Taliban's Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along
2y 10mon ago by lemm.ee/u/NightOwl in worldnews@lemmy.ml from www.mintpressnews.com
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.
lmao, so? we get it. you hate the US. what’s your point? just to come here and whine about it?
person replies back with factual evidence contradicting your personal beliefs in a foreign war, "lmao, so?"
Where is here? The World News community? The only one I see whining is the pickle. Is this a small step away from saying people should go back from where they came from and leave this social space you've claimed as your own? IDK wtf you're thinking coming into someone else's post, refuting verified evidence, then proclaiming hate because its context makes the US look subpar. What's your point, you love the US, why come on here and have to ignorantly shout it?
person replies back with factual evidence contradicting your personal beliefs in a foreign war, “lmao, so?”
you mean an Association Fallacy that fails to prove their claims? US Maries also peed while they were there. That doesn’t prove it’s why they were there.
You:
the US didn’t give a shit about it at all
Response:
the United States spent more than $9 billion on a dizzying array of programs to deter Afghanistan from supplying the world with heroin
You:
lmao, so?
That doesn’t prove it’s why they were there.
Now the goal post has been moved to WhY?!? were we there? Throw up some more pretty images to explain the situation please.
Now the goal post has been moved to WhY
wow, that’s quite the pretzel you’d twisted yourself into trying score some imaginary “point”.
The “goal post” was always the “why” and it was never to eradicate opium. Every source, every article linked here bears that out. all that’s ben proven here is:
the US didn’t give a shit about it at all
ya got me there. they did care. still doesn’t prove that it’s why the US was there, and, in fact, several of the linked sources directly state to the contrary against claims that it was.
try not to hurt yourself with more of those mental gymnastics. it’s hilarious to watch
edit: ya know, you probably wouldn’t be so outraged and angry all the time if you didn’t constant make stuff up to be outraged and angry about.
They were directly responding to your words, to disprove them.
except they didn’t disprove them. US Marines also peed a lot while they were there, but it’s not why they are there. it proves nothing.
Do you really not see the connection between the comments?
correlation ≠ causation
You selectively picked an activity that American soldiers would do everywhere (peeing) over something they did only in Afghanistan (guarding opium fields) only because it would support your argument.
That my dear good m'sir is a classic case of cherry picking.
You selectively picked an activity that American soldiers would do everywhere (peeing) over something they did only in Afghanistan (guarding opium fields) only because it would support your argument.
nope, just an example. you’re not very good at this
Terrible argument. Textbook case of:
whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night.
He actually never said he needed that to sleep at night. Textbook case of a strawman argument. You can do better.
I wasn’t making an argument, just a dismissal
You’ve moved the goalposts, but no matter.
“I know you are but what am I?” is not a convincing argument. most people learn this when they’re 5. (borrowed form another comment)
Operation Enduring Freedom was sold as a war on terrorism
see, you even admit that it wasn’t about opium.
the US repeatedly cited opium as a target of the war because they claimed it funded the Taliban.
you’re welcome to cite sources to back up your claims. and I’ll be happy to point out how the timeline doesn’t support your assertions that the war was about opium, it just happened to be something the US did while we were there.
Or did you think it was retaliation for 9/11 or something?
what I think is irrelevant. that facts are what matter.
I have American friends who died defending those poppy fields. I remember it all very well.
irrelevant. present facts. not anecdotes or your feelings.
Also do feel free to explain how this is any way relevant to the conversation:
correlation ≠ causation
I have, repeatedly. your inability/refusal to understand is not my problem.
You don’t seem to be capable of following the conversation
I’m perfectly capable of noticing when people move the goalposts because they can’t prove their argument with facts, as I keep pouting out. raging about it doesn’t change this fact or any other facts.
Oh my, you are really lost!
not according to the facts. if this continues to confuse you, that’s not my problem.
I’m sorry that I do not know how to find search results from 2001
not my job to prove your argument.
Yes, that’s why I was trying to figure out why you are struggling with them.
“I know you are but what am I?” is not a convincing argument. most people learn this when they’re 5.
you’ve presented nothing but anger, insults, and logical fallacies, none of which are convincing of anything other than that, when you can’t argue the facts in good faith, you resort to these bad-faith tactics ad nauseam because, so blinded by anger and hate, you can’t handle defeat.
Well that pretty much confirms my suspicions
so you admit to arguing from a position of clear and obvious bias. we get it— you hate the US. this has zero bearing on the facts— just that you like to insult people when you lose an argument.
Ah, so you do realize that it makes absolutely no sense lol
I’m not responsible for your lack of comprehension.
Looks like my job is done here. Rage on, little snowflake.
the finest projection in all the land.
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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.
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.
