, Afghanistan --- Afghanistan's criminal underworld has compromised key government officials who protect drug traffickers, allowing a flourishing opium trade that will not be stamped out for a generation, an ominous U.N. report released Tuesday said.

The fight against opium production has so far achieved only limited success, mostly because of corruption, the joint report from the World Bank and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said.

The findings show a "probability of high-level (government) involvement" in drugs, said Doris Buddenberg, the UNODC's Afghanistan representative and co-editor of the report.

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Report: Heroin Trade Thrives

U.S. and European efforts to end heroin production in Afghanistan have done little to hamper the drug industry and have hurt the country's poorest people, according to a report by the United Nations and the World Bank.

The report, released today, is the latest indication of the difficulties faced by the British-led effort to eradicate Afghanistan's opium crop, which drives the economy in parts of the embattled nation and has helped to fund a resurgence of the Taliban. The report says the cultivation of poppies that produce opium, from which heroin is made, permeates daily life in Afghanistan, and eliminating the illegal drug trade there could take decades.

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Afghanistan's war on drugs has been marred by corruption that has strengthened the grip of an increasingly powerful mafia on the country's narcotics trade, a report by the World Bank and United Nations said.

Over the past five years, the British-led counter-narcotics strategy had penalised the country's poorest farmers and strengthened networks of organised crime, consolidating the trade among a tiny elite of traffickers, the damning report said.

"Around 25 to 30 key traffickers, the majority of them based in southern Afghanistan, control major transactions and transfers, working closely with sponsors in top government and political positions."

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New Zealand Troops in Afghanistan Have Destroyed a Haul of Opium With a Potential Street Value of US$12 Million ($18m).

The almost one tonne of drugs was confiscated on November 1 by a team of Afghan National Police after they caught up with smugglers on a deserted road.

The New Zealand Defence Force in Bamyan received a call from the province's governor Habibi Serabi asking if they could incinerate the drugs.

Wooden pellets filled with opium were stacked on top of each other and doused in petrol before being set alight.

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KABUL, Afghanistan -- Farmers now planting opium poppies in Afghanistan will probably reap a harvest comparable to this year's record crop, in part because insurgents are preventing effective counternarcotics work, officials said Thursday.

Planting is under way in southern regions responsible for the bulk of the estimated 6,100 metric tons of Afghan opium produced in the 2005-06 growing season.

Anti-drug officials say that despite anti-cultivation campaigns, they foresee little improvement by harvest time next spring.

Drug production has skyrocketed since a U.S.-led offensive toppled the Taliban regime five years ago. Last spring's poppy harvest accounted for 92 percent of the global opium supply and was enough to make 610 tons of heroin--more than all the world's addicts consume in a year.

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KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan farmers now planting opium poppies will probably reap a harvest comparable to this year's record crop, in part because insurgents are preventing effective counternarcotics work, officials said yesterday.

Planting is under way in southern regions responsible for the bulk of the estimated 6,100 tons of Afghan opium produced in the 2005-6 growing season.

Drug production has skyrocketed since a U.S.-led offensive toppled the Taliban regime five years ago for giving refuge to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda camps. Last spring's poppy harvest accounted for 92 percent of the global opium supply and was enough to make 610 tons of heroin - more than the world's addicts consume in a year.

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KABUL - NATO-led troops killed 38 suspected insurgents in two separate confrontations in southern Afghanistan, and western troops and Afghan police elsewhere seized over nine tonnes of marijuana from a truck, officials said Wednesday.

The fighting in Kandahar's Zhari and Panjwaii districts on Tuesday targeted rebels who were attacking the alliance's "development efforts" in the area, said Maj. Luke Knittig, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

Details on the fighting were not available, nor was the nationality of the troops involved.

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VANCOUVER -- Corruption and drug-trafficking stemming from Afghanistan's poppy crops pose the biggest threat to coalition efforts to nurture a stable government in the country, U.S. Lieutenant-General Karl Eikenberry said yesterday.

Speaking via teleconference from the U.S. embassy in Geneva to the Asia Pacific Summit in Vancouver, Lt.-Gen. Eikenberry -- commanding general with combined forces command in Afghanistan -- said the poppy- growing problem is big enough to warrant a strategy aimed at providing an alternative economy, not just alternative livlihoods for poppy farmers.

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Canadian and United Nations experts are dismissing key elements of a report by an international think-tank that urges Canada to take the lead in developing new NATO strategies in Afghanistan such as legitimizing poppy production to meet Third World demands for painkillers.

The Senlis Council report, originally released in June, was submitted to a symposium yesterday, where the Conference of Defence Associations dismissed its main recommendation as superficial and nonsensical.

