TWO BRITISH SOLDIERS KILLED AS AFGHAN POPPY CROP BOOMS

Two more British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, as Western
officials there admit that the country is about to produce its
largest ever poppy harvest.

The two soldiers were named today as Corporal Peter Thorpe, 27, of
the Royal Signals, from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, and Lance
Corporal Jabron Hashmi, 24, of the Intelligence Corps, from Birmingham.

The deaths, on Saturday, bring the number of Britons killed in the
past three weeks to five. The members of 3rd Para Battlegroup were
killed when a rocket-propelled grenade struck a defensive post at the
regional headquarters in the town of Sangin, in Helmand province.
Other soldiers were injured but it is not yet known how many.

The incident came as Western military commanders and
counter-narcotics officials appear at odds over how to approach the
drugs situation in the south. Military officers are fearful the $1bn
(UKP540m) a year campaign to eradicate the drug is helping pull in
recruits for the Taliban. "The trends indicate that the area of
cultivation will be considerably higher than in 2004," said a
representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which
will publish its annual report of the Afghan opium harvest next month.

In 2004, 130,000 hectares of opium poppy was cultivated, which was
the largest so far. Better growing conditions across the country this
year will help produce the largest tonnage of opium ever. Afghanistan
is already responsible for 87 per cent of the world's opium and more
than 90 per cent of the heroin consumed in Britain.

Hamid Karzai, the President, announced last year a jihad on opium
poppy production, backed by a near-$1bn campaign, led by the UK. It
led to a fall by 21 per cent drop in the area under cultivation.
Those gains have been wiped out.

About one-third of this year's harvest has come from Helmand, where
3,300 British troops are engaged against Taliban guerrillas. British
troops have fought firefights with them almost every day for the past
week. Some military commanders argue that eradication operations in
the south should be suspended for a year or more. A Nato officer
said: "There may have to be a period of grace where we say that by a
certain time frame there can be no more poppy cultivation and at that
point we will eradicate."

The officer said that such an approach would give Western forces the
"moral high ground" against the Taliban's ongoing campaign to present
itself as the defender of poppy farmers.

Counter-narcotics officials contend that a suspension of eradication
would only produce a surge in production. They argue this would help
to fund elements with a vested interest in maintaining the current
instability, which has resulted in more than 1,600 people being
killed this year. The drugs economy is valued at $2.7bn, more than 50
per cent of the legal economy. The government's legal revenues,
outside of foreign aid, were $330m last year. Corruption is endemic.

Farmers in the south claim that in the absence of any other economic
activity, poppy cultivation and high wages paid by the Taliban to
fight for them offer the only sources of income to huge numbers of
unemployed men. "If you cultivate poppy the smugglers pay you in
advance," said Haji Mohammad Sarwar, 45, an elder in Kandahar
province. Amid the general gloom, there are positive signs. In the
east, where a 96 per cent drop in opium poppy cultivation was
recorded last year, much of that area remains free of poppies.

Police reforms have seen police chiefs known to be capable, and not
corrupt, installed. The new police chief in Helmand replaces a man
who was named in US intelligence documents as running heroin
shipments in police vehicles.

In Washington, there is pressure for a more radical approach, such as
aerial eradication. Western sources say that the US may use a form of
Agent Orange, a defoliant which was once used to notorious effect in
South Vietnam.