14 February 2004	Saturday	22 Zilhaj 1424

BRUSSELS, Feb 13: Foreign troops must help smash Afghanistan's drug traffickers to halt a vicious circle of violence in the country before landmark elections in June, European Union sources said on Friday.

The bloc's External Relations Commissioner, Chris Patten, will press for military reconstruction teams to help break up a booming opium drug trade when he visits Kabul next week and at a March 31-April 1 international conference on Afghanistan.

"Military people may be very unhappy...getting mixed up with drugs and warlords because you expose people to trouble," said a source at the bloc's executive Commission, one of Afghanistan's biggest aid donors.

"But...drugs and security are two sides of the same coin." The head of the UN drug-fighting body said in Kabul this week that hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Afghanistan's illicit drug trade end up in the pockets of militant groups.

"Fighting drug trafficking equals fighting terrorism," said UN Office on Drugs and Crime Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa, calling on US-led forces and troops under NATO command to help cut off trafficking and shipments of opium and heroin.

Although there are some 19,000 foreign troops in the country, none are engaged in seizing drug traffickers. Thirteen Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) will be operating by next month, the vast majority of them under US command.

"We would like to see PRTs gradually given a counter-narcotics agenda as well as a security agenda," said one European Commission source. Germany, which runs the biggest PRT, rejects the notion of using force to stem drug trafficking because it could suck its troops into open conflict with warlords and guerrillas.

The issue is being debated at NATO, which has taken the German PRT under its command and plans to set up four or five more reconstruction teams by the middle of this year. However, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in Kabul on Monday that counter-narcotics operations were "not the prime responsibility" of the alliance.

Germany, which hosted an international conference to lay the foundations for the political future of Afghanistan after the US-led ouster of the ruling Taliban in 2001, will host a "stocktaking" meeting in Berlin on March 31-April 1.

The conference will debate how to shore up security and the authority of the transitional government ahead of Afghanistan's first free presidential election in June, and it may bring top-up aid pledges from Washington, Tokyo and Arab states.

According to a report last September by the aid agency Care and the New York-based Center on International Cooperation, just 40 per cent of the overall 5.2 billion dollars pledged two years ago had been released and nearly a quarter of that had been diverted from long-term reconstruction to short-term emergency needs. -Reuters