Insurgency's Foot Soldiers Are Motivated by Loved Ones Lost to NATO Planes and Money Lost to Poppy-Eradication Programs

Air strikes and drug eradication are feeding the insurgency in southern Afghanistan, as those actions convince some villagers that their lives and livelihoods are under attack.

In a unique survey, The Globe and Mail interviewed 42 ordinary Taliban foot soldiers in Kandahar and discovered 12 fighters who said their family members had died in air strikes, and 21 who said their poppy fields had been targeted for destruction by anti-drug teams.

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British Forces Take Exception To NATO Reluctance For Action

Helmand Province

British special forces are conducting covert operations against drug smugglers in southern Afghanistan for the first time.

The operations represent a shift from the British military's long-held opposition to direct involvement in Afghanistan's drugs war. British special forces in Helmand province had previously been limited to targeting members of the Taliban leadership.

The operations are being conducted at night with members of Battalion 333, a secretive unit from the elite Afghan counter-narcotics police.

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TARIN KOT, Afghanistan -- On a recent cold spring day, just as the first small sprouts of poppies began pushing out of the southern Afghanistan earth, the members of Uruzgan province's poppy eradication council gathered around a wood stove in the governor's compound here for their first meeting.

"We should encourage people to eliminate poppies voluntarily," offered one official. "Ministers will go to the radio stations and tell them to stop. Mullahs should go to the mosques and tell people it's forbidden by Islam."

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The Afghan ministry set up to tackle the drugs trade is facing a staffing crisis after the UK, on the instructions of the Kabul government, withdrew funding for salaries.

The best-educated workers at the fledgling ministry of counter-narcotics, which is intended to play a key role in reducing the country's poppy crop, have been looking for other jobs after pay for senior staff dropped from $1,500 (=801,011, UKP762) to $200 a month.

The ministry said 30 senior workers had left since November when pay was cut.

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Afghanistan will produce another enormous opium poppy crop this year, close to last year's record harvest, and Europe and other regions should brace themselves for the expected influx of heroin, the United Nations warned in its annual winter survey of poppy planting patterns.

Cultivation is still increasing in the insurgency-hit south and west of the country, the report said, and taxes on the crop have become a major source of revenue for the Taliban insurgency.

"This is a windfall for antigovernment forces, further evidence of the dangerous link between opium and insurgency," Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, wrote in the report's preface.

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Afghanistan, the world's biggest opium producer, is set for another bumper crop this year, providing a windfall for the Taliban who tax farmers to finance their fight against government and foreign forces.

More than six years after US-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban, the failure to bring opium production under control means Afghanistan is now locked in a vicious circle. Drug money fuels the Taliban insurgency and corruption, weakening government control over large parts of the country, which in turn allows more opium to be produced.

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Europe And Other Major Heroin Markets Should Brace Themselves For Health Consequences Of Harvest, Warns UN

Afghanistan's opium economy will take up to 20 years to eradicate and require a UKP1bn investment from world leaders, according to a government study published yesterday. The 102-page report was welcomed by the international development secretary, Douglas Alexander, even though it contains some highly critical messages about the effectiveness of some of the aid programmes.

Compiled by the Department of International Development and the World Bank, the analysis suggests at least an extra UKP1bn needs to be invested in irrigation, roads, alternative crops and rural development to attract farmers away from the lucrative and growing opium industry.

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Where opium poppies used to colour the plains of northern Afghanistan, towering cannabis plants now sway in the wind, filling the air with their pungent odour.

Farmers in Balkh province were banned from cultivating opium last year and have switched to another cash crop, a rich source of income that is still tolerated by the authorities.

Balkh's burgeoning hashish industry does not pay farmers quite as much as the heroin factories used to for good-quality opium. But the rich black cannabis resin produced around the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif still pays about four times the price of cotton or wheat. It is highly prized by Afghan users and is exported in large quantities to Pakistan and Europe.

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The US government has conceded defeat in its attempt to persuade the Afghanistan government to begin the aerial destruction of poppy fields as part of its opium eradication strategy.

"We have decided to stop pursuing the aerial spraying of poppy fields in Afghanistan," said Thomas Schweich, principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

US officials have climbed down in the face of widespread criticism from the Afghan government and other coalition partners, notably the UK.

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Disable Rebels With Opium Crackdown: Military Boss

Taliban forces are weakening, but the way to ultimately eradicate insurgents in Afghanistan is by robbing them of their chief source of income: drug money.

That's the opinion of Maj-Gen. Tim Grant, former leader of Canada's military operations in the wartorn country.

Afghanistan is the world's largest heroin producing country, growing at least 90 per cent of the world's opium poppy supply in 2006.

Permanently dismantling Afghanistan's opium industry requires more than just destroying the poppies, Grant told the Herald on Thursday.

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Other than taking pot shots at Taliban soldiers, forests of massive marijuana plants are giving Canadian soldiers few options.

