Pat Dollard | Young Americans

KABUL, Afghanistan - As Britain’s military is expected to wind down its efforts in Iraq, the United Kingdom is pouring more soldiers and aid money into Afghanistan to fight a resurgent Taliban and booming drug trade it says pose a direct threat to the nation.

Britain’s ambassador in Kabul said the government began increasing its focus on Afghanistan shortly before the end of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure in June, and made it even more of a priority under Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Afghanistan “matters to us because a high proportion of the terrorism investigations in the U.K. can be traced back to the Afghanistan- Pakistan border area,” Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles told The Associated Press in an interview this week.

“It matters to us because 90 percent of the heroin on British streets comes from Afghanistan, and it matters to us because it is desperately poor, and we have a commitment through the International Development Act of tackling poverty around the world,” he said.

During a visit to the United States late last month, Brown called Afghanistan “the front line against terrorism,” in contrast to President Bush’s common refrain that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.

Britain will increase its troop strength in Afghanistan to 7,700 by the year’s end, up from 7,000 today and 3,600 a year ago, in what Cowper-Coles labeled a “sensible tactical adjustment” based on commanders’ advice.

In Iraq, Britain has handed over two of its three bases in Basra to the Iraqi government, and in the coming weeks its force level will drop to 5,000, down from 40,000 after the March 2003 invasion.

Britain’s move to Afghanistan, where the United States has 25,000 soldiers, “is proof that we’re not leaving the United States in the lurch, and although I’m quite sure they’d rather we stay in Iraq they also know we don’t have endless resources,” said a retired British Colonel.

David Miliband, Britain’s new foreign secretary, chose Afghanistan as his first overseas trip.

Afterward, he wrote in the British magazine The Spectator that “most British terrorism investigations trace back to the training camps just across the border, in western Pakistan.”

Police said two of the suspects in the London subway and bus bombings on July 7, 2005, had attended training camps in Pakistan, as did the ringleader of failed attacks two weeks later.

“There’s a real concern among ministers that, first of all, Afghanistan is one of our top foreign policy priorities and secondly that we need to get it right,” Cowper-Coles said.

British troops are responsible for Helmand province in southern Afghanistan—scene of some of the heaviest fighting over the last two years and the largest opium poppy-growing region in the world.

Cowper-Coles said NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, including British troops, will “really raise its game on counternarcotics” next growing season.

“You’re going to see increased disruption of traffickers. You’re going to see some serious targeted, non-negotiated eradication (of poppy fields),” he said. “In short the big traffickers are going to start feeling the heat.”

Heroin accounted for nearly a third of the total number of drug- related deaths in Britain in 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, according to the government.

Drugscope, a British drug information charity, says heroin use has leveled off, however, in part because that segment of the population is aging and fewer young people are taking up the drug. The charity estimates heroin had a street value of $100 per gram in Britain in 2005.

On the aid front, Britain’s Department for International Development will spend more than $200 million in Afghanistan this year—one of Britain’s top aid commitments per capita anywhere in the world.

“We very much believe that there is no military solution. Equally there is no entirely nonmilitary solution,” Cowper-Coles said. “We’ve got to keep up the military pressure on the Taliban, but at the same time we’ve got to use the other strands in our strategy to try to contain and gradually bring down the insurgency.”

Cowper-Coles said Britain doesn’t have any significant policy differences in Afghanistan with the United States, although Britain does not back Washington’s interest in launching a Colombia-style aerial spraying campaign to eradicate opium poppies.

“There are occasionally differences of emphasis,” he said. “We’re both agreed that there’s no case for aerial spraying unless the government of Afghanistan agrees to it. And as I understand it, the government of Afghanistan does not favor spraying, so there may be an academic debate about it, but it’s just that—academic.”

On the military front, a report in The New York Times last week quoted an unidentified British military officer as saying he had asked U.S. special forces to leave his area of operations because they were causing civilian deaths.

Cowper-Coles said there was “no truth to the suggestion” that anyone asked the U.S. forces to leave the officer’s area, but added, “as in any war … when troops are fighting alongside each other, there are occasional tensions below the surface, and somebody under pressure spouts off.”

“But overall my impression from Helmand is that U.S. and U.K. forces are working extremely well together,” he said.

(AP)