editorial comment Soon, they'll ask for the Taliban to come back....

International efforts to combat Afghanistan's booming opium industry should begin to reduce output next year, a British minister with responsibility for counternarcotics said yesterday.


Bill Rammell, Foreign Office minister, said a "robust" anti-drugs strategy, which the Afghan government would announce this week, would dent the coming crop. "Once we see the [United Nations opium] report for next year we will see that we have begun to turn the tide," he told reporters during a visit to Kabul.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime's most recent report on the Afghan opium industry showed a 17 per cent rise in opium production to 4,200 tonnes this year. Drug income represented 60 per cent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product and supplied the raw materials for most of the world's heroin.

The new strategy would expand current efforts that combine alternative crops and jobs for farmers, interdiction and eradication, Mr Rammell said. Alarmed by the growth of the opium industry over the past three years, the US said it would spend $780m (€580m, £400m) in 2005, dwarfing international efforts to date.

Foreign troops would assume a bigger role in the anti-drugs drive, Mr Rammell said. Forces would report on poppy cultivation when they saw it, destroy laboratories when they came across them and share information on drug dealers.

Mr Rammell said there was no substance to allegations that unidentified aircraft sprayed fields with herbicide without Kabul's permission. Reports of spraying in the eastern province of Nangahar prompted the government to issue a sharp warning to allies last week.

"We have not aerially eradicated," Mr Rammell said. US and Afghan officials have suggested the crop spraying might have been done by drug lords to stir anti-government sentiment.

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