AFGHANISTAN SET FOR RECORD YEAR OF OPIUM CULTIVATION

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels
- - up more than 40 percent from 2005 - despite hundreds of millions in
counternarcotics money, Western officials told The Associated Press.

The increase could have serious repercussions for an already grave security
situation, with drug lords joining the Taliban-led fight against Afghan and
international forces.

A Western antinarcotics official in Kabul said about 370,650 acres of opium
poppy was cultivated this season - up from 257,000 acres in 2005 - - citing
their preliminary crop projections. The previous record was 323,700 acres
in 2004, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

"It is a significant increase from last year ... unfortunately, it is a
record year," said a senior U.S. government official based in Kabul, who
like the other Western officials would speak only on condition of anonymity
because of the sensitive topic.

Final figures, and an estimate of the yield of opium resin from the
poppies, will be clear only when the U.N. agency completes its assessment
of the crop, based on satellite imagery and ground surveys. Its report is
due in September.

The U. N. reported last year that Afghanistan produced an estimated 4,500
tons of opium - enough to make 450 tons of heroin - nearly 90 percent of
world supply.

This year's preliminary findings indicate a failure in attempts to
eradicate poppy cultivation and continuing corruption among provincial
officials and police - problems acknowledged by President Hamid Karzai.

Karzai told Fortune magazine in a recent interview that "lots of people" in
his administration profited from the narcotics trade and that he had
underestimated the difficulty of eradicating opium production.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimate that opium accounted for 52
percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product in 2005.

"Now what they have is a narco-economy. If they do not get corruption
sorted they can slip into being a narco-state," the U.S. official warned.

Opium cultivation has surged since the ouster of the Taliban in late
2001. The former regime enforced an effective ban on poppy growing by
threatening to jail farmers - virtually eradicating the crop in 2000.

But Afghan and Western counternarcotics officials say Taliban-led militants
are now implicated in the drug trade, encouraging poppy cultivation and
using the proceeds to help fund their insurgency.

"(That) kind of revenue from that kind of crop aids and abets the enemy,"
Chief Master Sgt. Curtis L. Brownhill, a senior adviser to the head of
U.S. Central Command, said during a recent visit to Afghanistan. "They
count on having that sort of resource and money."

Afghanistan has seen its deadliest bout of fighting this year since
U.S.-backed forces toppled the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden.