NEW YORK, July 24: The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai has shielded the cultivation of poppies from American eradication efforts, which the Pentagon and its international partners have not pursued aggressively, the New York Times reported on Thursday quoting a former Bush administration official.

“The combined failure has turned Afghanistan into a virtual narco-state,’’ says Thomas Schweich, a former senior counter-narcotics official in the United States embassy in Kabul.

In the article written for the New York Times magazine, Schweich claims that opium production skyrocketed in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, making the country the supplier of 90 per cent of the world’s heroin. The Times said that coming from an insider, the accusations are especially embarrassing to all concerned, but in particular to Mr Karzai, whom Mr Schweich accuses of protecting corrupt senior officials.

Schweich, now a visiting professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, says there is a lack of will within the Afghan government to prosecute corrupt officials who are benefiting from the drug trade for fear of losing their political support. Narcotics corruption reaches right to the top of the government, and drug traffickers buy off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials around the country, he says.

Abdul Jabbar Sabit, the attorney general who was recently removed from his post, had a list of 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt, some of them tied to the narcotics trade, Mr Schweich writes. But Mr Sabit had been warned by Mr Karzai to leave them alone, Mr Schweich says.

The Times said that in a recent interview, Mr Karzai rejected accusations that he was not serious about combating narcotics and government corruption. “Rarely is corruption beyond our means,” he said. “I fired someone yesterday.”

He also rejected allegations from diplomats that his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was involved in the drug trade, an accusation that Schweich repeats. The brother visited a number of embassies in Kabul to ask what the allegations were, and was told that they had no evidence implicating him, the president said.

Asked for his comment, the minister of counter-narcotics, Gen Khodaidad, also rejected suggestions that the Afghan government was not pursuing the big traffickers or senior officials, but he said gathering evidence against them was harder.

“We know the retailers and the small sellers,” said General Khodaidad, who like many Afghans goes by only one name. “We are trying to find out the network, and who is the real person behind the network.”