WESTERN MILITARY LOOKED OTHER WAY AS THE AFGHAN DRUG TRADE BOOMED

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Locals call them "poppy palaces," the three-or
four-story marble homes with fake Roman columns perched behind razor
wire and guard shacks in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.

Most are owned by Afghan officials or people connected to them, men
who make a few hundred dollars a month as government employees but
are driven around in small convoys of armored SUVs that cost tens of
thousands of dollars.

Kabul's gleaming upscale real estate seems a world away from war-torn
southern Afghanistan, but many of the houses were built with profits
harvested from opium poppy fields in the southern provinces of
Helmand and Kandahar.

"When you see these buildings, that's not normal money ... that's
drug money," said Ghulam Haider Hamidi, the mayor of Kandahar's
provincial capital since 2007. "The ministers and the governors are
behind the drug dealers, and sometimes they are the drug dealers."

Last year, Helmand and Kandahar provinces accounted for about 75
percent of Afghanistan's poppy cultivation, and Helmand alone was the
world's biggest supplier of opium.

Afghan and Western officials say that's because U.S. and NATO-led
forces failed to take the drug problem seriously for more than six
years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 ousted the Taliban regime.

"They (the Western military) didn't want anything to do with either
interdiction or eradication," said Thomas Schweich, a former Bush
administration ambassador for counternarcotics and justice reform for
Afghanistan. "We warned them over and over again: Look at Colombia."

Now Helmand and Kandahar have become the core of a narco-state within
Afghanistan, effectively ruled by the resurgent Taliban. Drugs are
the main economic engine there, and most politicians and police are
said to be under the thumbs of dealers. "I haven't seen any good
police during the last two years in Kandahar," Hamidi said.

In the west Helmand district of Nad Ali, thousands of acres of
government land reportedly have been irrigated and cultivated -
including wells and farm boundaries dug by heavy machinery - as poppy
plantations. Police in the area fired on government eradication teams
last year.

Asked what American and NATO forces have done to halt the flow of
opium and heroin in the southern provinces, Afghanistan's minister
for counternarcotics, Col. Gen. Khodaidad, who like many Afghans uses
only one name, had a quick answer: "Nothing."

The Afghan government hasn't done much, either. Schweich said that at
the highest levels of government the issue wasn't always corruption,
but political considerations.

For example, he said, U.S.-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai was
seen in 2007 as "trying to prevent serious law enforcement efforts in
Helmand and Kandahar to ensure that he did not lose the support of
drug lords in the area whose support he wanted in the upcoming
election." But Schweich added that Karzai has recently appeared to
"adopt a more hands-off approach."

A spokesman for Karzai, Humayun Hamidzada, denied that the government
was soft on drugs and said it was waging "an active campaign against
corruption and drug dealing."

Mohammed Ayub Salangi, a former Kandahar and Kabul police chief, said
recently that he didn't think drug money tainted many Afghan
officials. Salangi, who said he was paid about $6,500 a year, was
sitting in front of his house in Kabul with a Lexus SUV parked in the
driveway and a small posse of gunmen out front. Rents in the
neighborhood run up to $10,000 a month. Officials from provinces
where Salangi worked in the past told McClatchy they weren't aware of
any accusations that he's corrupt. In fact, Salangi was waiting to
hear whether he'd be named the police chief of yet another province.

Britain Leads Anti-Drug Effort

Some Western and Afghan officials say southern Afghanistan spun out
of control because of a serious miscalculation by U.S. and British
officials, who all but ignored the long rows of poppy and the opium
trafficking that flows from them.

The results were grim.

After the Taliban banned poppy cultivation in July 2000, Afghanistan
produced about 185 tons of opium in 2001. The next year, production
was 3,400 tons, according to U.N. statistics, and by 2007 it was
about 8,200 tons, making Afghanistan the source of about 93 percent
of the world's opium and heroin. U.S. numbers differ from the U.N.
statistics but reflect the same trend.

Production declined last year, but there are differences about how
much. The State Department puts it at 5,500 tons; the U.N. says that
while the area of cultivation fell by 19 percent, farmers still
produced about 7,700 tons of opium because they had higher yields.

Most experts attribute the decrease in land usage to farmers
diversifying because of rising prices for wheat and bumper crops in
Afghanistan causing a slide in opium prices. Afghanistan, however,
still supplied more than 90 percent of the world market last year.

As a lead donor nation to Afghanistan, Britain agreed in 2002 to head
up counternarcotics efforts, but it did little to crack down on drugs
and largely avoided the eradication of poppy crops.

While NATO-led forces in Afghanistan provided training for Afghan
anti-narcotics units, they would "not take part in the eradication of
opium poppy or in pre-planned and direct military action against the
drugs trade," Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary from 2001 to
2006, wrote in a 2006 letter to Parliament.

The British worried that strong-arming poppy farmers could create
more militants, and they preferred to wait for the rule of law to be
strengthened, at which point - the thinking went - the Afghans could
take care of their drug problem themselves.