Both can be wrong, Sounds like you’re just here to derail into having a different conversation you want to have entirely separate to the topic rather than addressing the actual topic.
I'm staying on topic.
I am demonstrating how the American occupational forces handed out harsher punishments and consequences than the Taliban did, yet couldn't curb opium production. Ergo, the Americans were never interested in curbing opium production.
The Americans didn't intend to kill all those people. They intended to kill soldiers, and lots of other people who they deemed evil, but growing drugs was never deemed evil enough to be worth killing someone over. The Taliban intended to kill those growing drugs, along with a lot of other people doing things they deem to be evil I'll leave moral judgements to you.
LOL
No one I served with gave two shits who they were killing or why
you consider a source of homicidal psychopaths a reliable source of information?
I mean my takeaway would be that the us shouldn't slaughter and torture people, not that they should have slaughtered and tortored more people to curb opium production.
because you are sane
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?
the US didn’t go to Afghanistan to combat the opium trade. thanks for the false equivalence, though.
So all those DEA guys, FDA folks teaching wheat farming, millions of pounds of drugs burned, raids we conducted to "combat opium traffickers", and all the reports we were fed about how we are responsible for eradicating Afghan opium all means what, exactly? What were we (and Myself, personally) doing there, again?
So all those DEA guys, FDA folks teaching wheat farming,
hilarious. you should do stand-up.
so, you’re claiming, without evidence I might add, that people from the DEA and hehehe… the FDA were teaching wheat farming to the Afghani people? The DEA and FDA. And you expect anyone to take you seriously? lmao
and all the reports we were fed about how we are responsible for eradicating Afghan opium
what reports? let’s see these alleged “reports”
What were we (and Myself, personally) doing there, again?
I have no idea what you were doing there, and if you think this is what was happening, I seriously doubt you were ever there at all.
Man you libs really just sometimes shit all over the floor and declare you won the "argument". Its cringe as fuck.
FDA being clearly wrong aside, its clear your reading comprehension skills fail in the face of your debate bro antics of wanting to dunk on OP and avoid addressing any of the facts said.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/08/obama-afghanistan-drug-war-taliban-616316
aww, look at you, with your tantrums and your insults because you have no facts to back up your claims.
and look! you even have a link that contains exactly nothing that backs up your claims. funny how you insult my reading comprehension, but if yours wasn’t so terrible, you’d see that for yourself. it’s cute how angry you are.
sleep well.
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!!!
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.
The sticks are used to destroy the fields, not beat people
That was my point exactly.
But invoking the spectre of "Sharia law" is just as vague as referring to "US law".
But invoking the spectre of “Sharia law” is just as vague as referring to “US law”.
right, because Sharia Law and US Law are exactly the same thing...
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.
iirc there was barely any opium production in Afghanistan pre-2001 under Taliban rule. It was in the following 20 years that the industry boomed and a lot of those government officials you refer to and their relatives got extremely rich from that, including President Karzai's own little brother. The US put those people in power and propped them up for over 2 decades. It's pretty clear the US decision-makers tried to eradicate poppy just as little as they tried to create peace in the region (not at all).
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We need a bot for this. Synopsis should be added to the tldr-bot or something.
ya know, I’ve looked into it. one of the biggest problems with bots is that they have to be hosted from somewhere. that’s my first hiccup.
I’d LOVE to make this a bot, but I don’t know where I’d host it from.
You can get a cheap VPS with a couple cores and some RAM for less than $5.
can I run it from inside a docker container?
The project has a dockerfile to create the Docker image with the required LAMP stack and python dependencies.
Oracle Free Tier - 4 CPU, 24 GB RAM.
I’ve heard it’s very unreliable and people have had their VPS deleted without warning.
Have backups. :)
Seriously? That's awesome
Just like Facebook 😢
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.
I had a bunch of friends who went to Afghanistan/Iraq and they were protecting poppy and marijuana fields
Between shooting civvies and raping how did they find the time?
Canadian, not Murika. That's how
Well, the Canadian weed legalization makes a lot more sense all of a sudden.
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.
The rules specifically say reputable news sources only. I didn't make the rules. If you don't like them maybe you should go.
And who defines reputable? You I suppose?
MintPress News (MPN) is an American far-left[1] news website founded and edited by Mnar Adley (née Muhawesh) which was launched in January 2012[2] and also publishes the MintCast podcast. It covers political, economic, foreign affairs and environmental issues. Editorially, MintPress News supports Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia, Iran, and Syria.[3][4] It opposes the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia,[5] and reports geopolitical events from an anti-Western perspective.[6] In one contentious article, MintPress News falsely asserted that the Ghouta chemical attack in Syria was perpetrated by rebel groups rather than by the Syrian government.[4]
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.