The paper by Norine MacDonald, the development and security think tank's lead field researcher in Kandahar province, says the military situation in southern Afghanistan has declined dramatically in recent months due largely to a failure to win the hearts and minds of the local populace.

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Canada must immediately launch an emergency food program to relieve the growing hunger crisis in southern Afghanistan, says the president of an international development and security think-tank.

Canadian lawyer Norine MacDonald, the founding president of the Senlis Council, told a news conference yesterday that a famine has started to take shape in the cities and towns that neighbour Canada's military base in Kandahar.

"Children are starving to death literally down the road from the Canadian military base in Kandahar," said Ms. MacDonald, who has spent the past year in southern Afghanistan and has helped document the rise of refugee camps in Kandahar and in surrounding towns.

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Deciding to Fight

Inside the old city walls of Peshawar, Pakistan, a half-hour drive from the Afghan border, in a bazaar named after the storytellers who enthralled Central Asian gold and silk merchants with their tales of war and tragic love, sits the 17th-century Mohabat Khan Mosque. It is a place of cool, marble calm amid the dense market streets.

Yousaf Qureshi is the prayer leader there and director of the Jamia Ashrafia, a Deobandi madrasa.

He had recently announced a pledge by the jewelers' association to pay $1 million to anyone who would kill a Danish cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. Qureshi himself offered $25,000 and a car. I found Qureshi seated on a cushion behind a low glass desk covered with papers and business cards -- ambassadors, N.G.O. workers, Islamic scholars, mujahedeen commanders: he has conversed with them all. His office resembles an antiques shop, the walls displaying oversize prayer beads, knives inlaid with ivory and astrakhan caps. It was day's end, and Qureshi was checking the proofs for his 51st book, called "The Benefits of Koran."

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One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20's fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition of Georges Seurat's "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" -- middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys flying a kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight pattern of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction. He had just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque.

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Afghanistan's opium production has soared "out of control," the U.N. drugs and crime agency warned Tuesday, adding that proceeds from the opium harvest were being used to fund the resurgent Taliban.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime is calling on NATO and Afghan troops to attack heroin labs, opium bazzars and convoys transporting the narcotic, said Preeta Bannerjee, a spokeswoman for the agency.

Opium production in Afghanistan rose 59 percent in 2006 to a record 165,000 hectares (408,000 acres) -- representing 92 percent of the world's opium, according to U.N. figures.

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The Afghan government has ordered the closure of all offices of a group that wants to promote new ways of dealing with the global drugs problem.

The Interior Ministry said the Senlis Council, had been "confusing farmers" and had been a factor in the increase in poppy cultivation.

Senlis has suggested the legal use of Afghan opium for medical purposes.

A spokesman for Senlis said it had not received any formal notification that its offices were to be closed.

He denied its activities had increased poppy cultivation.

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Taleban fighters using giant Afghan marijuana forests for cover are proving a tough foe to smoke out, the head of Canada's armed forces has revealed.

Thickets three metres (10ft) high readily absorb heat, making them hard to penetrate with thermal devices, said Gen Rick Hillier in a speech in Ottawa.

"You really have to be careful the Taleban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he added.

Burning them is not an option as they are laden with water, the general said.

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DASHTAK, Afghanistan -- The village of Dashtak sits on a bumpy, washed-out specter of a road, an hour's drive off the main highway between Kabul and Afghanistan's lawless southeast.

It has 16 new wells financed by an aid agency. But the village men who gather around a visiting journalist offer a litany of complaints: no paved roads, no running water, no electricity, and the closest health clinic is two hours away by donkey.

Their frustration boils over when talk turns to 10 villagers recently arrested on suspicion of aiding insurgents.

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Afghans Reconsider: Taliban Opium Profits Prompt Bold Promise

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- With profits from this spring's record opium crop fuelling a broad Taliban offensive, Afghan authorities say they are considering a once-unthinkable way to deal with the scourge: spraying poppy fields with herbicide.

Afghans, including President Hamid Karzai, are deeply opposed to spraying the crop, but U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington are pushing for it.

Last week, Afghanistan's top drug enforcement official said he would contemplate spraying opium crops -- even with airborne crop-dusters -- if other efforts fail to cut the size of the coming year's crop.

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JALALABAD, Afghanistan - With profits from this spring's record opium crop fuelling a broad Taliban offensive, Afghan authorities say they are considering a once-unthinkable way to deal with the scourge: spraying poppy fields with herbicide.

Afghans including President Hamid Karzai are deeply opposed to spraying the crop.

After nearly three decades of war, western science and assurances can do little to assuage their fears of chemicals being dropped from airplanes.

But U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington are pushing for it. And on Thursday the country's top drug enforcement official said he would contemplate spraying opium crops -- even with airborne crop-dusters -- if other efforts fail to cut the size of the coming year's crop.

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