It's time for the US and its allies to face up to historical responsibilities by attacking the root of current violence and war in Afghanistan: the alarming resurgence of the Afghan opium trade.

Violence and insurgency, copying the suicide bombings and other desperate tactics seen in Iraq, are financed by the drug lords and traders who profit from the record production and traffic in opium and its most dangerous by-product, heroin.

Antonio Maria Costa, who directs the UN's anticrime and antinarcotics agency, UNDOC, has just provided stark details of a new UN report. Opium poppy cultivation, processing, and transport have become Afghanistan's top employers, its main source of capital, and the principal base of its economy.

NATO forces are taking heavy losses fighting the Taliban in the south, especially in Helmand Province, the source of the lion's share of opium. US troops and a US-led coalition continue to police other regions, with the US still pursuing Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.

Meanwhile, the drug culture, fostered by Afghan authorities, is turning Afghanistan into the narco-state it was during the Taliban years before the theocracy banned opium poppy culture in 2000 and 2001.

UNDOC's annual report shows that despite current worldwide expenditures of over $2 billion to fight drugs, Afghanistan in 2006 breaks its own records.

Opium production has grown in 2006 by 49 percent over 2005; areas under poppy cultivation by 59 percent. The predicted 2006 opium crop is 6,100 tons, significantly breaking the 1999 record when Afghanistan was still under Taliban rule.

The estimated 2006 crop is no less than 92 percent of total world production. And it exceeds world consumption of opium and its products by 30 percent.

It behooves policymakers and everyone else to overcome our historical amnesia about how this began.

Both the colonial French before 1954 and the Americans who followed them paid mercenary tribesmen in the wars in Vietnam and Laos with profits from drugs. The drugs were cultivated often under official protection and moved to markets by aircraft chartered by the American CIA in the 1960s and early '70s.

Former French intelligence boss Alexandre de Marenches recounted in his memoirs how he suggested to President Ronald Reagan and CIA chief William Casey in 1980 that the US-led coalition plant drugs among Soviet invasion forces in Afghanistan to weaken them. Mr. De Marenches said both liked the idea. This happened while Mrs. Nancy Reagan led a "just say no to drugs" campaign in the US.

Soviet military historians told this writer that drug addiction indeed spread among their personnel, who took their drug habits home with them. Russian commentators differ as to whether De Marenches's suggestion was actually implemented by the American CIA.

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