Mohammed Hussain was sitting on the roof of his house listening to the radio when he heard the sound of helicopters flying low over his village. He thought nothing of it. The US military frequently swooped over the area, and had spent hours hunting in the nearby snowy mountains for Taliban suspects.
It was only when he inspected his opium field the next morning that Hussain noticed something was wrong.
"The previous evening, my poppy plants were green and healthy. By the next morning they had completely dried out," he said. "I've never seen a disease like it.
"They were circling above us. They woke the children up. It was about nine or 10 o'clock at night. The helicopters had their lights turned off. They were definitely Americans."
Hussain lives in Zafar Khel, a village of high, mud-walled houses and shady mulberry trees in eastern Afghanistan. The village is two hours' drive from the sweeping Tora Bora mountains, where Osama bin Laden disappeared.
It is here, against a landscape of dusty boulder-strewn plains and lush oasis villages scented with orange blossom, that much of Afghanistan's opium is grown.
Hussain and other locals are convinced that the American military secretly tried to wipe out their crop two months ago. The farmers believe that, operating in darkness, US forces sprayed their fields with herbicide.
The US has been heavily involved in funding and carrying out crop-fumigation programmes in countries in South America, but the agreement of the governments concerned has been integral to the process.
Crop spraying in Afghanistan would be a different matter -- effectively an attempt at bio-sabotage in a country where the approval of the population's representatives had not been sought.
"I still managed to salvage a third of my crop," Hussain said, showing off a kilogram of black, gooey heroin wrapped in leaves and tied up with twine.
"I'm going to save this to pay for my wedding," he said.
Diplomats have dismissed the allegation of sabotage as "rubbish." Not, though, that any such tactic appears to have made much difference. Eighteen months after US-led forces evicted the Taliban, Afghanistan has just enjoyed another bumper heroin crop.
The Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, successfully banned opium production in virtually all of the country. But since Afghanistan's pro-American leader Hamid Karzai took over, poppy cultivation has flourished again.
Last year, Afghanistan retook its place as the world's leading producer of heroin, supplanting Burma. The amount of land used to cultivate opium poppies shot up from 1,685 hectares in 2001 under the Taliban, to 30,750 hectares.
International efforts led by Britain to reduce poppy cultivation in Afghanistan this year have failed spectacularly. In Kabul, senior Afghan officials are now grumbling that Britain has no anti-drugs plan. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the heroin that reaches Britain comes from Afghanistan.
Wiping out Afghanistan's opium crop is clearly going to be an epic task. Driving across Afghanistan's eastern opium heartland last week, the Guardian discovered dozens of poppy fields that had just been harvested. It wasn't difficult to find an opium farmer, since the term could be applied to just about everybody.
Sitting in the shade of a mulberry tree, Abdul Ahad yesterday showed off the field where he had grown opium, close to the main road in the dusty cricket-loving village of Kochiano. He had just sold 15kg of heroin in the local bazaar. Each kilogram sells for 20,000 Pakistani rupees -- US$360. After expenses, he had made US$5,000 profit -- a fortune in a country where the average monthly wage is about US$20.
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