US SEEKS COLOMBIAN HELP ON DRUGS

US counter-narcotics authorities are examining controversial policies used
in Colombia, the world's top cocaine producer, to formulate efforts to
combat the flow of drugs from Afghanistan, the world's leading supplier of
heroin.

John Walters, director of the US National Drug Control Policy, said on
Wednesday in Miami that methods used to combat drugs in Colombia
principally aerial fumigation were being studied to see how they can be
replicated in Afghanistan.

Under President Alvaro Uribe, who is strongly supported by Washington, the
area of land cultivated with coca, the plant from which cocaine is made,
has halved to about 212,000 acres, according to official figures.

Colombia's example shows that you can build institutional capacity and
change the face of the threat of illegal narcotics, Mr Walters said. The
Colombians have been very co-operative in helping to supply additional
information on what they have done and how it works.

Experts from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are this week being
briefed by anti-narcotics police in Bogot, Colombia's capital.

DEA agents are also evaluating the methods used by the Colombian police to
destroy cocaine laboratories. The capacity of Colombian cocaine labs is
similar to those used to process opium in Afghanistan, experts say.

But analysts say the policy experiment is controversial because the nature
of the two countries' drugs industries have key differences. Aerial
fumigation of herbicide in Colombia has forced coca growers to move crops
into national parks. The spraying of Afghan poppy fields is more complicated.

The government of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has opposed the use
of aerial fumigation, and this month asked for assistance in developing
alternative economic options for poppy farmers.

Additionally, Afghanistan's rampant opium trade employs far more people
than the cocaine business in Colombia. But drugs workers in both countries
see their work as more lucrative than cultivating other crops.

If the Karzai government leads with a punitive approach like eradication
before there are alternative livelihoods in place, that is a political
disaster, said John Walsh, of the Washington Office on Latin America, a
think-tank.

US drugs policy in Latin America has been criticised for being too focused
on tackling supplies via eradication and interdiction a policy, some argue,
that results in drugs crops being pushed from one place to another.

Under President George W. Bush's budget proposals, counter-narcotics aid
for Colombia is to be increased, while it is to be decreased in Peru and
Bolivia, where some reports suggest the size of drugs crops have actually
been increasing.

But Mr Walters said there appears to be no evidence of such a phenomenon,
which experts call the balloon effect.

The [critic's] view has been that whenever you see progress it's illusory,
because the problem goes into surrounding countries, he said. That
apparently is not happening. Basically because the cultivation levels in
Bolivia and Peru have remained roughly the same.