AFGHANS TURN TO COLOMBIA IN BATTLE AGAINST OPIUM

U.S. Likely Will Back Effort, Officials Say

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - Colombia to the rescue?

Overwhelmed by a flourishing opium trade, Afghanistan's government is
getting help from a country that knows about narcotics operations.

A team of Colombian narcotics police, which spent two weeks in
Afghanistan, has come up with a series of recommendations, including
better evidence-gathering, airport surveillance, training and
organization.

U.S. State Department and congressional sources said this week they
support Colombia's suggestions and would push for implementation.

Their reaction comes after the United Nations reported this weekend
that opium poppy cultivation has risen 60 percent over last year, to
400,000 acres. Production of heroin this year could total 610 tons, or
one-third more than current global demand, according to the report.

"We have known it was going to be a huge crop," said Thomas Schweich,
principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department's Bureau
for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. "When you see
the stark numbers, it's problematic."

The report stunned some members of Congress. House International
Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., is likely to put the
issue at the top of a Sept. 20 hearing agenda that will review
Afghanistan's status five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
said a senior staffer who asked not to be identified because he was
not authorized to speak .

"There's a feeling we're losing it," said the staffer, referring to
Afghanistan's war on drugs and the effort to improve security there.
"There has been a sea of bad news out of Afghanistan," he said.

Two members of the Colombian narcotics police team that visited
Afghanistan last month described the training, resources and
intelligence capabilities of their Afghan counterparts in the drug war
as "deficient" and "impotent."

"It can't be surprising to anyone that they are losing," said national
police Lt. Col. Oscar Atehortua, one of four Colombians who made the
trip. He said the struggling nation was only beginning to mount a
domestic drug force and strategy.

Atehortua and Maj. Raul Fernando Lopez said Kabul's international
airport was a sieve through which heroin was smuggled with impunity,
because the Afghans lacked the resources to stop it.

The Colombians have offered to train Afghan agents in methods of
detecting "mules," or people carrying drugs surreptitiously. It's an
offer the U.S. government is likely to underwrite.

The Colombians also suggested that the Afghans could do a better job
of catching "high-value targets" by taking evidence at a bust scene
rather than just destroying opium labs. They offered to train the
Afghans in evidence-gathering methods.

They recommended against aerial spraying of opium crops, the main
eradication method in Colombia. With up to 50 percent of Afghanistan's
economy dependent on opium, spraying would be too much of a financial
shock, they said.

Schweich said the Colombian advice was being taken seriously and was
likely to be implemented with financing from the United States and
Britain.

"Colombia has been a narco economy for decades, and they have learned
a lot of lessons on how to target drug kingpins, interdict drugs going
across borders and to deal with insurgencies being financed by drugs,"
Schweich said Tuesday.

"All that is going on in Afghanistan as well," he said.