ROME -- The Obama administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan told allies on Saturday that the United States was shifting its drug policy in Afghanistan away from eradicating opium poppy fields and toward interdicting drug supplies and cultivating alternative crops.

"The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure," the representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, told reporters on the margins of the Group of 8 conference in the northern Italian city of Trieste, Reuters reported. "They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban."

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The Afghan foot patrol descended a mountain and slipped through a canyon. Then things went wrong. One Afghan soldier insulted another. And there, exposed on dangerous ground, a scuffle erupted.

The soldiers turned on each other with shoves, punches and kicks. One swung an ammunition can in a slow-motion haymaker. The patrol had already been hapless: a display of errant marksmanship, dud ammunition and lackluster technique.

"For months I've been telling everyone how proud I am of you," seethed an American captain, yanking the Afghans apart. "Today you embarrassed me."

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UNITED NATIONS officials in Afghanistan are trying to create a "flood of drugs", which will destroy the value of opium and force poppy farmers to switch to legal crops such as wheat.

After the failure to destroy fields of the scarlet flowers in the volatile south, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says the answer is to stop the drugs from leaving the country.

"Manual eradication is incompetent and inefficient," the UNODC's chief, Antonio Maria Costa, said during a visit to the western Afghan province of Herat. "So we want to see more efforts to stop the flow of drugs across Afghanistan's borders and the hitting of high-value targets to create a market disruption.

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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Locals call them "poppy palaces," the three-or four-story marble homes with fake Roman columns perched behind razor wire and guard shacks in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.

Most are owned by Afghan officials or people connected to them, men who make a few hundred dollars a month as government employees but are driven around in small convoys of armored SUVs that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Kabul's gleaming upscale real estate seems a world away from war-torn southern Afghanistan, but many of the houses were built with profits harvested from opium poppy fields in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

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KABUL, Afghanistan - The men, hollow-eyed and matted, start coming at dawn, shuffling into the remains of the old Soviet Cultural Center, which in its day staged films celebrating the glories of a new era.

These days, the shell of the abandoned building serves as perhaps the world's largest gathering spot for men looking to satisfy their lust for heroin and opium. Stooping in the darkened caverns of the place, amid the waste and exhalations of hundreds of others, the men partake of the drug that has begun to wreak its deathly magic in the very country where it is produced.

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Canadian soldiers deployed in Afghanistan will now be ordered to target civilian producers and traffickers of illegal opiates in cases where there is evidence of links to the Taliban.

"Alliance members, including Canada, decided at the NATO defence minister's meeting in Budapest that [the International Security Assistance Force] may carry out direct operations against the narcotics industry," Laurie Hawn, Parliamentary Secretary to Canada's Defence Minister, confirmed last week.

The decision to target non-combatants in the drug industry was hotly debated among NATO members before the order to proceed was passed down the chain of command. One of the criticisms of the newly instated policy is that it constitutes a breach of international law, which prohibits the use of military force against civilians, regardless of suspected criminal activity. The Geneva Conventions, for example, prohibit the use of "violence to life and person" against "persons taking no active part in the hostilities."

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To understand why the war in Afghanistan, now in its eighth year, is not going well for the United States and its NATO allies, take a look at two statistics. One is Afghanistan's ranking on an international index measuring corruption: 176 out of 180 countries. (Somalia is 180th). The other is Afghanistan's position as the world's Number 1 producer of illicit opium, the raw material for heroin. The two statistics are inextricably linked and, a year ago, prompted Richard Holbrooke, the man President Barack Obama has just picked as special envoy for Afghanistan, to write: "Breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential or all else will fail.

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BERLIN -- NATO's senior military commander has proposed that the alliance's soldiers in Afghanistan shoot drug traffickers without waiting for proof of their involvement with the Taliban insurgency, according to a report in the online edition of Der Spiegel magazine.

The commander, Gen. John Craddock of the United States, floated the idea in a confidential letter on Jan. 5 to Gen. Egon Ramms, a German officer who heads the NATO command center responsible for Afghanistan, Spiegel Online reported Thursday.

General Craddock wrote that "it was no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective," the news magazine reported. A NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the wording of the letter, and several NATO officials said publicly on Friday that no such orders had ever been given to NATO troops.

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The approach to combatting the drug mafia in Afghanistan has spurred an open rift inside NATO. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, top NATO commander John Craddock wants the alliance to kill opium dealers, without proof of connection to the insurgency. NATO commanders, however, do not want to follow the order.

A dispute has emerged among NATO High Command in Afghanistan regarding the conditions under which alliance troops can use deadly violence against those identified as insurgents. In a classified document, which SPIEGEL has obtained, NATO's top commander, US General John Craddock, has issued a "guidance" providing NATO troops with the authority "to attack directly drug producers and facilities throughout Afghanistan."

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The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills.

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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A drive by the NATO alliance to disrupt Afghanistan's drug trade has been hobbled by new objections from member nations that say their laws do not permit soldiers to carry out such operations, according to senior commanders here.

The objections are being raised despite an agreement two months ago that the alliance's campaign in Afghanistan would be broadened to include attacks on narcotics facilities, traffickers, middlemen and drug lords whose profits help to finance insurgent groups.

