AFGHANISTAN: The US is scrambling for allies in a major international campaign to destroy Afghanistan's coming opium crop - predicted to be the country's biggest ever - having concluded that Afghan drugs now represent al-Qaeda's principal source of income.
The American initiative, as revealed to The Irish Times by a senior American official in Kabul, deals a crushing blow to existing British efforts to curb Afghanistan's opium output, which have failed to prevent an explosion in poppy production since the fall of the Taliban two years ago.
According to separate reports by the UN and the CIA, around 3,600 tonnes of opium resin were grown this year in an unprecedented 28 out of Afghanistan's 32 provinces. The crop earned Afghanistan's poppy farmers and traffickers around £2.5 billion (€3.6 billion), more than half of the country's GDP.
This year's harvest was up on last year's bumper crop - the first since the Taliban's fall - despite two devastating crop diseases; a ham-fisted government eradication campaign; and British-led efforts to train local police and provide poppy farmers with alternative livelihoods, all at an estimated cost of €93 million.
"The Brits will stay in the lead ... but we're facing the fact that their efforts have had absolutely no impact on opium tonnage whatsoever," the American official said. "Meanwhile, we're seeing that this issue affects our counter-terrorism interests: it's become more and more clear that the principal source of financing for al-Qaeda and the Taliban is Afghan drugs."
According to the plan, the US would persuade a moderate Muslim ally, either Turkey or a Balkan state, to deploy around 400 soldiers to Afghanistan to provide security for a similar number of Afghan counter-narcotics police.
Sweeping Afghanistan from south to north, the eradication team would arrive in each province during the two-week window in the opium poppy's growth cycle when it can be ploughed up without regenerating. US intelligence sources believe this would serve the dual purpose of destroying at least 25 per cent of the poppy crop, and flushing many Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives from cover.
"This is going to be the biggest frickin' pheasant drive you've ever seen," the official said.
A British diplomat in Kabul yesterday confirmed the American plan, but questioned whether a foreign force could be deployed in time for the next opium harvest. "To start eradicating in the south, you'd have to be ready by February, which looks unlikely."
America's sudden attention to Afghanistan's drug production represents a major shift in its conduct of the war on terror. Previously, it left counter-narcotics to its European allies, chiefly Britain, 95 per cent of whose heroin derives from Afghan opium, according to Tony Blair.
British and Afghan officials in Kabul privately complain that their efforts have been badly compromised by the US's ongoing military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The US employs local warlords to prosecute its war, including many allegedly involved in opium production. US special forces in southern Hilmand province last week said they routinely patrol through opium fields, but had no orders to interfere.
America's change of tack is less a response to Britain's failed counter-narcotics effort than its own failure to quell the Taliban and its allies, analysts in Kabul say. During the past year, the Taliban has reorganised and returned from its rear-bases in Pakistan, and now loosely controls pockets of south-eastern Afghanistan.
Its influence extends across much of Afghanistan's prime poppy-growing land, in Hilmand, Kandahar and Nangarhar provinces, including the fiefs of many of the US's supposed local allies.
Northern Afghanistan's poppy-growing areas are proving a similar draw for America's enemies. According to Western intelligence sources, opium production in northern Badhakshan province is now heavily controlled by Hizb-e-Islami, a fundamentalist group allied to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and linked to Chechen rebels.
"America's efforts to defeat the Taliban through local proxies has failed on the back of some very compromised intelligence," said Vikram Parekh of the International Crisis Group think-tank. "The Taliban will be defeated by good governance and law enforcement, and that includes counter-narcotics."
Failing drastic measures of the kind the US is planning, most analysts expect Afghanistan's next opium crop to top the record haul of 4,500 tonnes, set in 1999.
"There's no doubt we're about to see a record-breaking crop," said Abdul Ghaus, the beleaguered chief government counter-narcotics officer in Jalalabad, capital of Afghanistan's most productive poppy-province, Nangarhar. "The British are doing nothing to prevent it."
Outside Jalalabad, neat mud-villages and tidy plots offered an Arcadian vision, of courteous farmers and their sons sowing poppy seeds in the gentle morning sun. Cracking open a pile of yellow bulbs to reach the precious seed within, Mohamed Jan was preparing to sow three of his nine jeribs - the Afghan unit of land, denoting a fifth of a hectare - with opium. "Last year, the government destroyed my crop, but never again," he said, to the delight of a mob of local children.
"If they bring their tractors, I will fight them with my sword and my gun." He said that if he could not grow opium, his eight children would starve. That seems unlikely. He has no debt, has always grown opium, and wears a heavy gold ring. He expected to earn around £5,000 on this crop - a tidy sum where the average monthly wage is £12.
"These people are not starving peasants, they're small landowners, and if they've grown opium once before they're not poor," said the US official.