THE FIRST MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

The number of polio cases in Afghanistan has increased substantially in recent months, health officials said Monday. They attributed the rise to growing violence in the south that has hampered vaccination.

Health officials said they had identified at least 25 cases of polio so far this year, compared with 9 in all of 2005; a 26th case is suspected.

Dr. Abdullah Fahim, an adviser to the health minister, said inoculation campaigns across the country since 1995 had brought the annual number of cases into the single digits. The inoculations were conducted during the wars of the 1990's and under the Taliban government, which was ousted in late 2001. Officials had seen the reduction as a sign that polio might be eliminated in Afghanistan....

--New York Times yesterday

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels -- up by more than 40 percent from 2005 -- despite hundreds of millions in counternarcotics money, Western officials told The Associated Press....

A Western anti-narcotics official in Kabul said about 370,650 acres of opium poppy was cultivated this season -- up from 257,000 acres in 2005 -- citing their preliminary crop projections. The previous record was 323,700 acres in 2004, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime....

"It is a significant increase from last year ... unfortunately, it is a record year," said a senior U.S. government official based in Kabul, who like the other Western officials would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive topic....

--AP today