Taliban's Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along
Taliban's Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along
lmao, no it doesn’t. the US didn’t go to Afghanistan to eradicate opium. the US didn’t give a shit about it at all, lmao.
do tankie so kindly hate the US that they’ll give the Taliban a bj just to try to make the US look bad? wow...
We also didn't threaten to kill the farmers for growing it. No shit the Taliban was successful. Comply or die. They're the ones who were profiting from it anyway. Now that they're in charge again, religion trumps financial needs.
The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War is a summary of the Washington Post's reporting on Afghanistan, specifically on the US government's own internal assessments from all levels of the military and political administration. In it, you'll find this quote:
Of all the failures in Afghanistan, the war on opium ranked among the most feckless. During two decades, the United States spent more than $9 billion on a dizzying array of programs to deter Afghanistan from supplying the world with heroin. None of the measures worked. In many cases, they made things worse.
The US doesn't need "tankies" or anyone else to make themselves look bad as far as the Afghan drug trade goes.
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Good phoneposter.
This is one of the dumbest articles I ever read. The entire government changed. Taliban can be dictators. The US couldn't. On top of this, they essentially had two years to switch to wheat before this occurred. Something that was less economically feasible over two years ago due to an unfortunate food shortage in the area now.
Asking why someone couldn't get something done as quickly as a dictator is something a naive child asks.
They’re not being naive, they’re arguing in bad faith, imo.
I mean... Sure there are major improvements that can be had in the US, but punishment and consequences as defined in Sharia law isn't exactly something that the US can simply adopt.
May I suggest you read the article before commenting
Armed with little more than sticks, teams of counter-narcotics brigades travel the country, cutting down Afghanistan’s poppy fields.
And may I suggest you do some research before replying?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65787391
Balancing an AK-47 assault rifle slung around his left shoulder and a large stick in his right hand, Abdul hits the heads of poppies as hard as he can. The stalks fly in the air, as does the sap from the poppy bulb, releasing the distinctive, pungent smell of opium in its most raw form.
In April 2022, Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada decreed that cultivation of the poppy - from which opium, the key ingredient for the drug heroin can be extracted - was strictly prohibited. Anyone violating the ban would have their field destroyed and be penalised according to Sharia law.
The sticks are used to destroy the fields, not beat people 🤦
And punishment under Sharia law is much more severe than getting beat by a stick, which isn't something that obviously will never fly in the US.
Something the US couldn't do under the previous government. Plus many switched to wheat beforehand anyway due to food shortages. The US didn't rule Afghanistan and had to work within Afghanistan's government. That government is gone. The Taliban can act like a dictator. Sure, armed with little more than sticks, but farmers had a two year lag beforehand to switch to wheat. This ban wasn't just announced it's old. It was just never enforced til now. I mean, it's ridiculous to compare the two situations. If the US did the same, at the time they were there, there would have been total economic collapse plus basically commiting war crimes.
Three million dead in the Afghanistan war alone wasn't brutal enough for you?/ / The systematic, institutional rape and torture of men, women, and children in Abu Ghraib was more brutal than anything defined in Sharia law but we still pretend that the occupation was clean.
Are you suggesting since the US did that, they should institute unconstitutional laws in the US as well? Your argument is seriously that they did some bad things so let's do worse?
Unscholy_source is referring to domestically. US can't adopt wholesale murder of drug-users because it doesn't benefit the dealer to kill their clientele. Plus, it's super-cool to kill and torture people from the middle-east because we don't like the way they pray to their invisible friend.
But what about!!!
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No, it doesn't raise questions. We knew back in 2003 that there was never a long-term plan. The point was to kill a guy, and then to do some military spending. A major success, on those lines.
The Taliban are terrible, though.
Selling it, what else.
Those Sackler and Purdue shareholders weren't going to create profits themselves, government subsidized opium helped them fuel the opium epidemic for those record corporate profits.
explain to me how, exactly, you believe the tackler family profited from afghani opium. I’m curious about your thought process.
Upon first arrival in the middle east, US troops protected oil & poppy fields first.
