For a man who had just had his livelihood destroyed, Ziad Abdullah was remarkably polite to the visitors from Kabul who had come to watch his poppy crop in Afghanistan's northernmost province be destroyed.

As Afghan police, armed with an ox-drawn wooden plough, turned over the soil of his little field in Badakhshan, there was no need for the sort of Nato-led "force protection" of poppy eradicators called for in the more volatile south.