AFGHAN OPIUM CULTIVATION SURGES

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 United Nations 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."