editorial comment Sorry Mr. Karzai, but it is 60% of your GDP......

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has urged his countrymen to tackle the war on drugs with the same zeal they fought the Red Army during the Soviet Union's decade-long occupation that ended in 1990.

Speaking two days after being sworn in as the country's first democratically-elected president, Karzai said on Thursday that as the source of the majority of the world's heroin, Afghanistan risked becoming a pariah state.

"The nation of Afghanistan, for its survival from this disgrace, this dishonour, has to fight against poppy...like it fought against the Russians," he told a two-day national anti-drugs conference in the capital, kabul.

"If we do not, our homeland, our independence, our soil will face danger again."

Afghanistan's opium economy is estimated to have earned $2.8 billion this year -- up $500 million from 2003 -- and the country now accounts for 87 percent of global heroin.

According to a United Nations report released last month, the opium economy was equivalent to over 60 percent of Afghanistan's 2003 gross domestic product.

But while Karzai's speech was one of the strongest he has made on the subject to date, he offered little new initiatives to eradicate a crop in which 10 percent of Afghanistan's estimated 24 million people are directly involved.

Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to Kabul, told the conference that the U.S. Congress plans to provide $780 million to assist Afghanistan in its fight against drugs in the next few months.

The assistance will go to provide cash for alternative work for some 125,000 people in three provinces.

But opium production goes much further than that and the U.N. report says the poppies that produce the base of the highly addictive drug were grown in every one of the country's 32 provinces last year.

The opium trade has flourished since a U.S.-led coalition helped oust the Taliban in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Ironically it was the Taliban who successfully brought opium production down to virtually zero in their last year of rule -- deeming it un-Islamic and making it punishable by death.

But many of the militias that helped overthrow the hardline Taliban are also involved in the drug trade and Karzai risks losing their support if he acts too harshly against them without offering alternatives.

Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali conceded some government officials were backing the trade, but said under a new strategy smugglers would be tried and the government would destroy drugs markets and heroin laboratories.

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