US and coalition efforts to eliminate the massive opium poppy trade in Afghanistan have failed under tremendous waste, according to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. ‘The United States alone is spending over 800 million dollars a year on counter-narcotics. We have gotten nothing out of it, nothing,’ Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said, at the Brussels Forum conference. ‘It is the most wasteful and ineffective programme I have seen in 40 years in and out of the government,’ the new US representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan told an audience of senior world politicians and experts. Despite an alleged 19 percent decrease in opium poppy production in 2008, Afghanistan remains the world’s largest producer of the drug. Efforts to destroy poppy crops ‘hasn’t hurt the Taliban one iota because whatever money they’re getting from the drug trade, they get whatever they need whether we reduce the acreage or not,’ he said. … By forced eradication we’ve all been pushing farmers into Taliban hands.’ Aerial fumigation One of the eradication methods that was resisted by the US-backed Afghan President amid Karzai but put into place under President George W. Bush’s State Dept. is aerial fumigation. The Bush-era policy of spraying […]