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AFGHANISTAN ADVISED ON FIGHTING DRUG TRADE

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Anti-drug police from Colombia have been
touring Afghanistan to advise it on how to combat its booming illegal
drug trade, officials said Tuesday.

A five-member team from Colombia, the world's leading producer of
cocaine, has spent 10 days meeting counternarcotics police and
officials around Afghanistan, the top heroin-producing nation.
Colombian Interdiction chief Lt. Col. Oscar Atehortua, listens for a
question during a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan on Tuesday,
Aug. 1, 2006. Anti-drugs police from top world cocaine producer
Colombia have been touring top heroin producing nation Afghanistan,
to advise on how the lawless country can combat its booming drugs
trade, officials said Tuesday. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq) (Musadeq
Sadeq - AP) PHOTOS

Lt. Col. Oscar Atehortua, the chief of the Colombian team's drug
interdiction unit, said they had been sharing their "expertise and
experience" from 30 years of battling drugs and terrorist groups
involved in the illicit trade, and may help train Afghans in the future.

"The problem you have here is very similar to what we have in
Colombia," Atehortua said. "After a lot of mistakes in the war
against drugs in our country, now we have a very good
counternarcotics unit .. that is seizing a lot of drugs that are
coming out of our country."

Last year, Colombian security forces confiscated a record 245 tons of
cocaine, but U.S. drug officials believe that's no more than 20
percent of the total successfully smuggled out of the country.
Cultivation in Colombia of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, has
dropped sharply since its peak in 2000, but has recently started
increasing again.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in Western counternarcotics aid has
yet to make a major impact in Afghanistan, which last year produced
nearly 90 percent of the world's opium - enough to make about 450
tons of heroin.

Officials say the trade is fueling the Taliban-led insurgency
wracking the south of the country.

Colombia has used aerial spraying of herbicides in its U.S.-backed
war to destroy coca crops, an approach rejected so far in Afghanistan
because of strong domestic opposition due to the impact it could have
on the struggling rural economy.