Wednesday, June 24, 2009
WASHINGTON: The United States is winding down efforts to destroy poppy in Afghanistan, the US regional envoy said Wednesday, after criticism that the zealous US approach has pushed peasants toward the Taliban.
Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that President Barack Obama's administration was making "significant adjustments" from the previous George W. Bush team in a bid to root out Islamic extremism.
Testifying to Congress, Holbrooke said the United States had "a continued focus on stopping the drug trade, but within that we are downgrading our efforts to eradicate crops -- spraying -- a policy we think is totally ineffectual."
"We are going to increase efforts in interdiction and going after the drug lords. So we're not downgrading narcotics, we're downgrading crop eradication," Holbrooke said.
Afghanistan supplies 90 percent of the world's heroin, much of which emanates from the southern province of Helmand, where Taliban-led insurgents are waging a bloody campaign against Western and Afghan forces.
Critics, even within the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan, have feared that the United States was pushing impoverished peasants into the Taliban by destroying their key cash crop.
Holbrooke said that the Obama administration was also ramping up agricultural aid to provide Afghans with alternative livelihoods.
US military authorities acknowledge that an eight-year anti-drug effort in Afghanistan has failed to step the heroin trade, which is estimated to fund the Taliban to a tune of close to 100 million dollars a year.
In October last year, NATO nations for the first time authorized the international force in Afghanistan to take action against drug traffickers and their facilities.
