KABUL: US forces in Afghanistan are planning an offensive against the next opium crop, predicted to be the country’s biggest ever, after calculating that drugs are now Al Qaeda’s main source of income.

A senior US official in Kabul said that current British efforts to temper Afghanistan’s opium output had “absolutely no impact” on the amount of opium produced since the fall of the Taliban two years ago.

According to separate reports by the UN and the CIA, about 3,600 tons of opium resin were produced this year in an unprecedented 28 of Afghanistan’s 32 provinces. The crop earned the country’s poppy farmers and traffickers some two billion pounds sterling.

This year’s harvest was up on last year’s bumper poppy crop — the first since the Taliban’s fall — despite two devastating crop diseases, a ham-fisted government eradication campaign and British-led efforts to train local police and provide poppy farmers with alternative livelihoods at an estimated cost of 65 million pounds sterling.

“The Brits will stay in the lead, but we’re facing the fact that their efforts have had no impact on opium tonnage whatsoever,” the American official said. “Meanwhile we’re seeing that this issue affects our counter-terrorism interests: it’s become more and more clear that the principal source of financing for Al Qaeda and the Taliban is Afghan drugs.”

According to the plan, America would persuade either Turkey or a Balkan state, to deploy some 400 soldiers to Afghanistan to provide security for a similar number of Afghan counter-narcotics police. Sweeping the country from south to north, the eradication team would arrive in each province during the two-week window in the opium poppy’s growth cycle when it can be ploughed up without regenerating.

US intelligence sources believe this would serve the dual purpose of destroying at least 25 per cent of the poppies and flushing out many Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives.

“This is going to be the biggest pheasant drive you’ve ever seen,” the American official said.

A British diplomat in Kabul on Sunday confirmed the American plan, but questioned whether a foreign force could be deployed in time for the coming harvest. “To start eradicating in the south, you’d have to be ready by February, which looks unlikely,” the diplomat said. “If we know anything about this country, it’s that everything takes time.”

Washington’s attention to Afghanistan’s drug production represents a shift in its conduct of the war on terror. Previously, it left counter-narcotics to its European allies, chiefly Britain, 95 per cent of whose heroin derives from Afghan opium.

British and Afghan officials in Kabul privately complain that their efforts have been compromised by the US military campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. America employs local warlords to prosecute its war, including many who are allegedly involved in opium production. US special forces in southern Hilmand province said they routinely went on patrol through opium fields, but had no orders to interfere.

Washington’s change of tack is less a response to Britain’s failed counter-narcotics effort than to its own failure to quell the Taliban and its allies, analysts in Kabul say.

According to intelligence sources, opium production in northern Badhakshan province is now heavily controlled by Hizb-i-Islami, a group allied to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and linked to Chechen rebels.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.