USA failed to stop the drug trade (opium poppy crops) in that country, Taliban comes in a nuke that trade in 1 year, puts in question if the Americans were in fact running the drug trade themselves under their rule.
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
They were naturally. Opium is historically a tool of colonial oppressers. Asian opium dens were only a thing after the British Empire brought it to their communities. Gary Web famously shot himself in the head twice after exposing the CIA as the one offloading crack into the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area kick-starting the crack epidemic. Drugs like crack, opium, and other highly addictive drugs help maintain control and division among the exploited population. Pain killers and fentanyl are the new Crack Cocaine of our time. Even if they were not making a direct profit off the opium trade at the time, it did them no good to stop it. It only supported their efforts of looting and plundering.
The Taliban is willing to murder people to keep them in line. The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially that would have bern needed to stop the drug trade.
Edit: EXTRAJUDICIALLY means without a trial or in this case as a directive from the WH. They aren’t in theory just murdering for the sake of murdering. The Tailban, on the other hand, are less focused on trials for these people though they are turning a blind eye to the growth of the opium trade post 2021 takeover.
The US is willing to kill hundreds of thousands (millions) of people for trying to pass things like small labor reforms i.e the Jakarta Method in Indonesia
Americans are the drug trade, the world supply of opium dropped to almost nothing after Americans retreated from Afghanistan and the Taliban re-established their already right-wing, pre-American invasion policies on poppy crops.
The drug war funds the CIA black budget the same way Civil Asset Forfeiture funds your local police department.
The USA is willing to let other people kill people in Jakarta. The US military is not doing it themselves which is the difference here. The US DoD would have to sign off on the extrajudicial killings of Afghani civilians vs not engaging in war crimes to stop killing in Indonesia.
The rest of your post compounds on that ignorance.
I’m sorry what? What do you think the US was doing in Afghanistan for 20 years. The US loves an extrajudicial killing.
The Taliban have achieved this by offering better prices for food crops, which is what they need due to us sanctions. So it turns out that the us did have the power all along.
Also, that’s another thing the us likes to do, starve countries that don’t dance to their tune.
Your first paragraph makes it clear you don’t understand what extrajudicial means. Is there any point in reading past there?
The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially
Lol ahahaha good one! Lmfao
Key word is “extrajudicial”. We could easily have stopped the drug trade if Americans were willing to accept the wholesale destruction of Afghanistan.
The Taliban is willing to murder people to keep them in line. The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA holy shit people actually believe this.
Have you read the Jakarta Method?
They are an idiot troll and I feel like I wasted my time reading through their deranged contributions to this thread.
But your book recommendation made it worth it! Thanks!
The US was willing to kill half a million Iraqi children to prevent Saddam Hussein from rebuilding Iraq.
What the fuck are you talking about? The first war was over the invasion of Kuwait. The second war was to steal oil. At no time did we attack to prevent Sadam from rebuilding.
The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially that would have bern needed to stop the drug trade.
this might unironically be the funniest and most incorrect statement ever posted. it’s so divorced from reality that you must have typoed and meant some other place. the US has not once ever stopped murdering tens of thousands – or even millions – of people for the sake of a quick buck. please, dear god, listen to the Blowback podcast. you’re talking about the military that firebombed Korea so hard that people had to live in caves in order to survive after virtually every single city was completely and totally leveled, kill 20% of the population, all to institute a despotic police state in the name of repressing every single progressive tendency in the population.
This might actually take the award for Most Unhinged Comment Since Federation. Holy fucking shit.
Fuck the Taliban and the US war machine, they are both fucking assholes esp. the way Americans ran the fuck away from AFGHANISTAN, but facts are fact, Taliban nuked that trade while the US allowed it to flourished. It does not make Taliban better in general, they are still close minded, uneducated door knobs, just like half the US rednecks.
The Taliban closed the opium trade but the big picture is they are still exporting low-value form commodities (raw oil, ore) instead of retaining enough surplus to develop the means to produce high-value form goods (gasoline, electronics, stainless steel medical needles) which is what a left wing government would (did, 1987-1992) do.
If the U.S Government was unsuccessful in supplying and elevating the Gorbachev clique into power and unsuccessful in arming the Mujahideen+ affiliates (which consolidated into the Taliban), the Republic of Afghanistan would probably have fully secularized and industrialized by now.
Any space for right extremism would have been taken up by universal high education, land-reform, cyberneticist economic planning, advanced high-value production and other zero-poverty + full-employment initiatives.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/Opium_cultivation_Afghanistan_2022.pdf
It has grown since the Taliban took it back
They aren’t in theory just murdering for the sake of murdering.
or in this case as a directive from the WH.
wasn’t useless for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin
Don’t forget the tens of thousands of dead civilians.
Well the war machine did a bang up job at preventing Ghadaffi from implementing gold backed currency to keep our scam money system going.
So THAT’S where my affordable housing and groceries went!
