TRIESTE, Italy (Reuters) – Washington is to dramatically overhaul its Afghan anti-drug strategy, phasing out opium poppy eradication, the US envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan told allies yesterday.
Richard Holbrooke, attending a G8 conference on stabilising Afghanistan, also discussed efforts to support its Aug 20 election. Washington has nearly doubled its troops to combat a growing Taliban insurgency and provide security for the vote.
“The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure. They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work,” Holbrooke told Reuters after a series of bilateral meetings in Italy.
“We are not going to support crop eradication. We’re going to phase it out,” he said. The emphasis would instead be on intercepting drugs and chemicals used to make them, and going after drug lords.
He said some crop eradication may still be allowed, but only in limited areas.
Afghanistan supplies more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin.
Despite the millions of dollars spent on counter-narcotics efforts, drug production kept rising dramatically until last year – UN figures indicate Afghanistan’s opiate output has risen more than 40-fold since the 2001 US-led invasion.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Holbrooke told delegates the United States planned to cut back funding for eradication while allocating several hundred million dollars to support legal crop cultivation.