KABUL: Afghanistan’s opium poppy crop could rise 20 per cent this year over last year’s record haul, fuelling concerns that US and Nato forces need to play a bigger role in the drug fight, Western and Afghan officials say.

With growing drug profits flowing to the Taliban, the anti-narcotics and anti-terrorism efforts have become intertwined, officials say.

“It’s wrong to say that you can do one thing and not the other,” said Ronald Neumann, who recently stepped down as US ambassador to Afghanistan. “You have to deal with both at the same time.”

Afghanistan accounts for more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin supply, and a significant portion of the profits from the US$3.1 billion trade are thought to flow to Taliban fighters who tax and protect poppy farmers and drug runners.

Drug control has not been part of the official mandate of international forces in Afghanistan. But Nato’s International Security Assistance Force, known as ISAF, may play a more active role in detecting drug convoys and heroin labs, said Daan Everts, Nato’s senior civilian official here.

There is “increasing international interest in seeing a more assertive supportive role in ISAF in the counter-narcotics strategy implementation,” he said.

International forces also might provide support for operations targeting senior drug traffickers, Neumann said.

Military commanders who viewed drugs as a minor irritant in 2002, when poppy production was much lower, have reassessed the importance of the vast fields of red and white poppies, a Western official said.

It’s too early to say definitively what this year’s crop will be. But one Western official with knowledge of the drug trade estimated a crop of between 165,000 and 195,000 hectares compared with a UN estimate of 165,000 hectares last year.

Gen. Khodaidad, Afghanistan’s deputy minister for counter-narcotics, said that estimate is likely accurate. “The problem is a lack of security, a lack of governance, the Taliban, druglords, warlords and corruption,” said Khodaidad, who goes by one name. “It’s a bad list with very bad results.”

Thomas Schweich, a senior US State Department official, said he has briefed Nato ambassadors in Brussels and Gen. Dan McNeill, the top Nato general in Afghanistan, on the need for increased military cooperation on the drug front.

There is a growing recognition that “counter-narcotics and counterterrorism are effectively the same thing,” said Schweich, the US-based coordinator for counter-narcotics and judicial reform in Afghanistan. “I think everybody recognises that with the Taliban receiving funding from narcotics, much more so than in the past, that there has to be a coordinated effort.”

While poppy production is falling in north and central Afghanistan, where security is stronger, that decline is expected to be overwhelmed by a surge in production in the southern province of Helmand, the most violent region in the country and the scene of heavy fighting this year.

Helmand is expected to account for more than 50 per cent of Afghanistan’s poppy crop for the first time, meaning the province by itself would be the world’s largest opium-producing region.

“The amount of production in Helmand has undone successes in other parts of the country,” Neumann said. “What you see is that where you have a reasonable level of peace and a little bit of government, you can start to make progress against the poppy. Where you are in the middle of the insurgency, it’s much harder.”

The United States would like to see Afghanistan undertake ground-based spraying of poppy fields with herbicides. The new US ambassador here, William Wood, oversaw US-backed coca field eradication efforts in Columbia when he was ambassador there.

But some Afghan Cabinet members have expressed reservations about the impact on legitimate crops or livestock. President Hamid Karzai at first agreed to allow spraying last year before changing his mind, according to a Western official.

Khodaidad said the Afghan government may permit ground-based spraying next year and is even considering aerial spraying. Afghan officials have not talked publicly about aerial spraying before, out of fear of public opposition.

“We have left the option open,” he said. Any decision to start ground-based or aerial spraying would have to come from Karzai, Western officials say.—AP