US joins battle to destroy poppies

THE United States will take its war on drugs to a new level next year, by using its ground troops to help eradicate Afghan poppy fields, in a sign of growing frustration at the British-led efforts to curb opium cultivation.

Just days after Nato agreed to let its 50,000-strong force target heroin labs and smuggling networks, The Scotsman has learned that a handful of American soldiers are also training to take part in eradication missions.

It is the first time foreign troops will put "boots on the ground" to support poppy eradication in Afghanistan. Western diplomats are hopeful it will make it harder for corrupt officials and narco-barons to dodge eradication through bribes or violence, as has happened in the past.

Until now, Nato and the US have refused to get involved with eradication operations as they are seen to target farmers rather than drug lords. Western officials fear heavy-handed missions could "turn the insurgency into an insurrection".

It is also extremely dangerous: at least 75 people were killed in eradication operations last year. But American troops are training about 600 Afghan soldiers whose job it will be to protect the country's Poppy Eradication Force (PEF), when it begins its next wave of operations, in around three months. Together, they will ring-fence poppy fields so eradicators can destroy the crops unmolested.

It is part of a strategy to target land owned by corrupt Afghan power brokers. A British embassy counter-narcotics official said: "There shouldn't be any no-go areas for eradication teams in Helmand, and in order to do that, they are going to need more force protection.

"Land controlled by major landowners, corrupt officials or major narco-figures should be targeted. Having force protection is more likely to make that possible."

In the past, paramilitary narco-gangs have launched all-out assaults on the eradicators. This year, 11 US army mentors are training the Afghan counter-narcotics battalion in Kandahar. The mentors will be deployed alongside the soldiers on operations, a US spokesman said.

General Khodaidad, Afghanistan's counter-narcotics minister, said it would mean there would be nowhere too dangerous for eradicators to work. "We will use this force in Helmand," he said. In 2008, the province accounted for 69 per cent of the 157,000 hectares given over to opium poppies across Afghanistan. It is where most of Britain's 8,000 troops are based and if it was a country, it would be the biggest heroin producer in the world.

Britain's Special Boat Service led Afghan commandos on a series of raids against heroin factories in Helmand and elsewhere last year, but just 3.5 per cent of the country's poppy crop was actually eradicated – 71 per cent less than in 2007.

Eradication was so ineffective in 2008 that the United Nations' top anti-drugs official, Antonio Maria Costa, urged the Afghans to "give up".

The myriad military commands in Afghanistan means the American trainers answer to Nato's top general, but they are not part of the Nato force. The Afghan PEF is controlled by the country's interior ministry, while the counter-narcotics battalion is part of the ministry of defence (MoD).

Gen Khodaidad added: "We have not decided how it will work. Eradication is led by the provincial governors and the interior ministry. This force is from the MoD. But this will be the first eradication season that the MoD has given us protection. It will make a big difference."

The presence of US soldiers will also make it easier to call in air strikes from fighter jets and drones, which have played a key part in repelling Taleban attacks, as well as evacuating casualties in helicopters.

Nato and the UN estimate that the Taleban gets up to 60 per cent of its income from taxing Afghanistan's opium trade.

Afghan government corruption helps to boost Taleban resurgence

RIGHT across Afghanistan, the government is corrupt – and Afghans are fed up. The police organise kidnappings. Justice is for sale. Violence is spreading, and people don't feel safe.

The fact that 175 Taleban fighters tried to storm Lashkar Gah over the weekend, home to Britain's Afghanistan headquarters, is probably more important than the fact they were soundly routed by a combination of Afghan troops and British Apache helicopters.

Even in defeat, the Taleban appear to be signalling that they have reorganised into a formidable fighting force. On many occasions over the past 12 months, they have demonstrated that they can mobilise hundreds of fighters to launch attacks in the east, south and south-west of Afghanistan, on targets that are within a few days' trek of militant hideaways in the border areas of Pakistan.

What happened in the early hours on Sunday was a bold and intrepid attack on a town that is the administrative nerve centre for Kabul and Nato in Helmand.

One British Army spokesman has said that the Taleban operation displayed "a level of co-ordination that wasn't expected".

It would have been almost unthinkable a year ago. And now the symbolism is clear: the Taleban are trying to demoralise Nato forces and Afghanistan's roughly 30 million people by creating a groundswell of opinion that American-led forces are losing their grip.

Recently, the insurgents seem to prefer to score a major propaganda victory by over-running a military base or seizing a town.

Such attacks also suggest that Taleban commanders are organised enough to have hundreds of foot soldiers and other resources at their disposal in order to stage such costly assaults.

Had the infiltration at Lashkar Gah succeeded, then the streets would have seen confused fighting between the Taleban and British and Afghan forces, with western air strikes rendered impossible because of the risk of mass civilian casualties.

General David McKiernan, the US commander of almost all the international forces in Afghanistan, insisted on Sunday that Nato wasn't losing.

So why are civil servants, from towns further up the Helmand valley, who used to keep their families in Lashkar Gah because it was secure, now thinking about relocating them to Kabul?

Officials in Kabul, or at least those who can afford it, are relocating their families abroad.

And the latest Taleban strikes slowly but surely whittle away confidence in the forces charged with protecting Afghanistan.

IN NUMBERS

47,000
troops from 40 countries make up the Nato-run International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan

£1.6 billion
annually is generated by the drug trade in Afghanistan, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

90%
of the world's opium was being produced in Afghanistan in 2005

60
bodies ended up at Lashkar Gah hospital after insurgent attacks at the weekend

100
Taleban were killed in fierce clashes in the ambushes in Helmand

0
British troops were killed or injured during the four-pronged attacks by the Taleban

20,000
troops are participating in the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom against al-Qaeda remnants, primarily along the Pakistan border

300
Taleban prisoners revolted during the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi in Northern Afghanistan and 214 were killed by Northern Alliance fighters, assisted by British and American special forces