U.S. increasing counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan

"Our whole effort at developing security in Afghanistan was undermined by having a Ministry of Interior that was interested in facilitating the drug trade rather than combating it," said Riedel, who retired from the CIA in 2006 after three decades of advising administrations on South Asia national security issues. The current Afghan interior minister, Mohammed Hanif Atmar, Riedel said, is honest and well-intentioned -- and in mortal danger because of it.

"If we can keep him alive, he'll do a great job. But he's got a lot of enemies," said Riedel, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

With the Taliban now controlling large swaths of Afghanistan, traffickers and their networks pay the militants as much as $500 million a year, according to U.S. and U.N. intelligence estimates, to grow and protect the poppy fields, smuggle the drugs and run sophisticated processing labs and drug bazaars in Afghanistan and neighboring countries.

Similar drug trafficking activity is flourishing in the tribal belt that includes northwestern Pakistan, and it is providing huge amounts of cash to the Pakistani Taliban and possibly Al Qaeda, the officials said.

"We see their involvement through just about every stage of drug trafficking, and in each of the four corners of Afghanistan," Thomas Harrigan, deputy administrator and chief of operations for the DEA, said of the Taliban. "They use the money to sustain their operations, feed their fighters, to assist Al Qaeda."

In response, the number of DEA agents and analysts in Afghanistan will rise from 13 to 68 by September, and to 81 in 2010. More agents will also be deployed in Pakistan. It is "the most prolific expansion in DEA history," Harrigan said.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told Congress in June that the Obama administration was redirecting resources that lawmakers had appropriated for opium eradication toward the new strategy of "interdiction, rule of law -- going after the big guys. And those involve people in the government."

The DEA also has been designated as the lead in a multi-agency "Afghan Threat Finance Cell" that will go after not only the suspected drug kingpins, but also corrupt politicians and other sources of funding for the insurgency, including cash from wealthy Persian Gulf donors, extortion and kidnappings, according to DEA documents and interviews.