MIR ALI, Afghanistan - On the barren high plains of western Afghanistan, along a roadway south of Herat city, is a collection of sturdy earthen huts known as Qala-e-Biwaha, or "village of widows."

Most of the village's men have disappeared - killed while trying to smuggle opium across the desolate frontier into neighboring Iran. The widows have been left to fend for themselves and their children, some of whom have also died while transporting drugs over the border from Herat Province's rugged Adraskan district.

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The Taliban in Afghanistan is now running significant heroin production lines in the war-torn country to provide jihadists and insurgents with billions of dollars, western law enforcement officials

And much of that heroin is flowing into Canada.

"More than 90 per cent of all heroin consumed in the US is of Mexican origin. But in Canada more than 90 per cent of the heroin consumed is of Afghan origin," said William Brownfield, US Assistant Secretary for Drugs and Law Enforcement when addressing reporters in the Afghan capital Kabul recently.

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NAQIL, Afghanistan (AFP) - Lashes swished and whirled through the air in a burst of celebration around a sea of opium poppies, as farmers in a southern Afghan village rejoiced over a bumper harvest with a traditional rope game.

Hundreds of farm laborers from across the Pashtun heartland, many of them Taliban, congregated last month in Naqil in Uruzgan province for the most lucrative time of the year - the poppy harvest.

After laboring all day in the torpid heat, extracting milky opium resin from swollen green pods, they broke into revelry around the bountiful farms.

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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - It is spring that determines how a year turns out, according to an Afghan proverb. And if the Helmand poppy fields this spring are any indication, the Taliban will have a very good year.

As the opium harvest winds down across Helmand Province, Afghanistan's largest in territory and poppy cultivation, farmers and officials are reporting high yields. The skies were generous with heavy rainfall, and the Afghan government with its cancellation of annual eradication campaigns. It had lost much of the territory in Helmand to the Taliban anyway.

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LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan - Afghans have an expression: "Well, whatever has happened, we are still skinny." In other words, they have not gotten rich yet, try as they might.

It is an expression heard often here in Helmand Province, the southwestern region that is the world capital of opium and heroin production. Afghanistan accounts for 90 percent of the world's heroin; more than two-thirds of that comes from Helmand's opium poppies, according to United Nations figures.

Sometimes, the expression is uttered enviously - how did we miss out? Other times, it is delivered with greedy sarcasm - how much more can we get before the feeding frenzy is over?

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ZARANJ, Afghanistan - Shortly after sunrise, an Afghan special operations helicopter descended on two vehicles racing through the empty deserts of southern Afghanistan, traversing what has become a superhighway for smugglers and insurgents.

Intelligence showed that the men were transporting a huge cache of drugs and weapons from Helmand Province to Nimruz Province, a hub for all things illegal and a way station on the global opium trail. Hovering above, the troops fired tracer rounds into the sandy earth beside the vehicles, which skidded to a stop.

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GARMSIR, Afghanistan - The United States spent more than $7 billion in the past 14 years to fight the runaway poppy production that has made Afghan opium the world's biggest brand. Tens of billions more went to governance programs to stem corruption and train a credible police force. Countless more dollars and thousands of lives were lost on the main thrust of the war: to put the Afghan government in charge of district centers and to instill rule of law.

But here in one of the few corners of Helmand Province that is peaceful and in firm government control, the green stalks and swollen bulbs of opium were growing thick and high within eyeshot of official buildings during the past poppy season - signs of a local narco-state administered directly by government officials.

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GARMSIR, Afghanistan - The United States spent more than $7 billion in the past 14 years to fight the runaway poppy production that has made Afghan opium the world's biggest brand.

Tens of billions more went to governance programs to stem corruption and train a credible police force. Countless more dollars and thousands of lives were lost on the main thrust of the war: to put the Afghan government in charge of district centers and to instill rule of law.

But here in one of the only corners of Helmand province that are peaceful and in firm government control, the green stalks and swollen bulbs of opium were growing thick and high within view of official buildings during the past poppy season - signs of a local narco-state administered directly by government officials.

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KABUL - Afghan opium cultivation and production again reached historic highs in 2014, UN officials reported Wednesday. And in a sign of how deeply entwined drug trafficking and the Afghan political system have become, the officials said protracted elections this year were at least part of the cause.

"With the presidential election ongoing there was a huge demand of funding," said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, a senior official with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. "And that funding is not available in the licit economy, and that money has to come from somewhere, so they turned to the illicit economy."

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KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan opium cultivation again rose to historic levels in 2014, United Nations officials reported on Wednesday. And in a sign of how deeply entwined drug trafficking and the Afghan political system have become, the officials said the protracted elections this year were at least part of the cause.

"With the presidential election ongoing, there was a huge demand of funding," said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, a senior official with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. "And that funding is not available in the licit economy, and that money has to come from somewhere, so they turned to the illicit economy."

