US DEFENDS OPIUM POLICY DESPITE AFGHANISTAN VIOLENCE

America's drug tsar, John Walters, today acknowledged that US allies
have voiced doubts about the wisdom of opium eradication in parts of
southern Afghanistan where insurgents have killed 10 British troops
over the past two months.

Speaking during a visit to London for talks with British officials,
Mr Walters recognised that the situation in Helmand province had been
"difficult".

In recent months, officials within the British government and
military have privately expressed growing disquiet about the role of
opium eradication in fuelling the Afghan insurgency.

Unrest in Helmand, where 4,800 British troops are stationed under the
command of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), has
claimed the lives of 10 British soldiers since the start of June.
Before then, only two British soldiers had been killed in the whole
country since October 2001.

The British army chief, General Sir Mike Jackson, has said
eradication would be "counterproductive" unless done when all other
conditions were right and the Conservative whip, Tobias Ellwood, last
month called for the opium crop to be legalised.

But Mr Walters today said that eradicating the opium crop was the
only way for Afghanistan to achieve lasting peace.

"Sometimes we talk as if security and drugs control are at odds, but
the places where we have the best security are the places where we
have some of the best drugs control," he said. "[Afghan farmers] know
that their future and that of Afghanistan depends on rule of law, not
being ruled by drug mafias."

Local officials say that the eradication programme is corrupting
local government and driving support for the insurgency, as richer
farmers pay bribes to protect their opium crops and poor farmers who
can't afford bribes are forced into the pay of the Taliban.

Emmanuel Reinart, the director of the Senlis Council, a pro-licensing
thinktank, said that the eradication policy was destroying trust
between Afghan farmers and central government.

"Directly attacking the livelihood of farmers like this has very
counterproductive side effects. Locals see these eradication
programmes are conducted by foreigners and they often assume that
they're being organised by Nato troops, which makes it harder for
those troops to gain local trust," he said.

But Mr Walters dismissed the group's proposals to license opium
production as "a sideshow" and said there was no market for the legal
opium that licensing would produce.

"[Farmers] understand that the Taliban and the drug barons are on one
side and [the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai] and the international
community are on the other side, and we are trying to allow them to
make the choice between those sides in a way that works," he said.

The total number of hectares under opium poppy cultivation dropped
48% in Afghanistan during 2005, although a more recent study by the
UN office of drugs control found that production only sank 2.4% as
individual farms became increasingly productive.

Around 90% of the UK's illegal heroin originates in Afghanistan and,
despite around 36m being spent annually on opium eradication by the
US and Britain, officials expect the opium crop to increase this year.

Mr Walters said there was a perception that the US was pursuing crop
eradication before any attempts had been made to provide farmers with
alternative means of income. But he insisted that many areas of the
country had shown considerable progress in wiping out the trade.

"To say that we are losing ground or [eradication is] not making
progress requires you to look at this in a very, very distorted way," he said.

Afghanistan's counter-narcotics minister, Habibullah Qaderi, will
visit London tomorrow to discuss the role of US drug policy in his
country at a conference that will also be attended by Mr Walters.