SAS TROOPS GO TO WAR ON AFGHAN HEROIN

SAS troops in Afghanistan are waging a secret war against drug producers
who make the heroin that eventually arrives on the streets of Britain.

Defence sources admitted that detachments of the SAS had been ordered to
mount a series of 'search and destroy' missions against poppies in the
ground and on stockpiles of heroin waiting to be smuggled into Europe.

The top-secret missions have been running side-by-side with Britain's
continuing efforts to track down the remaining members of Osama bin-Laden's
al-Qaeda still in Afghanistan following the collapse of the Taliban.

Details of the action against the opium harvest offer the first concrete
evidence that Britain and the US are seriously pursuing a key 'war aim',
declared before the military action against Afghanistan began.

Tony Blair was among world leaders who pledged to stamp out Afghanistan's
opium trade, which accounted for 90% of the heroin traded on the streets of
Europe.

But complaints that he had not met his promise escalated this year when UN
experts warned that farmers were threatening to reclaim their position as
the world's biggest producers of illicit heroin. The bumper crop waiting to
be harvested was 14 times bigger than that grown in the country last year,
when production was outlawed as 'un-Islamic' by the fundamentalist Taliban
regime

Now it has emerged that Blair has ordered special forces to attack the
opium network, which could produce up to 250 tonnes of pure heroin this
year if left untouched.

It is believed that the incursions began early on in the war against the
Taliban, before the government agreed the huge deployment of British troops
to the region.

Britain is also bankrolling a scheme compensating Afghan farmers for
destroying their opium crops - with payments of UKP 870 for each hectare
they put beyond use.

Hamid Karzai, chairman of the country's interim government, warned that
forces from the interior ministry and provincial and local authorities
would "carry out enforcement" against those who refused to participate.

His officials have since mounted a concerted operation to eradicate poppy
cultivation and opium trading, in a bid to speed up the arrival of almost
UKP 500m in international aid promised to the war-torn country earlier this
year.