My friend went there several years after the start of the conflict and he said that the troops watched over the fields and poppy farmers. He said it was a surreal thing to see, and he completely changed his view of the US government. Then when he was done with his service he went full-blown GQP. I don't understand the Qanon bs, but his distrust of the government comes from a very real and tangible place.
I think it comes down to the US being tolerant because winning hearts and minds was more important than destroying Opium. The Taliban has no such qualms.
Tankie propaganda on lemmy?
I'm shocked. /s
This one is pretty simple to me: the Americans weren’t putting guns to peoples head and murdering people for drug trafficking on the spot. When the Taliban shows up at your house with guns, and just slaughters your whole family, because they think that you have opium that’s a much stronger deterrent than whatever the Americans were doing.
the Americans weren’t putting guns to peoples head and murdering people for drug trafficking on the spot.
80% of worlds's opioids consumption is in USA which has 4,5% of worlds population.
That's what they are doing, waging Third Opium War on their own people.
Are there any moderators on here? Mint press news.... Jesus
I'm not sure if you noticed but when you're scrolling down your feed list, just below the link itself is a little bit of text that shows the source. Just read it .. takes a fraction of a second.. and if it's from somewhere you don't like then don't open it. Just move on.
Moderators .. please pay no attention to posters like this, you're doing a fine job and we thank you. Keep the news coming from various sources abd let us decide for ourselves if we want to read it. Like adults.
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Tankie propaganda. Ignore.
Was opium a goal? I don't remember ever hearing anyone talk about it in the US.
I'm sure it was a goal. There's so much money to make with ... oh wait. You meant stopping it? Yeah sorry, nevermind ...
This entire thread is justification for telling hexbear to fuck off. These goons are trying to create a leftist version of The_Donald.
edit: and nothing of value is lost.
edit2: lol, look at all the brigading shitheel goons I get to ignore.
Am i a wimp or was that article kinda long?
And full of lies and tankie propaganda.
There are no questions. Title is disingenuous.
Talican doing what Americant lol
The Taliban has people on the ground that don't have to worry about being ambushed. Just casually strolling farm to farm.
Singapore also got rid of all their drug dealers with this one cool trick.
This is the kind of stupid article that someone publishes to make tankies look fucking stupid, and then tankies rush to defend it because they have completely lost the plot.
I can’t believe the U.S. government actually said “the Taliban’s successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world”.
The US government didn't really say anything. A government funded non-profit that is supervised by an independent US agency said it. It has the same freedom of press as NPR would theoretically. Authorities in the EU is worried as well. Basically, without heroin, they think everyone will use fentanyl instead which is far worse. This is what occurred the last time there was a heroin shortage. So, ultimately, this will backfire greatly. And moreover, the ban was announced two years ago. When announced, it was believed it would actually be completed at a time that would have caused immense hardship on Afghans that were growing it, hence the claims the Taliban was turning a blind eye. Because they effectively were.
This is an extremely biased article against the US for some reason. There's a difference when drug production was essentially being done out in the open and then suddenly stopped. Satellites can easily find where the poppy fields were. You can't do this with marijuana, nor do I think you should. And on top of that, the drug problem the US has is importation or small scale manufacture. Its an entirely different problem. And again, the war on drugs was never meant to do what this article seems to imply.
I'm surprised at this article and it's conclusions. They're extremely deceptive, biased, and not entirely accurate.
It’s still monumentally selfish for US agencies to make life and death Afghan struggles all about themselves. It’s like when Senator Jesse Helms complained when Indonesia cracked down on underage smoking because it harmed the US tobacco industry.
Afghan opium farmers switched to wheat crops, which the country needs due to famine, and the article points out the Taliban graciously waited until after harvest before cracking down and enforcing the ban for the next season. I wouldn’t have.
I can. It harms the U.S. government’s war against the poor. How is the prison industrial complex going to continue to thrive if the largest exporter of opium poppy in the world doesn’t export opium producing poppy anymore?
Bitching about people switching to more dangerous substances makes the case to legalize it, nothing more.
What a my$t€r¥!
LOL. Raises questions for whom? Libs? Everyone knows what the fucking USA was doing all along. Except the libs.
NB: both USA Rs and Ds are both liberal in their political philosophy and are both subject to this critique.
Except the libs.
Says all you really need to know about this user.
