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
80% of worlds's opioids consumption is in USA which has 4,6% of worlds population.
That's what they are doing, waging Third Opium War on their own people.
Intelligence agencies love the drug trade because:
To be technical, did the US actually fund the Taliban when it got started? The Pakistani intelligence service did, and the Taliban were only able to take power because of the US-backed Mujahideen alliance rapidly descended into civil war when the Soviets pulled out and the Afghan government fell, but idk.
But wasn't Pakistan also thoroughly a US puppet at this point?
All the armaments the US supplied (most of which actually came from China) to the Mujahideen was distributed by Pakistani intelligence services - that is true. However, the US knew perfectly well who the Pakistanis were giving these weapons to - it had been longstanding US foreign policy SOP to nurture and support far-right, reactionary Islamism as a counter to middle-eastern nationalism. That's the reason the "big bads" in the middle-east now are people like Osama and not people like Arafat.
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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.
Somebody else pointed out MintPress is tankie bullshit.
These scum are everywhere on lemmy.ml, I swear.
During the time of the US occupation of Afghanistan, opium from the region comprised a full 90% of the world's heroin supply. So I would say "the same thing they've been doing since at least the days of the Vietnam War and the Golden Triangle."
Turns out they were also attempting to monopolize the worlds heroin supply too, a major success on those lines too.
This image is damning
Could it be? A successful war on drugs?
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pseudoscience anti-Israel propaganda
Lol what is this even supposed to mean
time ran the exact same article, what is your point?
shame on Time?
also, it’s not the exact same article. it’s a different article by a different author. you can tell if you bother to read it instead of just googling around until you found another article with a similar click-bait headline...
do you often lie to make your point, or is this a new experience for you?
um ackshually, fact check
We need a bot for this. Synopsis should be added to the tldr-bot or something.
why? read the article, and if you can't tell the bias that's on you.
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.
Learn to read. If you can't be assed to actually read the article you're commenting on then go back to le 100 wholesome keanu reddit.
Holy shit is this a bit? Do people on here really still believe in a neutral or unbiased press? Shouldn't virtually every event from the Iraq war onward have already disillusioned you of that?
Damn, this website really gets your goat doesn't it?
Editorially, MintPress News supports Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia, Iran, and Syria. It opposes the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia, and reports geopolitical events from an anti-Western perspective. 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.
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 due to the Afghanistan war alone wasn't brutal enough for you?
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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.
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.
the US didn’t go to Afghanistan to combat the opium trade. thanks for the false equivalence, though.
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?
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.
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.
The us was using opium as a weapon of war against russia and iran. Its well known and the public health concequences in both those countries were horrific
But since mexico has orders of mag itude more state capacity than the taliban their failure to solve opium problem makes one almost certain the us goverment is also behind that.
You got a source on that? Last I checked Opium is an excellent cash crop that the Taliban used to fund their guerilla war with the US. Now that the Americans are out there is no point to keep growing it.
USA frooze the National Reserves of Afgahnistan after their Ho Chi Ming City Replay , thereby actually punging Afgahnistan into Starvation crisis und accelerating the switch from Cash Crop to Food Production , this has now increased the Water Use in the helmaz river valley thereby is leading to borderclashes with iran over the water use.
Just search opium in russia or opium in iran. You will see that its a huge problem there. You will also see both countries complaining to the us that they are maliciously increasing opium production.
Lmao
You mean the US wasn't trying to eliminate heroin production
"...but at what cost?!?!" These lizards deserve a whole lot of things.
I'm so tired of all this authoritarian propaganda on Lemmy, it's killing the community
Just like Facebook 😢
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.
Talican doing what Americant lol
Whitey Bulger: protected by the FBI for decades while being the biggest heroin importer in the northeast
Freeway Ricky Ross: supplied by the CIA with coke from the Contras, in a relationship mediated by a DEA informant
Golden Triangle heroin trade: controlled by the CIA for decades after the Korean War, arming and protecting manufacturers and traffickers, with heroin flown on CIA planes
The French Connection: French gangsters were protected by the CIA and allowed to import heroin to their primary market, the US, in exchange for keeping the port of Marseille out of the control of French communists
La Corporacion: the biggest Bolivian cocaine cartel, the "GM of cocaine", started with the cooperation and protection of the CIA according to a DEA agent whose investigations into them were repeatedly thwarted by the State Dept and CIA
the USA has been doing this shit for a long time
Oh, but the USA has changed, they're tHe gOoD gUyS now lmfao
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 sackler family profited from afghani opium. I’m curious about your thought process.
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.
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.
Worth noting however than this source is questionable and probably shouldn't be used https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/mint-press-news/
Tankie propaganda on lemmy?
I'm shocked. /s
Well, what else is there to say? You've gotta hand it to the Taliban.
Are there any moderators on here? Mint press news.... Jesus
Well I mean barring your personal dislike of the source, it does report an objective fact: opium cash crop farming exploded under the US / Joint alliance occupation and decade+long anti insurgency war, and died out once they left.
