KABUL, Aug 7: The war against drugs in Afghanistan is a failure and the strategy needs to be changed, the top United Nations official in the world’s biggest heroin-producing country said on Monday.

“Nobody can say that we have been successful if the poppy production has increased,” Tom Koenigs, the UN Secretary-General’s special representative in Afghanistan, told a monthly press conference.

“Certainly the strategy and the effort have to be rethought,” said Koenigs, adding: “The problem has increased and the remedy has to adjust.”

Figures for Afghanistan’s 2006 harvest of opium poppies — which are used to make heroin — are not yet known but the UN has said that it is set to pass the 4,100 tonnes produced in 2005.

Last year’s haul was worth 2.7 billion dollars, forming a sizeable part of the destitute and insurgency-racked country’s economy.

Afghanistan is the world’s top producer of opium and supplies 90 per cent of the heroin sold in Europe, despite moves by world powers including the United States and Britain to combat the trade.

Afghan officials have linked the drugs trade to a soaring insurgency headed by the Taliban, the regime which ironically slashed opium output before its ousting in late 2001 by a US-led coalition.

Koenigs stressed there was no easy answer to the problem.

“We know that if we start eradicating the whole surface of poppy cultivation in Helmand (the main opium producing province) we will increase the activity of the insurgency and increase the number of insurgents,” he said.—AFP