REPORT SHOWS SOME GAINS IN DRUG WAR

WASHINGTON Production and trafficking of opium accounts for fully one
third of Afghanistan's economy but a 10 percent decline in output last year
signaled a positive trend, a State Department report said Wednesday.

The area under opium cultivation dropped 48 percent, the report said.
Growers avoided a comparable decline in production because of good weather,
it added. Opium is the main ingredient of heroin.

The report, mandated annually by the Congress, was released not long after
President Bush made an unannounced four-hour visit to Afghanistan while en
route to India.

The two-part study, titled "International Narcotics control Strategy
report" and covering more than 900 pages, examines production, trafficking,
money laundering and financial crimes in all countries.

"Afghanistan's huge drug trade severely impacts efforts to rebuild the
economy, develop a strong democratic government based on rule of law, and
threatens regional stability," the report said.

It said dangerous security conditions and corruption constrain government
and international efforts to combat the drug trade and provide alternative
incomes.

The reduction in planting, the report said, may be credited to a number of
factors, including a surplus crop from 2004 and public information efforts
against poppy cultivation.

The report offered a generally upbeat assessment of the situation in
Colombia, which is the source of 90 percent of the cocaine entering the
United States.

Colombia had a record year in 2005 for eradication, interdiction, and
extradition of suspected traffickers to the United States.

Cocaine is derived from coca, which is cultivated largely in areas under
the control of illegal armed groups that earn substantial sums from
trafficking not only in cocaine but also in heroin.

The report said that notwithstanding record levels of coca eradication in a
U.S.-backed program, the Colombian government detected "massive replanting
and reconstitution efforts" by traffickers in some areas.

The situation in other key countries covered in the report:

Myanmar Annual production of opium has declined over the past 10 years and
is now at less than 20 percent of peak levels in the mid-1990s.