WASHINGTON: The United States is winding down efforts to destroy poppy in Afghanistan, the US regional envoy said Wednesday, blaming the zealous US approach for pushing peasants toward the Taliban.

Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said President Barack Obama’s administration was making ‘significant adjustments’ from the previous George W. Bush administration in a bid to root out Islamic extremism.

‘We are downgrading our efforts to eradicate crops — spraying — a policy we think is totally ineffectual,’ Holbrooke testified before Congress, according to AFP

He said the money spared would be devoted to stopping trafficking, pursuing drug lords and helping farmers grow other crops.

‘Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve spent on crop eradication has not done any damage to the Taliban. On the contrary, it’s helped them recruit,’ Holbrooke said.

‘In my experience,’ the veteran US diplomat and negotiator said, ‘this is the least effective program ever.’

Afghanistan supplies 90 per cent of the world’s heroin, much of which emanates from the southern province of Helmand, where Taliban-led insurgents are waging a bloody campaign against international and Afghan forces.

Critics, even within the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan, have feared that the United States was pushing impoverished peasants to the Taliban by destroying their key cash crop while funding the extremists.

Holbrooke said the Obama administration was instead focusing on ramping up agricultural aid to provide Afghans with alternative livelihoods.

But his view was challenged by Representative Mark Souder, a member of Bush’s Republican Party, who said Afghanistan was already ‘the breadbasket of the world’ until poppy became more lucrative.