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The amount of farmland in Afghanistan planted with cannabis fell by nearly a fifth last year after one province carried out a strictly enforced drug eradication campaign. However, a bumper crop showed production had risen compared with 2011, said the UN.

Officials in Uruzgan province, which borders Kandahar and Helmand, largely stamped out cultivation of the drug, acting out of concern that it was financing the Taliban. In 2011 there were more than 1,000 hectares (2,471 acres) of the crop there, but last year less than 100 ha. But planting in most other areas remained largely steady, with just over half of commercial production concentrated in the south of the country.

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KABUL, Afghanistan - For years, American officials have struggled to curb Afghanistan's opium industry, rewriting strategy every few seasons and pouring in more than $6 billion over the past decade to combat the poppies that help finance the insurgency and fuel corruption.

It is a measure of the problem's complexity that officials can find little comfort even in the news this month that blight and bad weather are slashing this year's poppy harvest in the south. They know from past seasons that blight years lead to skyrocketing opium prices and even greater planting efforts to come.

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Growers Action By Taliban Welcomed By Government And Clerics But Insurgent Says Destruction Was For Religious Reasons

Taliban fighters have destroyed fields of opium poppies in eastern Afghanistan this spring, the first time since 2001 the hardline Islamist group is known to have clamped down on the cultivation of a drug that provides a big part of its funding.

While the insurgents appear to have dug up a relatively small area of poppies in a remote area near the border with Pakistan, the move was so unusual it won a chorus of praise from the Afghan government and international organisations, whom the Taliban consider their enemy, as well as senior clerics.

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Few Treatment Options for Afghans As Drug Use Rises

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Once a river flowed under the low Pul-i-Sokhta bridge here, but now the thin stream is clotted with garbage, the banks are piled with refuse and crowds of heroin and opium addicts huddle in the shadows, some hanging like moths near the bridge's supports, then slumping in the haze of narcotic smoke.

When outsiders venture in, dozens of the addicts -- there are 200 or 300 here on any given day -- drift over to see the newcomers. Most of the visitors are health care workers trying to persuade the addicts to visit their clinic for a shower and a medical screening.

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Senate Questions Long-Term Benefits of Spending; A Grain Delivery Goes Awry

TOR GHAI, Afghanistan -- The Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned the benefit of billions of dollars worth of development aid pumped into Afghanistan, in a report issued Wednesday that called for an overhaul to the effort.

The report said evidence is limited that development helps stabilize territory-a key tenet of the coalition's counterinsurgency strategy. "Foreign aid, when misspent, can fuel corruption, distort labor and goods markets, undermine the host government's ability to exert control over resources, and contribute to insecurity," the report concluded.

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Star Buzkashi Players Can Earn A Lexus By Butting Heads Over An Animal Carcass

MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan-In the slums of Brazil, poor children dream of making it big by learning to kick a soccer ball. In the shanty towns of Afghanistan, it's all about tossing a dead goat.

Over the past several years, the ancient sport of buzkashi-Dari for "goat grabbing"-has turned into a big business in northern Afghanistan. Instead of sporting-goods manufacturers, sponsors usually are rival warlords who bet on their favorite goat grabbers.

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KABUL - A growing insurgency in northern Afghanistan could lead to renewed opium cultivation in provinces where the crop has been eliminated, a senior United Nations official warned.

Jean-Luc Lemahieu, Afghanistan representative of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said at least two provinces were now "vulnerable to relapse" into opium production this year.

The U.N. estimates that the Taliban reaps about $125 million a year in opium profits, an important source of funding for the insurgency. Afghanistan produces some 90% of the world's opium.

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KABUL - After several years of steady progress in curbing opium poppy cultivation and cracking down on drug smugglers, Afghan officials say the anti-drug campaign is flagging as opium prices soar, farmers are lured back to the lucrative crop and Afghanistan's Western allies focus more narrowly on defeating the Taliban.

That combination adds a potentially destabilizing factor to Afghanistan at a time when the United States is desperate to show progress in a war now into its 10th year. The country's Taliban insurgency and the drug trade flourish in the same lawless terrain, and are often mutually reinforcing. But Afghan officials say the opium problem is not receiving the focus it deserves from Western powers.

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Senate Investigation Says Military Depends On Private Security Forces Rife With Criminals, Drug Users And Insurgents

WASHINGTON-A yearlong investigation by a Senate panel has found evidence that the mostly Afghan force of private security guards the U.S. military depends on to protect supply convoys and bases in Afghanistan is rife with criminals, drug users and insurgents.

The Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry, based on interviews with dozens of military commanders and contractors and a review of over 125 Pentagon security contracts, found evidence of "untrained guards, insufficient and unserviceable weapons, unmanned posts" and other failings that put U.S. troops at risk.

