'90 civilians were dead in US-led strikes'

The UN said Afghan opium cultivation and production dropped in 2008 for the first time in three years, partly because of drought, with almost all the illegal crop grown in unrest-hit areas. Last year, the world was “hit by a heroin tsunami,” Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said in a statement. “This year the opium flood waters have started to recede.” The UN agency, in a report on its annual poppy survey, said there was a 19pc decrease in opium cultivation to 157,000 hectares, down from a record harvest of 193,000 in 2007.

It marked the first drop in cultivation since 2005.

But government-led eradication of fields was not a factor: poppy crops were destroyed in four times less area this year than last.

Drought also contributed to crop failure, particularly in the north and northwest, where most of the opium cultivation is rain-fed, the report said.

Meanwhile, Kabul is not asking international soldiers to leave the war-torn country, a government spokesman said Tuesday, but wants a review of the rules regulating the presence of the forces.

“We don’t want the foreign forces to leave Afghanistan. This is not Afghanistan’s government demand nor the demand of Afghanistan’s people,” said President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman, Homayun Hamidzada.

“We need the foreign forces, until our own military institutions are able to defend Afghanistan,” he told reporters in Kabul. “A timetable for their withdrawal is not included in our demands.”