U.S. now focused on getting rid of Taliban instead of opium crops in Afghanistan

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Taliban release video of captured soldier

The Taliban released a video Wednesday of a man identified as an American soldier captured in Afghanistan last June, showing him pleading for his freedom and to be returned home.

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Afghans who see their anticipated income disappearing for the year, Nicholson said, will be offered the $5 daily stipend the Americans here pay for clearing rubble and irrigation ditches. Migrants who are turned away will have to seek work elsewhere.

There is disagreement in the U.S. government about how much income the Taliban derives from the drug trade. Some intelligence and drug enforcement officials think it is a major source of insurgent revenue from taxes levied on farmers as well as trafficking of processed narcotics. But Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has consistently said that it is at best a minor source of insurgent revenue.

"Eradication is a waste of money," Holbrooke said last summer in outlining the end of the Bush administration's focus on destroying poppies. "The farmers are not our enemy, they're just growing a crop to make a living." Previous policy, he said, "was driving people into the hands of the Taliban." The administration would focus instead on interdicting traffickers and substituting crops.

Not everyone has been pleased by the end of the eradication program. Russia appealed to NATO last month to return to crop destruction, arguing that Afghan opium was killing up to 30,000 Russians each year.

The request was rejected, and NATO spokesman James Appathurai told reporters in Brussels that neither the international coalition in Afghanistan nor the Afghan government thought eradication was desirable.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Appathurai said, had told top Russian anti-drug official Viktor Ivanov that Russia should join the international effort to improve Afghan counternarcotics training and also supply badly needed helicopters for the overall counterinsurgency effort. That, he said, "is the most effective way to tackle the drug problem."

Said Appathurai: "We cannot be in a situation where we remove the only source of income of people who live in the second-poorest country in the world without being able to provide them with an alternative."

Later this year, as the fall planting season arrives, the administration plans to expand last year's crop substitution program with a surge of agricultural and development experts now arriving in Helmand.