NATO urges more Afghan effort on opium trade

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO's commander in Afghanistan urged the government on Thursday to step up its fight against the opium trade, which is increasingly fuelling the insurgency.

"The Afghan government must stand up and say, 'Much of our country is defined by the illegal narcotics business and we are no longer going to stand for it'," U.S. General Dan McNeill said.

"The Afghans must, in my view, prosecute their strategy better," he told reporters in a news conference broadcast to NATO headquarters in Brussels.

McNeill said it was no coincidence the bulk of the Afghan opium trade was in the south where NATO troops are facing the worst violence.

"In portions of those five (southern) provinces, the insurgency is illegal narcotics, and illegal narcotics is the insurgency," said McNeill, who will hand over command of the NATO-led force in June after 16 months in charge.

Afghanistan accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's opium production and there was a record harvest in 2007.

Seven years after the overthrow of the Taliban, the drugs trade in Afghanistan is booming. Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul and Kundi are the five provinces overseen by the southern command of NATO's 50,000-strong security force.

President Hamid Karzai's government has resisted a U.S. call for more aggressive tactics against poppy cultivation, such as aerial spraying with herbicide. It insists its own efforts to persuade farmers away from the crop are having results.

Minister of Counter Narcotics General Khodaidad told reporters in Badakhshan province this week he expected 20-22 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces to be poppy-free this year, compared to six in 2007 and 13 last year.

In a separate interview in Brussels on Thursday, U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) executive director Antonio Maria Costa noted a "continuing and even increasing role of insurgents" in the narcotics trade.

He said it was too early to predict the level of opium cultivation for 2008. But he saw nothing in a trip to Afghanistan last week to change a forecast in February that it would be around, or slightly below, 2007's record figure.

(Reporting by Mark John; Editing by Robert Woodward)