"The key to success there is not turning this into a military mission for the Americans," Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon's chief policy official, said in an interview. "It's the Afghan government trying to enforce its own laws, and what we're interested in doing is building up their capacity so they could do it."
At the same time, Feith said, U.S. troops, who number about 15,000 in Afghanistan, will "be substantially more involved" in countering the drug trade. "There certainly is a sense this is a problem that we need to address because it could get to the point where it could endanger key goals of ours in Afghanistan," he said.
 
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Lt. Gen. David Barno, the senior military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed expanding U.S. military counternarcotics assistance in three ways: by focusing more intelligence-gathering assets on suspected drug operations; by ferrying Afghan counternarcotics police in U.S. military aircraft; and by providing emergency support.
Two other broader security initiatives put forward by Barno would also enhance the country's ability to go after traffickers, defense officials said. One is a plan to strengthen key border checkpoints with more forces and equipment. The other would enlist U.S. troops in extended and specialized training of Afghan police.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and the fall of the Taliban government, Britain agreed to take the lead on counternarcotics -- part of an international nation-building plan that also gave the Germans the lead on police and the Italians the lead on courts. But some British strategies have faltered badly.
A plan in 2002 to compensate farmers who destroyed their poppy crops ended up spurring poppy cultivation. A 2003 effort to rely on local governors to eradicate poppy fields was misused for political purposes.
Reflecting concern in Washington about Britain's leadership on the issue, Souder's House subcommittee held a hearing in April with the unusually pointed title: "Are the British Counternarcotics Efforts Going Wobbly?"
The new U.S. approach, administration officials said, has been developed in coordination with the British and with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who made clear publicly this month that going after traffickers would be a top priority of his newly elected government.
The U.S. plan calls for eradicating an area five to seven times larger than the nearly 10,000 acres of poppy fields destroyed this year. The destruction is to be offset by more than $100 million in aid to Afghan farmers to plant wheat, barley, corn and other crops and for other rural economic development projects.
A special Afghan interdiction force, trained by the British, and other Afghan counternarcotics police units will be expanded. Additionally, a special task force of prosecutors and judges to handle drug cases is being set up and will be housed in a secure facility -- a refurbished wing of the Pol-e-Charki prison on the outskirts of Kabul.
Another element of the plan includes the launching of a public awareness campaign to stress to farmers and other Afghans that the drug business poses a serious menace to the country and will not be tolerated.
Although Pentagon officials do not foresee any increase in U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to support the new strategy, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration plans to increase its ranks in the country from eight agents and analysts to as many as 30, according to Doug Wankel, a former DEA agent who now serves as the counternarcotics coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
"We have to make an impact in the next year," Wankel said in a phone interview last week. "And I would say, in the next two years, we have to show this pendulum swinging back in the other direction or we run a real risk of losing Afghanistan."
Others warn, however, against expecting a quick solution or taking precipitous action that fails to cushion stronger eradication and interdiction measures with a substantial infusion of rural economic aid.
"Given the scope of the problem, it is not one that will get solved in one year," Lamm said in a phone interview. "We need to take a very deliberate, systematic and long-range approach to the problem or else we run the risk in many provinces of destabilizing the country."
