Karzai blasts west over opium policy

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, on Aug. 29 launched a powerful attack on the international community's failure to come up with a coherent counter-narcotics strategy for his country, blaming the west for Afghanistan's explosion in opium poppy cultivation. In the aftermath of a United Nations report showing that opium production soared in Afghanistan by 34 percent last year, Karzai said there was insufficient cooperation among members of the international community in the fight against drug production in Afghanistan. The president told journalists in Kabul that part of the problem facing Afghanistan was that the international community had not respected the Kabul government's proposals to reduce poppy production. Karzai did not explain which ideas were being over-ruled, but said: "Wherever the government is present, the drug fight is successful, but where the government is overshadowed it is not successful." Britain has been under pressure on the issue because this week's report from the UN Office of Drugs and Crime showed that the biggest increase in opium production last year took place in Helmand province, where British troops are fighting the Taliban insurgency. Senior US officials are keen to use aerial crop spraying as a means of tackling the soaring production rates in some of the country's provinces. However crop spraying has been strongly resisted by many European, Afghan and NATO officials who fear it will force farmers to shift their support away from the Afghan government and towards the Taliban insurgency.