US disagrees with Russia on Afghan drugs (Keep growing Poppies...for the Afghan poor and War on Drugs farce and Fiat currency!!) WASHINGTON: The United States has an “honest disagreement” with Russia over fighting drugs in Afghanistan but is cooperating with Moscow in other areas, a US official said Wednesday. President Barack Obama after taking office last year made a major policy shift by ending a military drive to destroy poppies, believing it alienated Afghanistan's poorest who only grew the crop to make money, reports AFP.
“We had an honest disagreement about poppy eradication,” Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a news conference.
“The Russian government thinks that poppy eradication is the key; we think it was creating opportunities for the Taliban to recruit farmers,” he said.
Holbrooke said the new emphasis on interdiction and destroying drug bazaars instead of crops was yielding “much greater success.”
“We have done more damage to the drugs by this policy and we're no longer giving the Taliban a free recruiting tool,” he said.
But he denied that the disagreement was impeding Russian involvement in Afghanistan, saying that Moscow and Washington were pursuing “a wide range of areas of cooperation.”R
ussia's ambassador to Nato, Dmitry Rogozin, told AFP last month that Moscow had complained to the alliance about its attitude to fighting opium production, insisting it should be a higher priority.
“Thirty-thousand young Russians died last year because of their consumption of heroin produced in Afghanistan. That's twice the number of Soviet troops who were killed in Afghanistan in a decade,” Rogozin said.
In 2009 the potential gross export value of opium from Afghanistan was 2.8 billion dollars, or about a quarter of the country's gross domestic product, according to the UN drugs agency.