Afghanistan is known for its poppy trade. But huge fields of marijuana plants, ranging from six to 12 feet high, are causing unique problems.

"When we drive through them on a light armoured vehicle, the plants are taller than a vehicle itself," explained Gen. Rick Hillier yesterday.

Taliban soldiers have been hiding in the forests, then jumping out to fire rocket-propelled grenades at vehicles. Because the plants retain energy, the insurgents can't be detected.

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The general made an elementary mistake. Told by his superiors that his new posting as chief of police in a drug-rich northern province would cost him "one hundred and fifty thousand", he assumed the bribe to be in Afghan currency.

He paid the money to a go-between at a rendezvous in Kabul's Najib Zarab carpet market. For two days he was lorded in the office of General Azzam, then Chief of Staff to the Interior Minister, helping himself to chocolate and biscuits. "I must have eaten a pound of the stuff," he recalled.

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The head of the UN's anti-narcotics unit has called on Nato forces to crack down on heroin production in Afghanistan -- a policy which contradicts proposals by the Brown government.

Gordon Brown will propose paying farmers more than they earn from their poppy harvests in return for ceasing to grow the crop when he makes a statement to the Commons in the next few weeks on his strategy for winning over Afghans and curbing the influence of the Taliban.

Thus far the British campaign to destroy poppy production has been an abject failure, according to the annual report of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The biggest growth area is in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold, where British forces are fighting daily battles.

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OTTAWA - Canadian military police have started using drug dogs to search troops' bags at Kandahar Air Field after being tipped about soldiers suspected of using heroin, hash and pot, say newly released documents.

Although there were no drug seizures reported, a briefing note says illegal drugs are readily available in Afghanistan and present a "temptation for Canadian troops in the form of personal use and in the form of importation for the purpose of trafficking."

The documents, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, indicate there were at least five targeted and random searches of soldiers' belongings in June and July at Kandahar Air Field.

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Opium

With its economy in shambles, Afghanistan ranks near the bottom on almost every international indicator of human and economic development. In one sector, though, it leads the world, setting records year after year. Unfortunately, that sector is the heroin trade. Afghanistan produces more than 90% of the world's opium.

As well as supplying addicts around the globe--causing an estimated 100,000 deaths a year -- the industry has fuelled corruption and instability at home, and bankrolled the Taliban insurgency.

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KHWAJA GHOLAK, Afghanistan - Amid the multiplying frustrations of the fight against narcotics in Afghanistan, the northern province of Balkh has been hailed as a rare and glowing success.

Two years ago the province, which abuts Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, was covered with opium poppies - about 27,000 acres of them, nearly enough to blanket Manhattan twice. This year, after an intense anti-poppy campaign led by the governor, Balkh's farmers abandoned the crop. The province was declared poppy free, with 12 others, and the provincial government was promised a reward of millions of dollars in development aid.

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American military officials are carrying out a sweeping $2.5 billion overhaul of Afghanistan's police force that will include retraining the country's entire 72,000-member force and embedding 2,350 American and European advisers in police stations across the country.

The new effort is a vast expansion of the current American program and is the third significant attempt to bolster the country's feeble police force since the American-led invasion in 2001.

Improving the police force is a key to defeating the Taliban and salvaging the credibility of the central government, which is widely viewed as corrupt, according to Western officials.

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The Country Produces 93 Per Cent Of The World's Supply Of Opium

KABUL -- Afghanistan, the world's biggest heroin producer, is struggling to cope with a drug problem as thousands of Afghans -- trying to cope with the traumas of war, displacement and poverty -- are becoming addicted to narcotics.

On the outskirts of Kabul, a sprawling bombed-out building that was once a centre for culture and science is home to more than 100 squatters whose main concern is feeding their heroin habit.

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British troops fighting a bitter insurgent war in Helmand province could be placed in even more danger if the Afghan government approves a new US-backed programme to eliminate the country's poppy-crop by spraying it with herbicide.

UK officials leading the battle against the burgeoning opium output from the poppies say the policy would backfire by wiping out the livelihoods of tens of thousands of local farmers and could drive them into the arms of the Taliban.

It might also wipe out food crops grown alongside the poppies and hand the insurgents a major propaganda victory by allowing them to claim that the West was waging chemical warfare on civilians.

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KABUL, Afghanistan - After the biggest opium harvest in Afghanistan's history, U.S. officials have renewed efforts to persuade the Afghan government to begin spraying herbicide on opium poppies, and they have found some supporters within President Hamid Karzai's administration, officials of both countries said.

Since early this year, Karzai has repeatedly declared his opposition to spraying the poppy fields, whether by crop-dusting airplanes or by eradication teams on the ground.

But Afghan officials said that the Karzai administration was now re-evaluating that stance. Some proponents within the government are pushing a trial program of ground spraying that could begin before the harvest next spring.

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