And this objective fact DOES raise important questions: what in the hell was the US doing all this time? They had infinitely more resources than the Talibans do now to subsidize non opium crops for farmers, to encourage diversification and development, etc. Did they turn a blind eye to the mass scale poppy farming? If so, why? It generated huge sums, was it a strategic use of and encouragement of corruption of local Afghan administrators and tribal elite to "make the occupation easier"? Did some money return to western elements? What was the impact on world trafficking?
Like you can dislike mintpress news but IMO it's important to, now that the US/West occupation of Afghanistan is over, not swipe it all under the rug and investigate.
Fighting the Taliban? The objectives had nothing to do with the war on drugs. I thought it was well known that the reason there was hardly any opium farming in Afganistan before the invasion was because of the Taliban.
We can go on about how the invasion failed catastrophically but. This is just Afganistan going back to the way it was.
when the news article is correct but not liberal enough fro you.
When you are so deeply propagandized that seeing any different viewpoint causes you to cry for help.
If you're so much of an intellectual coward that the only thing you can do is cry propaganda when presented with a dissenting opinion, then you should go back to reddit.
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.
Gee, i wonder
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.
Weird headline. The US was trafficking heroin.
idk if the article mentions it but Afghanistan has often had a horrible opiate problem. The Taliban crackdown on poppy cultivation is one of a very, very small number of "I guess I have to give it to them in this one very specific instance".
And as near as I can tell there's nothing cynical about this. The Taliban wants to stop local opioid production because of the horrific harm it does to Afghanis.
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.
???
I'm obviously biased as an accursed tankie myself, but looking at this thread:
EDIT: I will also point out that the harshest criticism of the US here is from a user from your own instance. That wouldn't even be allowed on hexbear, so glass houses.
This isn't even your instance lmao.
Is... are you coming out as a fan of the heroin industrial complex here? Are you really mad we don't support Big Heroin ™️
All things I don't like are exactly the same, united in their nature of me not liking them.
edit: and nothing of value is lost.
Behold the Redditor
Another redditer who doesn't understand how federation works.
You see, brigading is when content that I am interested in is algorithmically prioritized in my feed and I interact with it. The more algorithmically prioritized the content is, the more it's an inorganic brigade.
Whenever leftists post outside of their home instance it inevitably breaks down into a rehashed version of "This is America, why can't you speak American?"
This entire thread is justification for telling hexbear to fuck off.
Why exactly? You have not given a reason. Vaguely gesturing at the thread full of people criticising the US is not a very good reason, unless you are an angry american nationalist.
Glad to see that your instance filter is working. Everyone should be free to curate the content they see.
For the benefit of others, checking your comment history, it is hilarious to me that you've never posted in your home instance even once and have the audacity to call us brigadiers.
lemm.ee user posts an article on lemmy.ml
random reactionary from a third instance: wtf how could hexbear do this
Look at all the users I blocked! LOOK HOW MUCH I DON'T CARE!!
Sorry, I'll turn the mind control machine off now
It's just like the good old days, where everything anyone didn't like on Reddit was because they were being bridaged by the Hexbaerinos.
Won’t somebody think of the opium trade!
"I'm so proud of my echo chamber! Want to see pictures? No critical thinking can touch me! hahaha!"
Kind of make sense that Opium is eradicated since there is an embargo preventing export, causing an economy collapse. Any government regardless of their ideology leanings that wants to preserve power would switch their cash crops into sustenance crops.
See Cuba and the DPRK after the 90s or China post-split
Again this is not a pro-Taliban statement, this is just how insurrection happens to take over a country by building a parallel economy and governance within the country or global economy (see 1st Chinese Civil War until the defeat of the KMT by the communist force)
Am i a wimp or was that article kinda long?
And full of lies and tankie propaganda.
There are no questions. Title is disingenuous.
The Taliban has people on the ground that don't have to worry about being ambushed. Just casually strolling farm to farm.
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.
"tankie" is when you understand cause and effect
What am I supposed to be defending here? I’m honestly confused.
Tankies under your bed. Tankies in your closet. Tankies everywhere. Spouse left you? Jodie's a Tankie. Kids don't love you? They're Tankies.
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¥!
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 tankies so blindly hate the US that they’ll give the Taliban a bj just to try to make the US look bad? wow...
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:
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?
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.
I'm pretty sure the Talibans (not to defend them, mind you), were already cracking down on poppy farming before 9/11 and the subsequent decade long war.
So how were they benefitting? Or do you mean to say the US and allied forces allowed mass poppy crop farming that was then utilized by the Taliban to fund itself? You know there is an alternative hypothesis: the US and other occupation allied forces tolerated poppy farming to pacify and win over tribal chiefs and keep corrupt Afghan officials squarely on their side. Maybe both were happening, who is to say.
The US doesn't need any help looking bad
it must be easy to say whatever you want when you don’t have to worry about facts, lol