Drugs Main Threat in Afghanistan, General Says

Drugs are a greater security threat in Afghanistan than a Taliban resurgence, NATO’s top operational commander said Thursday, despite a rise in attacks blamed on remnants of the hard-line Islamic regime and their Al Qaeda allies.

Opium production has boomed since the fall of the Taliban, stoking fears that Afghanistan, which is the source of most of the world’s heroin, is becoming a narco-state.

“For my money, the No. 1 problem in Afghanistan is drugs,” U.S. Gen. James L. Jones told reporters during a stopover in Qatar on his way to the Afghan capital, Kabul, for talks with President Hamid Karzai.

Jones said it was too early to say if a spate of suicide bombings against U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan represented isolated copycat incidents or a long-term shift by Taliban fighters and their foreign allies toward the tactics often used by insurgents in Iraq.

“The fact that there are any [suicide attacks] is worrisome,” Jones said, adding that part of his two-day Afghan visit would be devoted to gathering information from commanders about the recent attacks.

A U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded in a firefight with insurgents Thursday in southern Afghanistan, the military said. Afghan and U.S. troops were on a patrol when they were targeted by small-arms fire northeast of Kandahar, the military said in a statement. It said U.S. and Afghan soldiers returned fire, and aircraft attacked the enemy positions.

One insurgent was killed, the military said.

Last month, a suicide car bomb in Kabul killed a German peacekeeper on NATO duty and eight Afghans. Increased violence against the NATO-led force also has caused the deaths of two Swedish soldiers and one from Portugal.