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."