Some of the key players behind Afghanistan's record-high opium trade are expected to be brought before court over the next year, a top US counternarcotics official said on Friday.
The arrests would be vital to a strategy to stem the increasingly sophisticated narcotics trade before links between insurgents and drug traffickers become entrenched, Thomas Schweich said.
"I think you are going to see some big people being prosecuted over the season ... over the next 12 months," the US deputy assistant secretary for international narcotics told reporters in Kabul.
There have been doubts about the will of the authorities to round up the kingpins of the trade, as several of them allegedly hold top positions in the government.
Afghanistan's opium production soared to a record 6,100 tonnes this year, a nearly 50 percent jump on the previous year. This was despite Afghan and international efforts costing millions of dollars to cut output.
Schweich said there had been a "very slow start" to a two-year-old strategy to fight the drugs trade, but he was confident the plan was the correct one and would pay off if implemented more aggressively.
The "carrots" of the strategy, such as development help for areas that cut production, and the "sticks" -- eradication, interdiction and prosecution -- had not been as effective as they could have been, he said.
And in the southern province of Helmand, which produces more opium than any other province in Afghanistan, top officials "practically encouraged poppy growth," he said.
But there had been small improvements: interdiction of drugs had doubled over the past year to two percent of the volume, and about four times more of the crop was eradicated, although this only came to a low 16,000 hectares.
The total area under cultivation was 165,000 hectares.
"We don't need to change the fundamental strategy, I think it will work given enough time," Schweich said.
The official said the US had "no doubts" that insurgents were getting money through the narcotics trade.
It was important that this relationship be stopped before the financial ties between them became too strong, entrenching unrest, he said.
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