KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) -- The bloody insurgency being waged in southern Afghanistan by loyalists of the ousted Taliban regime is being fuelled by poverty, drug money and corruption, according to analysts.

The violence that started months after the Taliban were toppled in late 2001 is focused on southern and eastern Afghanistan -- destitute areas where militants find some support among a population struggling to make ends meet.

The area along the border with Pakistan is also where the Taliban first surfaced in the early 1990s, earning some local allegiance by standing up to warlords who cultivated lawlessness as they slugged it out for dominance.

Four years after hardliners' fall from power -- once they had crushed Afghanistan with their ultraconservative doctrine -- many in their traditional support base have had no reason to switch loyalties because they have seen little of the new government's promised reconstruction.

"The people are severely poor in this region," analyst Abdul Qadar Noorzai of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission told AFP. "The government has done nothing to improve peoples' lives -- instead, it fights their poppy crops which they rely on."

For two million Afghans, nearly nine percent of the population, opium from poppies is their main source of income, according to UN figures.

The top growing area is southern Helmand, which along with neighboring Kandahar and Uruzgan, is a hotbed of an insurgency led by the Taliban.

The new government and the international donors on which it depends are determined to do away with the country's opium crop which makes up nearly 90 percent of the world total, and are cracking down. But poppy farmers are reluctant to pull up the crop, which earns them a better living than conventional ones, and have found an ally with Taliban militants who can earn money protecting poppy fields. "The government destroys their poppy crops but the Taliban encourages them to grow and promises them protection," said another Kandahar-based observer, requesting anonymity. "Here, people simply slide to the Taliban side," he told AFP. Taliban fighters offer to protect opium farmers against police for a tax of 10 percent of their harvest, an intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. "The Taliban are everywhere. In my village they come and urge people to grow poppy," said driver Saleh Mohammad from Kandahar's Maiwand district, site of several Taliban attacks and a major poppy-producing region. "People help them. Why not?" Noorzai alleged that buyers of the raw opium included former commanders who fought the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and now had jobs as high-ranking government officials. "Corruption, drugs and militancy has formed a triangle in our region," he said. Many groups have a vested interested in ensuring a level of instability remains, agreed Joanna Nathan, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. "It's not just the card-carrying Taliban, there are many different strands to the insurgency," she said. These included the narcotics industry, tribal and regional grievances and dissatisfaction with local leadership, including "failed figures from the previous regime who are back in power", she said. Insurgency-linked violence killed about 1,700 people -- many of them militants but also Afghan troops, civilians and even aid workers -- over the past year, the bloodiest since the ouster of the Taliban. Nearly 70 US troops helping to hunt down militants were also killed last year. The increasingly deadly insurgency has taken a vicious turn in the past months with a spate of suicide blasts and car bombs, a sign some say of the influence of Al-Qaeda, a long-time ally of the Taliban. The authorities need to bring Afghan people onto their side if they are to beat back the unrest, Noorzai said. "Unless the corruption is curbed and unless peoples' lives are improved, there will be no end to the militancy," he said. "The people are the most effective weapon to defeat the Taliban."