Last Sunday they carried out strikes with CRV7 rockets in the province of Oruzgan.But the Taliban and their al-Qa'ida allies are lethally active in Helmand, with an attempted suicide bombing targeting the province's governor, teachers being beheaded for providing education for girls, and the murder of aid workers, including the shooting of one while he was praying at a mosque.Engineer Mohammed Daoud, the governor of Helmand, stresses that the revenue from opium is fuelling the insurgency. But we will have quite a potent force and they will only get away with it once."The RAF is already involved in attrition ,with Harrier jets based in Kandahar repeatedly taking part in raids. Lt-Col Henry Worsley, a senior British officer in Helmand, said: "Inevitably there will be opposition because there are more soldiers here now If I were a Taliban commander I would want to have a go. Here the British troops are working in full co-ordination with other agencies.

This is not just a military matter."But military matters are concentrating the minds of British commanders as a massive build-up takes place in southern Afghanistan. "There has been criticism that in Iraq the military was deployed and aid did not follow," said Wendy Phillips, the Department for International Development's development adviser "We are being very careful not to do this here. However, farmers will not get monetary compensation matching the amount they will lose if they agree to abandon poppy cultivation.Mr Kay said that a whole series of measures being implemented, including the establishment of law and order, and job opportunities, would eventually lead to a fall in opium production.British officials are keen not to repeat the "mistakes" made in Iraq. It is the most important conduit for trafficking the drug to the West through Iran and to the rest of Asia through Pakistan.According to British and Iraqi officials, the size of the crop is due to double next year, negating any gain made elsewhere in Afghanistan.However, the yield from heroin has risen almost 1,000 per cent from seven Afghanis (around 8p) a kilo to 300 Afghanis (£3.44) in just two years.Amir Mohammed, the district governor of Chemtal, west Mazar-I-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan , said: "We are trying to stop the problem, but people are poor and they are, of course, tempted by so much money."The United Kingdom is giving aid of £20m a year in efforts to stop opium cultivation.

The main role of the British forces will be to enable the Afghan police and army to establish control over areas which have remained outside their reach and allowed a resurgent Taliban and drug lords to gain ascendancy, said Col Messenger.Even if the policy were changed to allow British involvement in poppy eradication, the troops would not be in a position to take part in such programmes, said Col Messenger, who won a DSO in the 1990-91 Iraq war.Helmand, the biggest and the most lawless province in Afghanistan, accounts for 25 per cent of the opium produced nationally. But the commander of the British forces in southern Iraq insisted yesterday that his troops would play no part in destroying poppy fields, while senior British civil servants cautioned that ending cultivation may take years. "After all, it took 30 years to end opium production in Thailand under much more benign circumstances," said Nick Kay, the United Kingdom's regional co-ordinator for southern Afghanistan. "Considering the problems in Afghanistan one can see it will not be an easy process."Col Gordon Messenger of the Royal Marines said that British troops deploying to Helmand, the biggest centre of heroin production in the biggest heroin-producing country in the world, would not be involved in a process being considered by President Hamid Karzai's government of eradicating poppies."There will be absolutely no maroon berets [of the marines] with scythes in a poppy field," he said.British forces will not even directly stop vehicles suspected of smuggling the drug. British Government ministers had repeatedly declared that one of the primary tasks of the 5,700- strong expeditionary force was to help end Afghan heroin production, which supplies 90 per cent of the narcotic in Britain. The enormity of the problems in tackling Afghanistan's massive opium crop has become apparent as the first wave of British troops are deployed in one of the most dangerous parts of the country.

He is due to leave for Canada next month on a UN-sponsored resettlement programme.Yu Zhijian, the third prisoner, was taken into police custody again last week after joining a hunger strike to support a rights activist.It was unclear why Yu Dongyue stayed in prison while his two colleagues were paroled and other Tiananmen protesters were allowed to travel into exile.. Lu Decheng, who also received 16 years, is in Thai custody after fleeing from China in 2004 while on parole. He is believed to have suffered a nervous breakdown after repeated beatings in prison. The Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights watchdog, believes there are around 70 political prisoners still in jail for their part in the student-led demonstrations for democracy which were crushed by the army on 4 June 1989.Mr Yu's two fellow paint-throwers have been released. He was later convicted of "sabotage" and "counter-revolutionary propaganda".Mao is an idol to many Chinese, even though 30 million people starved to death after he launched the Great Leap Forward campaign in 1958 and millions were purged or killed during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976.It was not clear if there was any connection between Mr Yu's release and President Hu Jintao's planned visit to the US in April, but China has previously freed political prisoners ahead of major state visits. They grabbed Mr Yu and his fellow paint-throwers and handed them over to security officials.

This saved face for the Croatian government amid staunch nationalist opposition.Negotiations, analysts say, are not only about saving face, though, and money can be the deciding factor. Speculation in Belgrade suggested that Mladic has demanded up to €5m(£3.4m) for his family and dependants in return for his surrender.The former general was more or less living freely in Belgrade until the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Some government officials fear that if he is handed over, he will reveal the full extent of Belgrade's involvement in the Bosnian war.Military documents relating to Mladic could aggravate Belgrade's position in a case that Bosnia is bringing before the International Court of Justice. This would involve using a third country as basis for extradition, in this case it was the Bosnian Serb Republic.Gotovina was arrested in Spain and transferred to the international war crimes tribunal in December.