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WASHINGTON -- The American commander in charge of building up Afghanistan's security forces said Monday that in the next 15 months he would have to recruit and train 141,000 new soldiers and police officers -- more than the current size of the Afghan Army -- to meet President Obama's ambitious goals for getting Afghan forces to fight the war on their own.

The commander, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said the large recruiting number was to allow for attrition rates in some units of nearly 50 percent.

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KABUL, Afghanistan-When U.S.-trained agents from an anticorruption task force raided the headquarters of the nation's largest "hawala" money-transfer business, they caught many people by surprise: the company's politically connected executives, the nation's top law-enforcement officer, even Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Tens of thousands of pages of documents were carted out of the New Ansari Exchange on Jan. 14. Armed with those records, investigators have been digging into the movement of billions of dollars in and out of Afghanistan.

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KABUL-An Afghan police major-general overseeing the borders with Iran and Turkmenistan went on trial Monday for allegedly facilitating the drug trade, one of the most senior officials prosecuted in the country's latest crackdown on corruption.

In a separate investigation, Afghanistan's major-crimes task force, a recently created unit that's backed by U.S. and British law-enforcement agencies, has asked for President Hamid Karzai's agreement to pursue as many as three cabinet ministers and other senior officials on corruption charges, Western diplomats said. An official at Afghanistan's National Security Council has been arrested as part of the inquiry, they said.

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KHADAKALAY, Afghanistan-It took a few tense seconds for U.S. and Afghan soldiers to realize that a sudden burst of gunfire and explosions one recent afternoon wasn't aimed at them but at a different patrol a mile away.

Everyone relaxed. A U.S. lieutenant resumed chatting with village elders. And four Afghan soldiers leaned back on some idle farm equipment and lit up a joint in full view of U.S. troops and an American reporter.

Use of marijuana, opium and heroin among Afghan troops, even while on patrol, is just one of the challenges coalition forces face in working with the Afghan National Army as they begin a major push against the Taliban in and around the southern city of Kandahar.

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More And More Children Are Testing Positive For Opium Addiction In Afghanistan, Some From Second-hand Smoke And Some Because Their Parents Give It To Them, Dan Williams Reports.

Look closer at the drawings on the wall of the Sanga Amaj clinic, and a wrenching motif emerges.

One 11-year-old's family tableau shows father and mother huddled over heroin kits as their sons watch helplessly. Another sketch is of smiling youngsters around a poppy plant that has been crossed out in red, like a traffic no-go sign.

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KABUL, Afghanistan -- The last several years of poverty, conflict and widely available opium are taking a toll on the Afghan population, with roughly 800,000 Afghan adults now using opium, heroin and other illicit drugs, a jump from five years ago, according to a study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In a report released Monday, the United Nations detailed the results of a study to determine the prevalence of drug use and found a jump in the use of every type of drug, with heroin use rising the most sharply, making Afghanistan one of five countries with the highest percentage of drug users.

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Afghanistan's Opium Producers Believe They Are Victims of a Biological Attack by the United States

Reports of a "mysterious" fungus that has damaged opium poppy crops in Afghanistan have hit international headlines but on the ground the "mystery" is an open secret. Helmand farmers interviewed by BBC Pashto service for the early-morning news programme a couple of days ago were convinced that "they" had deliberately destroyed the crops.

The pronoun "they" is a euphemism for US secret agents, whom farmers suspect of having sprayed the crops with the fungus. Afghan farmers have been cultivating opium poppies for a considerable period of time. This allows them to distinguishing between natural causes and artificially induced problems.

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KABUL, Afghanistan - The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marja has put American and NATO commanders in the unusual position of arguing against opium eradication, pitting them against some Afghan officials who are pushing to destroy the harvest.

From Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal on down, the military's position is clear: "U.S. forces no longer eradicate," as one NATO official put it. Opium is the main livelihood of 60 to 70 percent of the farmers in Marja, which was seized from Taliban rebels in a major offensive last month. American Marines occupying the area are under orders to leave the farmers' fields alone.

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MARJAH, Afghanistan-Even by Afghan standards, it was a startling find: An opium packaging workshop, buried under donkey dung and old hay in a stable that U.S. Marines turned into a patrol base in southern Afghanistan. Two U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration employees nosing around the base found more than two kilograms (4.4 pounds) of opium, five large bags of poppy seeds, some 50 sickles, jugs and a large scale for measuring opium.

When the Marines leave the compound this week, though, they won't detain the old, bearded Afghan man suspected of owning the hidden cache. Instead, they'll hand him $600 in rent for using his place as a base.

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The U.S. military assault under way in southern Afghanistan seeks to oust Taliban forces but has the secondary mission of disrupting insurgent drug trafficking in a region notorious for large-scale opium production, U.S. and Afghan officials said Sunday.

