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U.K.’s new plan for Afghanistan

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is planning a radical scheme to subsidise farmers in Afghanistan to persuade them to stop producing heroin, as part of a wide-ranging drive to re-energise policy in the conflict that he now regards as the front line in the fight against terrorism.

Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch-Brown has admitted the rise in opium production in the country means Britain “cannot just muddle along in the middle” and instead must come up with more imaginative ideas on opium eradication.

Ministers are looking at what Lord Malloch-Brown describes as a system of payments loosely along the lines of the common agricultural policy to woo the Afghan farmers off opium production. The government is conducting joint research on the right economic incentives with the World Bank.

British and allied forces are also looking at destroying drug factories inside Afghanistan and a much better-targeted drive against the big traffickers responsible for 90 per cent of the opium that reaches the West.

The focus on Afghanistan comes as British troop levels there are now higher than in Iraq. Critics in the British aid agencies claim that too little Western aid is being set aside to provide alternative livelihoods for farmers, and comparatively too much going on building state structures or funding public sector salaries.

Senior British officers believe the Afghan war remains largely misunderstood in Britain, and say security is the precondition for building alternatives to opium production.

Illegal Afghan opium was selling for as much as $125 per kilo in 2006. The United Nations said the area under opium cultivation had risen this year from 165,000 hectares to 193,000 hectares and the total harvest increased from 6,100 tonnes to 8,200 tonnes.

Opium production is heavily concentrated in areas of insecurity, with British-controlled Helmand now the world’s biggest source of illicit drugs.

The U.K. has provided $20 million to an Afghan criminal justice taskforce that has managed to secure only 400 convictions.

Some influential figures, including the former Foreign Office Permanent Secretary, Lord Jay, have become so despairing of the fight that they are backing calls for opium to be produced legally and used as morphine, but the idea appears to have been rejected. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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