WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Thursday said it plans to reward Afghan provinces that combat the opium trade with more development aid in a new anti-drug strategy but analysts doubted it will make much difference anytime soon.

An opium poppy is seen in a field in eastern Afghan province of Ningarhar, April 9, 2007. The United States on Thursday said it plans to reward Afghan provinces that combat the opium trade with more development aid in a new anti-drug strategy but analysts doubted it will make much difference anytime soon. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

U.S. officials unveiled the plan as part of a new carrot-and-stick approach of giving greater financial incentives to provincial governors to fight the opium trade while stepping up efforts to eradicate poppy crops and stem the flow of drugs.

They said they plan to spend $25 million to $50 million to reward provinces that make significant progress against drugs, up from about $21 million budgeted in the current fiscal year and $6 million the previous year.

They also plan to better coordinate counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency work in Afghanistan, which is the source of about 90 percent of the world’s opium and is grappling with a revived Taliban insurgency.

“We want to make sure there are greater rewards for success and greater consequences for failure,” Ambassador Thomas Schweich, the acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement, told reporters.

U.S. officials said the insurgency and the opium trade are increasingly intertwined in the country, which in the past 18 months has seen its bloodiest fighting since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban movement in 2001.

While praising elements of the new counter-narcotics plan, analysts said the magnitude of the drug problem in Afghanistan and the depth of corruption made it unlikely that it would make much headway.

‘TOO UNSTABLE, TOO POOR’

“There are some positive ideas ... which may help to boost the effort but it’s very hard for me to see in the near term that these are efforts are going to make a serious dent,” said Alex Thier of the United States Institute of Peace think tank.

“It probably plays out very badly and that’s simply because Afghanistan is too unstable, too poor and its officials are too corrupt,” analyst Anthony Cordesman of the CSIS think tank in Washington said of the overall approach.

The $25 million to $50 million for economic development in provinces that tamp down the drug trade is only a part of the substantial U.S. budget for counternarcotics in Afghanistan.

According to figures provided by the State Department, Congress initially set aside $449.9 million for Afghanistan counter-narcotics work in the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30, and then approved another $388.2 million.

U.S. officials also plan to provide more troops to accompany Afghan forces that eradicate poppy crops and go after drug traffickers. They also will have a stepped-up public education campaign about the evils of growing poppy.

In a joint statement, the top Democrat and Republican on the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs welcomed the new emphasis on financial incentives but said the strategy needed to do more to go after major traffickers.

“What the plan lacks is the recognition that Afghanistan is approaching a crisis point, and that immediate action is required to eliminate the threat of drug kingpins and cartels allied with terrorists so we can reverse the country’s steady slide into a potential failed narco-state,” Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, said in the statement.