A main goal of the military operation involving about 15,000 Marines, British troops and some Afghan soldiers that began Friday in Helmand province is to try to win support of local Afghans.

The secondary mission of the operation, in what is seen as a shift in the military's strategy, is disrupting the Taliban's drug trade -- the key source of funding for weapons and explosives used in the insurgency.

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Marines Face a Huge Challenge in Training a Reliable Police Force.

It's only his second day on the job after graduating from a police academy sponsored by U.S. Marines, and Khair Muhammad is stopping cars along the main road to the Nawa market to check for explosives.

An ancient Toyota rolls up, jammed with four men, five boys, a woman fully covered in a burka and, against the back window, a small goat. In a friendly but firm voice, the 20-year-old police officer orders the men and boys out of the vehicle for a pat-down search.

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Heroin Trade; 'Narco-Cartels' Take Over From Ideologues

The lure of easy drug money is trumping political ideology as "narco-cartels" emerge in Afghanistan's heroin trade, says a UN report.

The report warns the country's lucrative opium economy, viewed mainly as the financial fuel for the ideologically driven anti-government insurgency, was giving rise to "narco-cartels" in an evolution similar to what Colombia experienced with leftist guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and cocaine.

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KABUL, Afghanistan -- Though the Afghan opium harvest has declined for the second consecutive year, a new United Nations report says, there is growing evidence that some Afghan insurgent forces are becoming "narco-cartels" -- similar to anti-government guerrilla groups in Colombia -- that view drug profits as more important than ideology.

Afghanistan's multibillion-dollar illicit narcotics industry finances much of the country's insurgency, and the influence of drug money is a major reason the Afghan government is considered among the most corrupt in the world.

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KABUL -- Farmers in Afghanistan are growing less opium than last year and prices for the illicit crop have fallen to levels not seen in a decade, according to a new report from the United Nations.

The decline in poppy growing is largely the result of years of oversupply catching up to farmers -- cultivation climbed this decade as earlier efforts to curb it failed -- and newly successful interdiction efforts that have begun to discourage production, the report said.

But obstacles remain as foreign troops and aid workers try to end opium's role as a pillar of Afghanistan's economy and a source of revenue for the Taliban, particularly because the industry is so entrenched.

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Opium's Afghan Impact

Editor's note: Afghanistan supplies 93 percent of the world's opium, and the money often goes to fund the growing Taliban movement. This is the first of two stories exploring the impact of opium in Afghanistan.

SHAHRAN, Afghanistan ---- For as long as anyone can remember, there was no need for paper money in this remote corner of the Hindu Kush. The common currency was what grew in everyone's backyard ---- opium.

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QALAI BOST VILLAGE, Afghanistan -- The Obama administration is overhauling its strategy for eliminating Afghanistan's flourishing drug trade, a key source of funds for the Taliban. Its plan hinges on persuading farmers like Mohammed Walid to grow something other than poppies.

Mr. Walid's tidy fields here in southern Afghanistan once were full of poppy bulbs, the core ingredient in opium. He replaced the poppy with wheat and corn after receiving free seed from a U.S. government program, starting about two years ago. Today, he grows enough of both crops to feed his family and sell the remainder at a nearby bazaar.

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Targets to Be 'Captured or Killed' In Attempt to Disrupt Taliban Finances

Fifty Afghans who are suspected of drug trafficking and have ties with the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, according to a congressional study to be released this week, the New York Times reported yesterday .

The move, reflecting a shift in US counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan, is certain to provoke controversy.

US commanders, who described it an essential part of a plan to disrupt the flow of drug money helping to finance the Taliban insurgency, are reported to have told Congress they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military's rules of engagement and international law.

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WASHINGTON -- Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.

United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military's rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.

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Farmers Would Be Paid Not to Grow Crop

The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plant opium poppy, by far the country's most profitable cash crop and a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early October. Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan's harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest.

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WASHINGTON - The American-led mission in Afghanistan is all but abandoning efforts to destroy the poppy crops that provide the largest source of income to the insurgency, and instead will take significant steps to wean local farmers off the drug trade - including one proposal to pay them to grow nothing.

The strategy will shift from wiping out opium poppy crops, which senior officials acknowledged had served only to turn poor farmers into enemies of the central government in Kabul. New operations are already being mounted to attack not the crops, but the drug runners and the drug lords aligned with the insurgency.

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U.S. Shifts Its Drug Focus From Eradicating Poppy to Targeting Trafficking, Seen As Aiding the Taliban.

The U.S. government is deploying dozens of Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Afghanistan in a new kind of "surge," targeting trafficking networks that officials say are increasingly fueling the Taliban insurgency and corrupting the Afghan government.

The move to dramatically expand a second front is seen as the latest acknowledgment in Washington that security in Afghanistan cannot be won with military force alone.

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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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