"We think that this was a rather simplistic view of the issue,
because as we have seen in Colombia, as we have seen in the Golden
Triangle" - an opium and heroin production area in southeast Asia -
"at the end of the day it is very hard to make a distinction between
the drug cultivation and the insurgency," said Jean-Luc Lemahieu,
representative for the United Nations office on drugs and crime in Afghanistan.

The softer British approach often didn't achieve much.

During 2003, for example, the British and Afghan governments tried to
buy up the poppy crop in Helmand. The $40 million effort "failed to
produce lasting results," according to a subsequent report by the
U.S. State and Defense departments' inspectors general.

"It was not just the British, it was also ISAF (the NATO-led forces)
and the U.S. military" that did little about the opium trade, said a
Western official working with counter-narcotics efforts in
Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the
sensitivity of the subject.

The British and U.S. embassies in Kabul declined to comment.

Some experts on counternarcotics contend that in the middle of a war,
in a country with a weak central government and a tattered economy,
the British had limited options.

"Peace first, drugs next," said Ekaterina Stepanova, a senior analyst
at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute who's studied
drug economies in conflict zones. "If you want counternarcotics
policy to succeed, you first need a functional and domestically
accepted state."

The issue was left mainly to underequipped and often-corrupt Afghan
police, who had little inclination to take on the hordes of militants
and warlords who were protecting poppy fields.

The police are infamous for being on the payrolls of drug dealers big
and small.

"When the police arrested me I would give them 1,000 or 2,000
afghanis" - $20 or $40 - "and they'd let me go," said Ahmadullah, a
20-year-old junkie and former two-bit heroin dealer from Kandahar who
was interviewed at an abandoned building in Kabul that's become an
opium and heroin den.

When he was asked when heroin started becoming a major problem in
Kandahar, Ahmadullah, his hair matted with dirt and face drooping
with the lazy gaze of a heroin addict, paused and asked: When did the
Western armies and Hamid Karzai come? It was a few years after that, he said.

Christopher Langton, a retired British army colonel who's a senior
analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic
Studies, pointed to the fragile state of the Afghan government,
"which has little control over the country," as a major factor.

"Weak control allows cultivation," he said.

Obama's Confusing Signals

The Western powers' hands-off counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan
has begun to change, however slowly. Much of President Obama's surge
of 17,000-plus troops to Afghanistan will target the south, a move
that's sure to put pressure on the Taliban's drug-running operations.
The State Department and other agencies are spearheading eradication
campaigns and agricultural development projects across the country, a
carrot-and-stick approach.

In Helmand, the Afghan government - with U.S. and British backing -
has distributed wheat seed to about 30,000 farmers as part of a pilot
program for crop substitution and has begun to map out supply chains
for fruits and vegetables to lucrative markets such as Dubai.

Afghan eradication teams now have regular backup from Western
military units that serve as quick reaction forces. Former U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration officers are mentoring Afghan Interior
Ministry narcotics officials, and a central drug court in Kabul is
seen as relatively promising.

Last December, the British military led a contingent of at least
1,500 troops for an operation in and around Helmand's Nad Ali
district - home to thousands of acres of poppy - to establish a
foothold. Then in February, the British conducted one of the first
high-profile military raids of a reputed Taliban drug base in
Helmand, in its northeast district of Sangin. They found more than
2,700 pounds of opium and a lab for making heroin.

The number of poppy-free provinces reportedly climbed to 18 from 13
out of 34 last year, including the former No. 2 producer of opium,
and there are expectations that the number will increase this year.

However, as poppy cultivation has shifted almost exclusively to five
of the country's southern provinces, Taliban areas such as Kandahar
and Helmand have become even more volatile. In 2007, 19 Afghan police
were killed during eradication efforts. In 2008, that number more
than tripled to 72, according to the Western official involved with
counternarcotics.

Government eradication troops in the south now come under attack by
platoon-sized Taliban teams broken into squads firing mortars,
grenade launchers and machine guns.

Amid the new, fragile momentum in the battle against drugs, the Obama
administration has sent some confusing signals.

The president's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard
Holbrooke, recently lashed out at U.S. policy, saying that American
efforts to date have been useless.

"We have gotten nothing out of it, nothing," Holbrooke said at a
March conference in Brussels, Belgium. "It is the most wasteful and
ineffective program I have seen in 40 years."

During a briefing for White House reporters the same month, Holbrooke
acknowledged that the Obama team hadn't finalized its strategy for
counternarcotics in Afghanistan.

In Helmand, convoys of Land Cruisers still speed across the desert
loaded with heroin and gunmen, and no one dares stop them, said Sher
Mohammed Akhundzada, who was the governor there for about four years.

Sitting in his living room in Kabul, Akhundzada bemoaned the state of
his home province. It's a place run by the Taliban and
narco-traffickers, he said with a shake of the head.

Akhundzada didn't mention that during his time as governor he was
caught storing about 9 tons of opium in the basement of his office.
Instead of being prosecuted, he became a senator. Akhundzada now
lives in a large house in Kabul.