Does Britain have a plan any more for dealing with the soaring drugs crisis in Afghanistan?

Barely. Britain, which, out of all the countries struggling to help Afghanistan, still carries the main responsibility for tackling the problem, has taken a long step back from trying to eradicate opium poppies in favour of fixing things that might be fixed more quickly.

That is sensible, up to a point, but it isn’t success. In the six years since the fall of the Taleban, opium has come to dominate the Afghan economy, the government of the south and even parts of the Ministry of the Interior. The British plan is to tease out the strands, which it can tackle, without trying to shut down poppy-growing itself.

But the risk is that the billions of dollars that the drugs trade is pouring into the hands of gangsters – and politicians – will make it impossible to improve security and, so, impossible to get rid of the drug.

President Karzai said yesterday that drugs and lawlessness were the two “major dangers” facing the country. He added that Afghans should stand on their own feet to tackle them and “not accuse foreigners of [causing] the deterioration of our situation” – nor give foreign forces “an opportunity for interference”.

He cautioned that foreigners – meaning the US – may turn to spraying opium poppy fields if Afghans on their own did not give up the crop. They may, but foreign supporters of Afghanistan are uncomfortably divided about the choice of tactics.

The US has, indeed, been in favour of spraying the crop to wipe out as much as possible. Britain, in a policy that has hardened over six years, has been cool towards this, as have others.

A report prepared for the Canadian Privy Council Office last year, and partially released to the media on Monday, said that “any aggressive clampdown on the opium trade would provoke economic dislocation and hardship for large numbers of Afghans”. Many nonUS officials have been worried that wiping out poppies will alienate the local people whose support they need to combat the Taleban. Karzai has banned spraying, although he permits ploughing up of poppy fields.

But the tension between the rival tactics remains, particularly as the £46 million a year that Britain puts into Afghan antinarcotics efforts is less than half the US total.

For Britain, eradication is not now in the top four priorities, a senior official said yesterday. He added that eradication was increasing, year on year, measured by hectares destroyed. But that has not stopped the crop booming; last year was a record, with production up by a quarter over the previous year. This year may be even higher; a retreat in the north and stable levels in the centre have been eclipsed by the boom in the south.

Helmand province, where British forces are concentrated to fight the Taleban, would count as the world’s largest producer of heroin on its own, if it were a country, one official said – followed by the rest of Afghanistan. In total, Afghanistan produces about 90 per cent of heroin in the world.

British priorities are to target the traffickers, as well as rising addiction within Afghanistan, to try to open up other livelihoods for farmers and generally to make the business of growing poppies seem more risky to them.

But the danger of letting the value of the crop rise, even if only for a few years while these tactics are tested, is that it makes the warlords of the south even richer.

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