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1y ago

Taliban's Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along

www.mintpressnews.com Taliban's Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along

Imperialism and illicit drugs commonly go together. However, with Taliban opium eradication efforts in full effect, heroin is in short supply, and experts fear that a new fentanyl crisis could be brewing in the US.

601 comments

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:
It's easy (certainly for a state actor) dark money
It's ubiquitous
It gives you blackmail material on all sorts of useful people
It gives you the proven ability to smuggle bulk quantities across the globe
Who is going to blow the whistle on you?

A reminder that the Taliban only exists because the US funded the Mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war
- 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.
- "I'll stand by our Mujahideen brothers until the end!"

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.

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."

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:
  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?
- 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

This image is damning

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.

I had a bunch of friends who went to Afghanistan/Iraq and they were protecting poppy and marijuana fields

Lmao
You mean the US wasn't trying to eliminate heroin production

"...but at what cost?!?!" These lizards deserve a whole lot of things.

Talican doing what Americant lol

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- 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?
- pseudoscience anti-Israel propaganda
  Lol what is this even supposed to mean
  
  It means they peddle far-left conspiracy theories like Palestinian children needing water and food to survive which is something that Israeli scientists have debunked
  
  I suspect it’s just a typo and should say:
  pseudoscience, anti-Israel propaganda
- fucking liberal
  
  can’t argue based on facts, so you just hurl insults. typical
- I embrace the far left bias
  if you don't, I wonder which bias you accept
- 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?
- Appeal to Authority. Genetic Fallacy.
- Damn, this website really gets your goat doesn't it?

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.
- Turns out they were also attempting to monopolize the worlds heroin supply too, a major success on those lines too.

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
Ronald Stark: the world's biggest manufacturer and supplier of LSD for a period after its criminalization, sole supplier of late-period Brotherhood of Eternal Love, threw parties at the US embassy in Brussels, sent letters using their letterhead, and when he was finally arrested in Italy, the judge in his case accused the CIA of protecting him
the USA has been doing this shit for a long time
- Oh, but the USA has changed, they're tHe gOoD gUyS now lmfao
- Hmmm, what could this mountain of evidence possibly mean?

Well, what else is there to say? You've gotta hand it to the Taliban.

Gee, i wonder

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.

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.

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.
- I think you should lie down
- 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.

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)

601 comments

Mint Press News – Bias and Credibility

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