SUCCESS OF AFGHAN DRUG WAR IS WANING

KABUL - After several years of steady progress in curbing opium poppy
cultivation and cracking down on drug smugglers, Afghan officials say
the anti-drug campaign is flagging as opium prices soar, farmers are
lured back to the lucrative crop and Afghanistan's Western allies
focus more narrowly on defeating the Taliban.

That combination adds a potentially destabilizing factor to
Afghanistan at a time when the United States is desperate to show
progress in a war now into its 10th year. The country's Taliban
insurgency and the drug trade flourish in the same lawless terrain,
and are often mutually reinforcing. But Afghan officials say the opium
problem is not receiving the focus it deserves from Western powers.

"The price of opium is now seven times higher than wheat, and there is
a $58 billion demand for narcotics, so our farmers have no
disincentive to cultivate poppy," said Mohammed Azhar, deputy minister
for counternarcotics. "We have gotten a lot of help, but it is not
enough. Afghanistan is still producing 85 percent of the opium in the
world, and it is still a dark stain on our name."

International attention to Afghanistan's drug problem has waxed and
waned over the course of the war, often as a result of shifts in
Western priorities as elected governments have changed and conflict
with Islamist insurgents has intensified.

In the first several years after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001,
U.S.-led policy was military-driven and drugs were not seen as a
critical issue. Poppy cultivation, once banned by the Taliban, surged.
By 2004, the U.S. and British governments stepped in with programs to
eradicate poppy, encourage farmers to grow other crops and train
Afghan police and prosecutors in how to combat drug
trafficking.

Those efforts met with mixed success. Afghanistan eliminated poppy
cultivation in 20 of 34 provinces, but it continued to flourish in the
south and west, where the insurgency was strongest. Anti-drug police
arrested hundreds of smugglers, but few major traffickers were caught
and some were released under high-level political pressure. Insecurity
and Taliban threats made some alternative crop programs hard to carry
out.

Now, Afghan officials say, the latest NATO push to wipe out the
Taliban leadership and focus on military goals has once again led to a
reduced international interest in the drug war.

According to a U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime report released in
September, the value of Afghan opium skyrocketed from $29 per pound in
2009 to $77 per pound in 2010, fueling fears that production levels
will soon follow upward. Although the amount of land devoted to
growing poppies has remained the same over the past year - about
304,000 acres - the number of families producing the crop has grown.
In all, more than 1.5 million Afghans depend on the sale of drugs for
their livelihoods.

"I was excited when I took this job, but it seems narcotics is no
longer a priority," said Lt. Gen. Bazz Mohammed Ahmadi, who was named
to head the anti-narcotics police in September. "All the attention now
is on security, but people don't realize that drugs and insecurity go
together." Chipping away at success

Ahmadi's troops, trained by the British and now working closely with
American anti-drug agents, have achieved considerable success in
detecting and confiscating drugs. One recent week, for example, they
carried out five raids across the country and seized 4,782 pounds of
opium, 1,246 pounds of heroin - some of it hidden in a shipment of
blenders at Kabul airport - and a whopping 41 tons of hashish, which
they captured in a helicopter raid on a rural nomad camp. Their
efforts have been aided by a fungus that blighted hundreds of
thousands of poppy plants last year.

But Afghan officials said they face a double challenge from the
Taliban, whose fighters protect and profit from poppy cultivation in
areas they control, and from the country's powerful drug mafia, which
is often able to circumvent law enforcement efforts and intimidate or
compromise even well-trained anti-drug forces.

The successful effort to wipe out poppy farming in secure northern and
eastern provinces, they said, has had the unintended effect of
concentrating production in a handful of southern provinces such as
Helmand and Kandahar, where both insurgents and traffickers are most
active. They said NATO forces, eager to win cooperation from local
farmers, sometimes turn a blind eye to the crops they grow, and
fighting provides convenient cover for smuggling.

"Most of the trafficking we see is in Kandahar, and we have no control
there," Ahmadi said. "We have a lot of security checks at the
airports, with special scanners and equipment, but the VIPs and the
organized crime people know how to avoid them."

American military field commanders tell a somewhat different story,
however. In Marja, a district in Helmand where U.S. forces have been
operating for months, Marine officers said they expect poppy
cultivation to fall because they have pushed the insurgents to the
periphery of prime farmland.

Marine Col. David Furness, the regimental commander in the area, said
he expected that 85 percent of Marja, once a thriving opium region,
would soon be poppy-free. However, he noted that in the long term,
keeping farmers away from growing poppies would require finding
cheaper and safer ways for them to grow legal crops such as wheat.
Victims of drug culture

In Kabul, the most visible sign of the flagging war on drugs is the
burgeoning population of addicts living under bridges and overpasses.
While the use of hashish and opium is a traditional part of Afghan
society, experts say the introduction of heroin - especially by exiles
returning from Iran - has brought crime, homelessness, disease and
mental illness to the drug culture.

"When we started here in 2002, it was hard to find a single drug user
on the streets of Kabul. Now there are close to 1 million all over the
country," said Tariq Suliman, a doctor and the director of the Nejat
Center, a program for addicts in Kabul. "This is a population that is
using dangerous drugs, getting thrown out of their jobs and families,
and suffering from social stigma."

Inside the center, half a dozen gaunt men with newly shaved heads
sipped tea and spoke about their drug habits, most of which were
directly related to wars past and present. Two men in their 20s said
they had become addicted while serving in the Afghan army or police -
one after he was wounded in battle and needed to kill the pain, the
other to keep awake on night watches.

A longtime addict who said his name was Ghaffour, 45, said he had fled
to Iran during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and spent years as a
refugee. He became a courier and smuggled drugs into Afghanistan
hundreds of times, while gradually becoming addicted to heroin.

"I had a luxurious life, with bags of money and cars. I miss those old
days, but not the nights I had to spend sleeping under bridges," he
said, laughing uproariously. "Now I am very different. I tell the boys
not to forget God and to earn a living the honorable way."