U.S. REPORT WARNS OF AFGHAN DRUG STATE

Heroin production in Afghanistan represents "an enormous threat to world
stability," and the country is "on the verge of becoming a narcotics
state," the State Department said in a report released yesterday.

Despite steps by the Afghan government and foreign donors, the U.S.
International Narcotics Control Strategy Report said that the Afghan
"narcotics situation continues to worsen" more than three years after
U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government.

The report said Colombia has made "impressive progress" against the drug
trade but remains a major producer, and that traffickers continue to move
drugs through Peru -- the second-largest cocaine producer, after Colombia.

The most dramatic conclusions in the report, an annual survey of the world
drug trade, were about Afghanistan, where it praised President Hamid
Karzai's efforts but said Afghan poppy cultivation more than tripled last
year. "Afghanistan's illicit opium/heroin production can be viewed, for all
practical purposes, as the rough equivalent of world illicit heroin
production, and it represents an enormous threat to world stability," it said.

The area devoted to poppy cultivation in Afghanistan rose to 510,756 acres
last year from 150,731 acres in 2003. Citing International Monetary Fund
estimates that drugs account for 40 percent to 60 percent of the Afghan
economy, the report added: "Afghanistan is on the verge of becoming a
narcotics state."

The report said Afghan political conditions improved last year, but
"criminal financiers and narcotics traffickers in and outside of
Afghanistan take advantage of the ongoing instability."

The report provides the backdrop against which the U.S. government in
September will decide which countries belong on the U.S. list of "major"
drug-trafficking and drug-producing states.

The Bush administration will also then decide which nations "failed
demonstrably to make substantial efforts" during the previous year to
respect international agreements and U.S. legal requirements on
counter-narcotics, leaving them vulnerable to losing some U.S. aid.