TWO BRITISH SOLDIERS KILLED AS AFGHAN POPPY CROP BOOMS

Two more British soldiers have died in Afghanistan, as Western
officials in the country have admitted that the country is to produce
its largest ever poppy harvest.

The deaths, the fourth and fifth in three weeks, come as Western
military commanders and counter-narcotics officials appear
increasingly at odds over how to approach the drugs problem in the
south of the country. 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, about 130,000 hectares of opium poppy was cultivated, which
has been the largest so far, despite poor growing conditions that
year. Better conditions across the country this year will help
produce the largest tonnage of opium ever. But Afghanistan is already
responsible for about 87 per cent of the world's opium and more than
90 per cent of the heroin consumed in Britain.

Hamid Karzai, the President, and his government announced last year a

jihad on 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 now been wiped out.

One Western official, who declined to be named, predicted a
considerable rise, but not as extreme as that predicted by the UNODC.
"The evidence collected so far indicates that the harvest will be
significantly up on 2005 and perhaps around the 130,000hectare mark."

About one-third of this year's harvest has come from Helmand, where
3,300 British troops are heavily engaged against Taliban guerrillas.
British troops have fought firefights with them almost every day for
the past week in the north of the province.

Some military commanders argue that eradication operations in the
south should be suspended for a year or more. "We may have to say to
the farmer we are not yet ready to provide an alternative
livelihood," a Nato officer told The Independent. "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
your poppy."

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, a campaign which has had
considerable effect in Helmand this year.

Another Western official said that "full and frank" exchanges were
ongoing between military commanders and counter-narcotics officials
over the issue of eradication. Counter-narcotics officials contend
that a suspension of eradication, and removal of any punitive
measures would only produce a further surge in poppy production. They
argue this would help to fund elements with a vested interest in
maintaining the current instability; instability that has killed more
than 1,600 people in the first six months of this year.

The drugs economy is valued at $2.7bn, equivalent to more than 50 per
cent of Afghanistan's legal economy. By contrast the government
managed to generate legal revenues, outside of foreign aid, of only
$330m last year. With most government officials on salaries of about
$50 a month and a cost of living that is artificially inflated
largely by the drugs economy, 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 young men. Poppy cultivation, they say, is the only means
of wealth creation without capital.

"If you cultivate poppy the smugglers pay you in advance, so you
don't need any money to buy the seed or fertiliser," Haji Mohammad
Sarwar, 45, an elder in the Punjwai district of Kandhar province,
told The Independent. "You can make enough to buy some land. Five
jiribs [1 hectare] of poppy is $5,000 profit even after the costs of
labour and fertilizer."

Shamsuddin Tanwir, of Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights
Commission in Kandahar, said: "In Taliban-held areas everyone
cultivates poppy. They do not get any problems so they prefer Taliban."

Amid the general gloom, Western officials stress the long-term nature
of the war on drugs and the several positive signs amongst this
year's early findings. In the east of the country, where a 96 per
cent drop in poppy cultivation was recorded last year, officials
feared a large resurgence after unrealistic expectations of Western
aid on the part of poppy farmers were not met. That resurgence was
much smaller than feared and Nangahar province remains largely drug free.

Western officials also point to improvements in governance. Reforms
of the police force have seen police chiefs, known to be capable and
not corrupt, installed in a number of provinces in the south,
including Helmand.

The new police chief in Helmand replaces a man who was named in
leaked US intelligence documents as running heroin shipments in
police vehicles. But there are still widespread claims that figures
high in the government control the drugs trade, including allegations
against President Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is head of
the provincial council for Kandahar province.

"There is no evidence for this claim," he told The Independent. "When
people want to attack the President they say these things about me.
It is like the spice on a dish." In Washington there is increasing
pressure for a more radical approach to the drugs problem with the
threat of aerial eradication being held up as the ultimate sanction
if the softer methods favoured by the British and Afghan governments
don't work.

Western sources have said that US counter-narcotics teams are
exploring the possibility of using a form of Agent Orange, a
defoliant that become notorious for turning large parts of south
Vietnam into a lunar landscape during the Vietnam War. One Western
official said: "Aerial spraying will definitely not be used as part
of the poppyeradication for 2007, period. But if a decrease in poppy
cultivation is not achieved soon it is something that will
increasingly be brought to the front for consideration."

The official stressed that any aerial spraying would only be
undertaken with Afghan consent.

The United Nations remains completely opposed to such a move. "We
really hope that all relevant parties and stakeholders will see that
aerial spraying will contribute to the conflict and will play into
the hands of the insurgents, and based on this insight will not start
this measure at all," said a representative of UNODC.

Farmers from Kakhrez, near the town of Musa Qala in north Helmand,
told The Independent this month that helicopters dropped an unknown
substance during April on to their fields:

"It was in Boom village," said Lal Mohammed. "The helicopters were
heard overhead in the night. A white powder was on the plants in the
morning. There were red and yellow spots on the trees. Eight jiribs
of poppy (1.6 hectares) were affected. I saw the plants, they grew
very small, they didn't bloom and they dried out." Western
Counter-Narcotics officials denied the claim. Similar claims were
made in Jalalabad in December 2004. They were never substantiated.