Pubdate: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 Source: New York Times (NY) Page: A12 Copyright: 2009 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298 Author: Rachel Donadio Note: Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan. Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Afghanistan Bookmark: http://drugnews.org/topic/poppy (Poppy) NEW COURSE FOR ANTIDRUG EFFORTS IN AFGHANISTAN ROME -- The Obama administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan told allies on Saturday that the United States was shifting its drug policy in Afghanistan away from eradicating opium poppy fields and toward interdicting drug supplies and cultivating alternative crops. "The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure," the representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, told reporters on the margins of the Group of 8 conference in the northern Italian city of Trieste, Reuters reported. "They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban." Mr. Holbrooke said the United States would begin phasing out eradication efforts, which generally have involved spraying or plowing under poppy fields, often under fire from Taliban militants or angry farmers. Instead, he said, more emphasis would be placed on helping Afghan farmers make a living through other crops and on seizing both drugs coming out of the country and growing and processing supplies coming in. The Bush administration had put steady pressure on President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to step up eradication efforts, arguing that defeating the Taliban would require depriving it of drug revenue. But in recent years, some American diplomats have argued that eradication was costly and difficult to carry out. And Mr. Karzai had resisted those efforts, arguing that crop substitution and foreign aid to stimulate the economy would be more effective. Mr. Holbrooke said Saturday that the United States had "wasted hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars" on the eradication program. "The poppy farmer is not our enemy. The Taliban are," he was reported as saying. The Afghan minister of counternarcotics, Gen. Khodaidad, who uses just one name, said Saturday that Mr. Karzai and the Afghan government wanted to see the details of the policy shift before commenting fully. "We are still waiting to see what kind of changes they have made in the new policy," General Khodaidad said. "If the strategy is not in accord with Afghan culture and tradition, any such changes would have no real effect." Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy said Saturday that he and the other leaders at the Group of 8 meeting "strongly appreciated" the new United States policy, a spokesman for Mr. Frattini said. And Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, praised the shift, calling eradication efforts "a sad joke" -- sad because so many Afghan security forces had been killed in the efforts, though only "about 3 percent of the volume" had been eradicated, Reuters said. Mr. Holbrooke's comments on Saturday were a continuation of a discussion in Washington in recent months over policies toward Afghanistan. Last week, in remarks to Congress, Mr. Holbrooke said the United States was "downgrading crop eradication" and shifting resources toward "interdiction, rule of law, going after the big guys and -- and those involved people in the government," he told the House Oversight Committee, according to a transcript of the hearing. He said that drugs were "an important, but not the primary source of funding" for the Taliban. "They get a lot more money out of the gulf, according to our intelligence sources," he added, referring to donors living in Persian Gulf countries. Afghanistan supplies more than 90 percent of the world's heroin, and the drug trade is estimated to account for about half of Afghanistan's economy. The United Nations estimates that in 2007, the Taliban made as much as $300 million from the opium trade. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on counternarcotics, called the administration's shift away from eradication and toward stimulating the rural economy "courageous" and "absolutely right." But she added that it was imperative for the United States "to set the right expectations," and make it clear that it was unlikely that the new policy "will result in a substantial reduction of cultivation or on the dependence on the illegal economy." - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake