ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s war on drugs will receive more help from the United Nations to stem the flow of narcotics from neighbouring Afghanistan, a UN anti-drug official said here.

Opium cultivation reached record levels in Afghanistan last year, fuelling international fears that, having ousted the Taliban militia protecting Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network in late 2001, the country now risked becoming a narco-mafia state.

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), on Thursday promised more help for Pakistan to bolster security at its ports and to catch drug runners coming across the 2,500km border with Afghanistan.

“We are familiar with the very tragic situation in Afghanistan and the significant increase in the past few years of opium cultivation in Afghanistan and the threat opium poses to Pakistan,” he told a news conference.”

A UNODC statement did not say how much money would be earmarked for Pakistan to fight the drug scourge.

Pakistani officials have warned that Pakistan is in danger of becoming a major production and refining centre for heroin and morphine, the derivatives of opium gum found in the poppy flower’s bulb.

Pakistani officials say about 70% of Afghanistan’s drugs are smuggled through Pakistan and Iran, while the rest goes north through Central Asia.

Pakistan was declared free of opium poppies in 2000, but production began creeping back two years later. A UN study estimated that Pakistan had just 6,700 hectares under poppy cultivation, mostly in the restive semi-autonomous tribal belt along the Afghan border.

Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Thursday that he hoped opium poppy production in his country would drop by around a quarter in 2005. “There has been good progress this year. I hope there will be 20 to 30% reduction this year in the drug cultivation in Afghanistan,” he said in Brussels after talks with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. –  AFP