Afghan president sees 15-year fight against opium

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 22 (Reuters) Eradicating Afghanistan's surging opium production and weaning poor farmers from growing the raw material for heroin will take at least 10 to 15 years, the country's president said.

President Hamid Karzai said desperation after decades of war and poverty drove Afghan farmers to turn orchards and vineyards into fields of poppy, which now accounted for 30 percent of his country's economy.

Stamping out opium production ''will take more than two or three or five years,'' he said, citing the experiences of former opium producers Thailand, Pakistan and Turkey, which each took more than a decade to curb poppy growing.

''In Afghanistan, we should give it at least 10 to 15 years of very dedicated work,'' Karzai, a key US ally against terrorism, told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

''Anything short of that, anything in a hurry, anything with emotions will get us into trouble,'' said Karzai, who is attending the UN General Assembly and will hold talks with President George W Bush in Washington next week.

Afghanistan needed to combat opium with better law enforcement, efforts to build a police force free of corruption and aid to enable farmers to grow legal crops to replace the lucrative opium trade, he said.

Karzai said the most promising replacement for opium for Afghan farmers was production of fruits such as pomegranates, raisins and other fruits Afghanistan used to export.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime issued a report on September 2 that said poppy cultivation would soar to a record level in Afghanistan this year and yield 92 per cent of the world's supply of opium.

Much of the sharp rise had occurred in southern provinces hit by a growing Taliban insurgency against Karzai's Western-backed government, jarring a US counternarcotics program to wipe out opium in the country, the Vienna-based agency said.

Reuters DKS VP0537