CHINAR, Afghanistan — When the Taliban ordered Afghanistan’s fields cleared of opium poppies seven years ago because of Islam’s ban on drugs, fearful farmers complied en masse.

Today, officials say the militia nets tens of millions by forcing farmers to plant poppies and taxing the harvest, driving the country’s skyrocketing opium production to fund the fight against what they consider an even greater evil — U.S. and NATO troops.

“Drugs are bad. The Koran is very clear about it,” said Gafus Scheltem, NATO’s political adviser in southern Afghanistan. But to fight the enemy, he said, “all things are allowed. They need money and the only way they can get money is from Arabs that support them in the [Persian] Gulf, or poppies.”

Corrupt government officials, both low-level police and high-level leaders, also protect the drug trade in exchange for bribes, a recent U.N. report found. Warlords and major landowners welcome the instability the Taliban brings to the country’s southern regions, causing poppy eradication efforts to fail.

The Taliban denies it supports poppies. Mullah Abdul Qassim, a top commander in Helmand province, told The Associated Press last month that the militia’s goal is to defeat foreign troops and it doesn’t have time to regulate poppies. He noted that the militia virtually eliminated poppies after leader Mullah Omar banned them in July 2000.

Diplomats at the time believed the Taliban, pariahs because of their violations of human rights standards, was seeking international respectability and financial aid. Washington sent $43 million in emergency funds to Afghanistan after poppy growing was banned.

But Western officials say it appears the ban was meant at least in part to increase the price of opium stockpiles.

“Originally they said, ‘It’s bad for you, it’s against Islam,’ but when they realized how much money they could make off of it they said it was okay to grow but not consume it. That’s the hypocrisy of it,” said Specialist Zach Khan, a cultural adviser in the U.S. Army who was born in Pakistan and lives in Nashville, Tenn.

The Taliban is also telling farmers in the south they must grow poppies but if the militia returns to power, the plants will once again be outlawed, said a Western official familiar with Afghanistan’s drug trade who asked not to be identified because of the nature of his job.

Afghanistan’s opium crop grew 59% in 2006 to 407,000 acres, yielding a record crop of 6,100 tons, enough to make 610 tons of heroin — 90% of the world’s supply, according to the U.N. Western and Afghan officials say they expect a similar crop this year.

The street value of the heroin was estimated at $3.5 billion, said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Of that, Afghan farmers earned an estimated $700 million last year, while the bulk of the rest went to traffickers who smuggled the drugs to the Middle East and Europe.

No one knows the Taliban’s exact take from poppy cultivation, and guesses range from the low tens of millions of dollars to an estimate of $140 million by General Khodaidad, Afghanistan’s deputy minister for counter-narcotics. His figure was based on various Taliban taxes that could add up to 20% of the farmers’ $700 million.