AFGHAN GOVERNMENT CONSIDERS SPRAYING OPIUM CROPS WITH HERBICIDE

JALALABAD, Afghanistan - With profits from this spring's record opium
crop fuelling a broad Taliban offensive, Afghan authorities say they
are considering a once-unthinkable way to deal with the scourge:
spraying poppy fields with herbicide.

Afghans including President Hamid Karzai are deeply opposed to
spraying the crop.

After nearly three decades of war, western science and assurances can
do little to assuage their fears of chemicals being dropped from airplanes.

But U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington are pushing for it. And on
Thursday the country's top drug enforcement official said he would
contemplate spraying opium crops -- even with airborne crop-dusters --
if other efforts fail to cut the size of the coming year's crop.

"This year, we'll wait and see how it goes. Next year, the 2008
season, we will consider it," said Lt.-Gen. Mohammed Daoud Daoud on
the sidelines of an anti-poppy gathering in Jalalabad, the ancient and
verdant capital of Nangahar province, once the heart of Afghanistan's
poppy belt. This year Nangahar was a success. Poppy cultivation stayed
low amid a boom that saw Afghanistan produce 82 per cent of the
world's opium, providing for 90 per cent of its heroin, according to
U.S. and United Nations figures.

Opium eradication is one of the great failures of the five-year period
since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. In 2000, under the Islamist
Taliban government, Afghanistan produced virtually no opium.

Planting has soared since then, jumping 59 per cent this year, enough
to produce 6,700 tonnes of opium that fetched around US$750 million
for Afghan farmers and eventually sold for $50 billion on the street,
mainly in Europe, according to a UN report.

Opium poppies have become Afghanistan's chief crop and economic
mainstay even as Washington and Britain have pumped hundreds of
millions of dollars into eradication schemes and complex efforts to
create markets for legal crops.

In the meantime, drug money nourishes the insurgency. In the
opium-rich southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, Taliban
commanders protect growers in return for a 30 to 40 per cent tax,
which is spent to recruit fighters, experts in the region say.

Retired U.S. general Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton administration drug
czar, said crop dusters may be the only way to preserve Washington's
project in Afghanistan, before drug profits undermine the country's
elected government.

"We know exactly where these fields are. They're absolutely vulnerable
to eradication. And it is immeasurably more effective to do it with an
airplane," McCaffrey said by telephone from Virginia.