AFGHAN FIGHTING BLAMED FOR OPIUM BONANZA

The Government was accused of self-delusion last night over the
Army's mission in Afghanistan after a Foreign Office minister
admitted that the campaign against the Taliban was responsible for a
bumper opium crop.

Kim Howells said instability in Helmand province, where 4,500 British
troops are trying to eliminate Taliban forces, had hindered efforts
to purge poppy fields.

An emboldened coalition of "drug-runners" and "gangsters" was
thriving as programmes to discourage cultivation ground to a halt. He
said: "The operation to establish stability has set us back a good
deal and it's going to be hard work to establish the stability the
Afghans need.

"That's why the reserve force that Nato has requested to provide the
flexibility to cope and stabilise the province is so important.

"I am very disappointed in the latest [opium] figures. Clearly, we
face a very difficult task to ensure this year that the crop next
year is not the same or even bigger."

Nato forces were deployed in Afghanistan's southern provinces in the
summer to back up Afghan police and army units that Kabul charged
with eradicating opium crops.

But attempts to establish an official presence in areas beyond state
control since the fall of the Taliban fell victim to counter-attacks
by re-energised Taliban units. Mr Howells has a reputation for
speaking frankly about the consequences of Government policy but his
latest remarks will cast a further cloud on an operation which has
cost the lives of 26 British troops.

Nato forces in Helmand and other southern provinces replaced American
units which had focused on hunting down Taliban and al-Qa'eda leaders.

With a mandate to bring schools, police posts and medical clinics to
the villages of southern Afghanistan, Nato quickly fell foul of local
rumours that foreign forces were out to destroy the poppy crop. To
farmers with no other means of gaining cash, such claims became a
rallying cry for the insurgency.

Liam Fox, the Conservative defence spokesman, said the Government
should abandon any pretence of prosecuting a counter-narcotics policy
in Afghanistan.

"This Government was living in cloud cuckoo land on this," he said.
"To tell Parliament and the Labour Party that this deployment was
part of the war on drugs was self-delusion.

"This is the Government belatedly catching up with reality. It was
not going to happen. The military didn't believe it.

"Stability and military victory should come first to extend the writ
of the Afghan, so that it can run its own counter-narcotics policy."

When John Reid, as Defence Secretary, announced the commitment to
Helmand, he declared a hope that they would return "without a shot
being fired."

The phrase has come to symbolise the Government's failure to
appreciate the extent of the threat.

A United Nations survey this week reported that the planted area of
the Afghan opium crop rose by 59 per cent this year.

Helmand was a particular blackspot with a tripling of planting. The
drug lords' revenue from opium sales is expected to exceed $3 billion
(UKP 1.7 billion) this year.

The record Afghan harvest means that the supply of heroin will exceed
last year's global demand for the drug by 30 per cent, which is
likely to lead to narcotics of very high purity flooding Europe.