OPIUM WAR REVEALED: MAJOR NEW OFFENSIVE IN AFGHANISTAN

The Kabul government is planning to take the war to its illegal drugs
trade. And once again, it will put Britain's exhausted troops back
into the firing line.

British troops in southern Afghanistan, already engaged in stiff
fighting with the Taliban, face a new threat as the Kabul government
prepares to crack down on the country's rampant drugs trade.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that in the next week to 10
days, 300 members of the Afghan Eradication Force (AEF), protected by
an equal number of police, will begin destroying fields of ripening
opium poppies in the centre of lawless Helmand province, where Britain
has some 4,000 troops. While British forces will not be directly
involved in the operation, commanders concede that they will have to
go to the aid of the eradication teams if they encounter armed
resistance. "A backlash is definitely possible," said one senior officer.

The poppy fields to be targeted are on the Helmand river near Lashkar
Gah, the provincial capital and headquarters of the British task
force. The area has deliberately been selected because it is in the
relatively peaceful "development zone", well away from the fighting
which claimed the lives of two Royal Marines in the past week. "These
people are growing poppy out of greed rather than need," a British
counter-narcotics official in Lashkar Gah told the IoS. "They could
earn a living by other means."

The Afghan government has rejected calls for defoliants to be sprayed
on the crop, and the plants will be cut down by hand, or crushed by
tractors dragging heavy metal bars behind them. The British official
said there were some 22,000 hectares of opium poppies in the target
area. The Afghan operation might destroy up to a third, if it didn't
encounter trouble, "but it depends on the security situation as much
as anything".

The attempted crackdown will be a crucial test of the Afghan
government's willingness and ability to gain control over an illegal
drugs trade which not only helps to finance the Taliban insurgency,
but contributes to endemic violence and corruption, reaching to the
highest levels of President Hamid Karzai's administration. Afghanistan
produces over nine-10ths of the world's illicit opium, according to
the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and more comes from Helmand
than any of the country's other 28 provinces. Half of the heroin on
British streets originates there.

Despite the deployment of British forces in Helmand last year, opium
production in the province soared by 160 per cent, faster than
anywhere else in Afghanistan. A record crop was harvested in May under
the noses of arriving British troops, and the area under cultivation
increased further during the autumn planting season.

"It is is wall-to-wall poppies everywhere you look, just a mile or two
from Lashkar Gah," said a source who travelled out of the provincial
capital last week. "There was some early planting by people hoping to
beat any crackdown, but the weather has also favoured growers, with
rain at just the right time. The crop will be earlier this year than
in 2006."

As soon as they moved to southern Afghanistan, senior British officers
dissociated themselves from suggestions in Whitehall that they would
seek to stamp out the drugs trade. They were aware that a badly
handled eradication operation in 2002 had sown deep bitterness: big
growers paid bribes to save their crops, and it was small farmers with
no other livelihood who suffered. Funds to compensate them were
misspent or stolen.

Poppy cultivation has since been declared illegal, and no compensation
will be paid this time. "The aim is to go after the big operators, who
grow opium with impunity on government-owned land they have seized,"
said the official. "It will be a powerful disincentive if they are
seen to have lost their crops, although some smaller farmers will
inevitably suffer. But they are in an area where funds are available,
mainly from USAid, for 'cash for work' projects, such as road building
and canal clearing."

International pressure has been applied to the Kabul government to
remove officials implicated in the drugs trade, such as Abdul Rahman
Jan, the former police chief of Helmand. Last February the provincial
governor was sacked and replaced by Mohammed Daud, an English-speaking
engineer and ex-UN worker.

When he fell victim in December to internal political wrangling, it
was feared that his deputy, Amir Muhammad Akhundzada, a member of a
clan with close links to the drugs trade in northern Helmand, would
take over, but he too was ousted.

This month's eradication move is being carried out by the Kabul
government, with the provincial administration having no say. The
local authorities are supposed to make their own efforts to stamp out
narcotics, but Governor Daud, fearing the backlash from destruction of
crops, concentrated instead on seeking to persuade farmers not to
plant poppies. It is understood that his successor, Asadullah Wafa,
will meet President Karzai in Kabul tomorrow to discuss further
measures to deal with the trade.

Even if the AEF succeeds in destroying a third of the poppies in their
target area, or about 7,000 hectares, that would be barely one-10th of
the total under cultivation in Helmand, which could still produce more
opium this year than last. But the British official said eradication
was only one strand of an anti-drugs strategy in which the main
priority was to target the big traffickers.

An international think tank, the Senlis Council, is backing a
radically different approach to the Afghan drugs problem. It says the
world is suffering a shortage of legal opiates for medical use, and
argues that buying up the entire Afghan poppy crop for legitimate
purposes would not only be more cost-effective, but would cut out the
traffickers and lead to a sharp reduction in violence. The group says
this strategy worked in Turkey, which was one of the main sources of
illicit opium and heroin in the 1960s before switching to legal production.

But the British official dismissed the plan, saying it would founder
on Helmand's "utter lawlessness". He added: "In Turkey they were able
to force farmers to sell their crop to legal buyers. Here they will
sell to the highest bidder, and the traffickers will always go higher,
because they can still make a profit. The economics don't hold up."

[sidebar]

OPIUM: FACTS AND FIGURES

Opium dominates Afghanistan's economy: the illegal trade is worth
$2.6bn (UKP1.3bn) a year, more than a third of the country's gross
domestic product.

ORIGINS: A traditional crop for centuries in the mountainous border
area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the opium trade exploded during
the 1980s, when it helped to finance the mujahedin war against the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

BLOWBACK: With heroin laboratories springing up on both sides of the
border, gun violence, corruption and drug use has spread in Pakistan,
which has some three million heroin addicts.

THE TALIBAN: After the Pakistan-sponsored Taliban swept to power in
Afghanistan in 1996, it initially raised money by taxing opium
production. But under UN pressure it finally cracked down, reducing
the area under cultivation from 91,000 hectares in 1999 to only 8,000
in 2001, when it was ousted in the wake of 9/11 for hosting Osama bin
Laden and al-Qa'ida.

EXPLOSION: Opium growing soared as soon as the Taliban fell, rising to
74,000 hectares in 2002. The head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime
says it reached over 400,000 hectares last year, producing a record
6,100 tonnes of opium - 92 per cent of the world supply.

HELMAND: Afghanistan's largest province produces 40 per cent of its
opium and half the heroin in Britain. The poppy-growing area grew 160
per cent in 2006.