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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