During a recent visit here, Gen. John Craddock, NATO's supreme allied commander, expressed surprise upon learning of what he described as a gap between the decision by alliance defense ministers to authorize aggressive counternarcotics missions and the lack of follow-through because of objections from several of the countries that make up the NATO force in Afghanistan.

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The Third In Our Series On Life In Afghanistan Reveals That In Helmand Province No Part Of Society Is Free From The Economic Impact Of Drugs Or The Prevailing Culture Of Corruption

The smuggler

Hameedullah's family live in one big house on a dusty unpaved lane - Hameedullah, his five sons and their wives, children, grandchildren and two cousins. Hameedullah, a tall, thickset man, is a government employee. And like many people in Helmand, he is also a poppy farmer.

Like any other farmer, he was concerned by water, and crop prices. "People plant poppy because it's good money, it needs little water and it makes a good harvest," he said. "Prices were very low last year because everyone planted poppy. Wheat is very good this year because prices are high, so most of the people are planting wheat this year. I divided my land half wheat and half poppy, but next year we will plant poppy again."

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UNITED NATIONS -- Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years that the Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in an effort to support prices and preserve a major source of financing for the insurgency, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations drug office, says.

Mr. Costa made his remarks to reporters last week as his office prepared to release its latest survey of Afghanistan's opium crop. Issued Thursday, it showed that poppy cultivation had retreated in much of the country and was now overwhelmingly concentrated in the 7 of 34 provinces where the insurgency remains strong, most of those in the south.

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Eradication Effort, Along With Drought and a Global Food Shortage That Boosted the Price of Wheat, Cut Production of the Crop, Which Is Used to Make Heroin.

After seven years of extraordinary expansion, Afghanistan's harvest of poppies used to produce opium has declined by 6% from a record high in 2007, according to the annual opium survey by the United Nations released Thursday.

The amount of land used to cultivate opium declined by 19%, to about 388,000 acres.

"We are finally seeing the results of years of effort of making some areas completely free of opium harvesting," said Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Opium production is now concentrated in seven provinces in the southwestern part of the country.

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MOSCOW -- Opium production in Afghanistan has increased by 150 per cent since a NATO-led security and development mission entered the country in 2001, Russia's Federal Drug Control Service said yesterday.

"Afghanistan has become the absolute leader in narcotics production, producing 93 per cent of the world's entire opiates. Afghan drug dealers have in two years set up the successful production of cannabis (marijuana, hashish) with over 70,000 hectares of land being cultivated, taking Afghanistan into second place in the world behind Morocco in terms of the cultivation of such drugs," the service said in a statement.

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Heroin Trade; Take Action Against Operations Tied To Insurgency

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - The product is hidden in transport trucks, hauled on the back of donkeys and finally spirited through villages that straddle Afghanistan's northern border.

Being part of the world's largest heroin industry certainly has its benefits, but the work, says one Afghan drug smuggler, is no walk in the park.

To move narcotics from Afghanistan's Pashtun belt -- where Canadian troops operate -- to Tajikistan, smugglers risk arrest by the police, theft at the hands of other criminals or worse, says the Kabulbased courier, who asked not to be named.

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Goal To Give Farmers An Alternative To Growing Poppies

KANDAHAR -- Canada is providing $1.2 million to buy wheat seeds and fertilizer for thousands of Afghan farmers, but the Taliban warn they may attack any foreigners who attempt to distribute the seeds.

The money will pay for 293 tonnes of wheat seed, to supply more than 5,000 farmers with 50 kilograms each, and plant a total of 2,000 hectares of land.

"We look forward to working with the governor of Kandahar to sow these seeds of peace," said Elissa Golberg, head of Canadian development operations in Kandahar province.

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(CNS) - Canada is providing $1.2 million to buy wheat seeds and fertilizer for thousands of Afghan farmers, but the Taliban warn they may attack any foreigners who attempt to distribute the seeds.

The money will pay for 293 tonnes of wheat seed, to supply more than 5,000 farmers with 50 kilograms each, and plant a total of 2,000 hectares of land.

"We look forward to working with the governor of Kandahar to sow these seeds of peace," said Elissa Golberg, head of Canadian development operations in Kandahar province.

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Afghanistan Wants High-Tech Help From NATO To Track Smugglers

KABUL - The product is hidden in transport trucks, hauled on the back of donkeys and finally spirited through villages that straddle Afghanistan's northern border.

Being part of the world's largest heroin industry certainly has its benefits. but the work, says one Afghan drug smuggler, is no walk in the park.

To move narcotics from Afghanistan's Pashtun belt -- where Canadian troops operate -- to Tajikistan, smugglers risk arrest by the police, theft at the hands of other criminals, or worse, says the Kabul-based courier, who asked not to be named.

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Afghan Heroin Traffickers May Soon Have Something New To Worry About

KABUL - The product is hidden in transport trucks, hauled on the backs of donkeys and finally spirited through villages that straddle Afghanistan's northern border.

Being part of the world's largest heroin industry certainly has its benefits, but the work, says one Afghan drug smuggler, is no walk in the park.

To move narcotics from Afghanistan's Pashtun belt -- where Canadian troops operate -- to Tajikistan, smugglers risk arrest by the police, theft at the hands of other criminals, or worse, says the Kabul-based courier, who asked not to be named.

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