Afghanistan's opium poppies will be sprayed

Afghanistan has agreed to poppy-spraying measures in a desperate bid to deflate the soaring drug trade, the US anti-narcotics tsar has announced. The move was urgently needed to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a narco-state, said John Walters, the head of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy. "We cannot fail in this mission." But the prospect of herbicide use aroused criticism from other western officials, who are skeptical of its benefits and fear it will push farmers into the arms of the Taliban. "Nobody in the international community is loving this," said one. Crop spraying is highly sensitive in Afghanistan. Government officials traditionally reject aerial spraying, saying low-flying planes dispersing clouds of herbicide could destroy licit crops and arouse painful memories of Soviet-era carpet bombing. Reports of limited aerial spraying, in which the US denied involvement, sparked health scare stories among villagers in Nangarhar and Uruzgan provinces. To assuage those fears, Walters ruled out the use of planes and said spraying would initially use ground-based techniques. President Hamid Karzai had approved herbicide use, he said. "I think the president has said yes, and I think some of the ministers have repeated yes." But Karzai's office was less sure. One official would not confirm the change. "We are thinking about the issue and looking to see how we might proceed," he said. Britain, which leads anti-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan, firmly opposes aerial eradication but has no firm policy on ground spraying. Herbicide use this year could presage the introduction of aerial eradication in 2008–which would bring Britain into conflict with the US. The debate has been injected with fresh urgency by this year's record opium harvest. Production rose 49 percent to 6,700 tons in 2006, more than 90 percent of the world's supply. Taliban commanders have started to take a slice of drug profits, which fuel the insurgency. The money trail also leads to the higher echelons of government, where corruption at provincial and central levels has eroded public confidence in Karzai. The pressure for herbicides comes from US officials and politicians who signed off on a $600 million counter-narcotics budget this year but received little result for their money. Many are influenced by the alleged success of US-funded aerial spraying programs in Colombia, where FARC rebels benefit from the cocaine trade. Walters said glyphosate, sold under the name Roundup in the US, would be used. He did not say when spraying would start, but poppy planting is under way in southern provinces including Helmand, where farmers harvested a record crop under the noses of British soldiers this year.