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Afghan opium production flourishing

Despite seven years of efforts to stamp out the opium crops funding Taliban militants through the heroin trade, more Afghans than ever are growing the poppies, a US government report said on Friday.

"Narcotics production in Afghanistan hit historic highs in 2007 for the second straight year," the report released by the State Department said. "Afghanistan's drug trade is undercutting efforts to establish a stable democracy with a licit economic free market in the country."

More than 14 percent of Afghans were involved in poppy production last year, up from 12.6 percent the previous year, the 600-page document that evaluates anti-drug efforts country by country said.

Last year, 93 percent of the world's opium came from Afghanistan, where US and other international forces have been fighting to stamp out the crop since the US-led invasion that ousted the Taliban in 2001.

This share, up from 90 percent in 2006, was grown over 193,000 hectares of Afghan fields -- a 17 percent increase on the previous year, said the report, which cites UN figures.

NATO forces continue to battle a stubborn insurgency in the south of the country by remnants of the Taliban and fighters linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

"There is incontrovertible evidence that the Taliban use drug trafficking proceeds to fund insurgent activities," David Johnson, the State Department's top anti-drug enforcer, told reporters when presenting the report on Friday. "The counter-narcotics/counter-insurgency nexus is both real and growing."

Favorable weather aided a bumper yield last year, with an opium crop one-third bigger than that of 2006, with an export value of some US$4 billion -- more than one-third of Afghanistan's GDP.

"The Afghan government must take decisive action against poppy cultivation soon to turn back the drug threat before its further growth and consolidation make it even more difficult to defeat," the annual report said.

But he said that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime predicted a slight dip in poppy crops nationwide this year.

Meanwhile, NATO's top official took issue on Friday with a US intelligence assessment that the Afghan government controls just 30 percent of the country and the Taliban holds 10 percent.

The assessment, revealed by US Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell on Wednesday, suggested the rest of Afghanistan was under the control of local groups.

"I do not share that analysis," NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in Washington after a meeting with US President George W. Bush.

De Hoop Scheffer did not offer an alternative assessment but said the US figures did not match the views of commanders leading the NATO-led force trying to stabilize Afghanistan.

De Hoop Scheffer also disputed that tribal control of parts of Afghanistan represented a failure for the international community. He suggested it was a success if traditional tribes rather than the Taliban held sway.

"What kind of society is Afghanistan? It is a society with a tribal structure," he said in a speech hosted by the Brookings Institution think tank.

"That many parts are ruled by tribes, and are ruled by the system that the country has known for ages, does not mean that we are failing," he said.

"It does rather mean that we are successful in Afghanistan," de Hoop Scheffer said.

McConnell told the Senate Committee on Armed Services on Wednesday that the Taliban was able to control the population in about 10 percent of the country and Afghanistan's federal government had control of approximately 30 percent.
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