So the Taliban Pulled Up and Overthrew.

I’ve been saying it since 2001. This war will never end. Without the integration of westernized/ progressive culture, you’re always going to have religious based conflict.
 
kingkoopa said:
RustyShackleford RustyShackleford your thoughts please
Click to expand...
Page 10809 and onward in the Political Thread I have numerous posts regarding the situation

If you a summary:

-Taliban taking over again was destined to happen. Nearly everyone thought it would happen eventually, Trump included. The shock is it happened so quickly with such little resistance

-The president to blame for this situation is neither Biden nor Trump, it is Bush. We should have never gone over there, and even if 9/11 pushed us in that direction he still botched it worse than anyone

-Afghanistan is nearly impossible to hold. The British Empire failed, the Russians were more murderous than us and failed, we failed. If someone else tries, they will fail.

-The Afghan government is corrupt and had little interest in stopping the Taliban

-The Afghan military rolled over faster than most predicted, but I don't blame these dudes for not wanting to die for a hopeless fight

-A lot of Afghans wanted the US gone

-The biggest mistake the Biden Admin made was assuming the Afghan army would be able to hold off the Taliban for at least 6 months. After a little while, they just gave up, and let them take over. Which caused the panic to evacuate so quickly this weekend.

-I feel really sad for all the people whose lives will be affected by this

-I hope we can get all our collaborators out of the country in time

-The US should be willing to takin in million of refugees but this country will never do that. At best the people who aided the military will be let in

-Most dudes that will Monday morning quarterback this will be wrong. Because they will treat foreign policy/middle east policy/Afghan policy like it is a game instead of a complex situation that has been misrepresented in your news for decades.

-People will complain about the US's exit, but nearly will offer no good alternative strategy of what should have been done. Conservatives, progressives, and "both sides" dudes that are inclined to criticize Biden will ignore a lot to make their simplistic take work. Again, Bush is the President people should be upset at all things considered.

So in short, this was a 20-year ****show that ended in a 3-day **** show.
 
It’s sink or we swim time for the Afghan people. 20 plus years of an unjust war or expanding upon that wasn’t going to happen in a positive way regardless. As with anything……it’s up to the people of that county decide what they want. Nobody can want something more than you in life…….or survival of country.
 
I still remember how "radical" it was to say we should leave even 5 years after, the "moderate approach" was a well timed evacuation. How history has laughed at those idiots
 
RustyShackleford said:
Page 10809 and onward in the Political Thread I have numerous posts regarding the situation

If you a summary:

-Taliban taking over again was destined to happen. Nearly everyone thought it would happen eventually, Trump included. The shock is it happened so quickly with such little resistance

-The president to blame for this situation is neither Biden nor Trump, it is Bush. We should have never gone over there, and even if 9/11 pushed us in that direction he still botched it worse than anyone

-Afghanistan is nearly impossible to hold. The British Empire failed, the Russians were more murderous than us and failed, we failed. If someone else tries, they will fail.

-The Afghan government is corrupt and had little interest in stopping the Taliban

-The Afghan military rolled over faster than most predicted, but I don't blame these dudes for not wanting to die for a hopeless fight

-A lot of Afghans wanted the US gone

-The biggest mistake the Biden Admin made was assuming the Afghan army would be able to hold off the Taliban for at least 6 months. After a little while, they just gave up, and let them take over. Which caused the panic to evacuate so quickly this weekend.

-I feel really sad for all the people whose lives will be affected by this

-I hope we can get all our collaborators out of the country in time

-The US should be willing to takin in million of refugees but this country will never do that. At best the people who aided the military will be let in

-Most dudes that will Monday morning quarterback this will be wrong. Because they will treat foreign policy/middle east policy/Afghan policy like it is a game instead of a complex situation that has been misrepresented in your news for decades.

-People will complain about the US's exit, but nearly will offer no good alternative strategy of what should have been done. Conservatives, progressives, and "both sides" dudes that are inclined to criticize Biden will ignore a lot to make their simplistic take work. Again, Bush is the President people should be upset at all things considered.

So in short, this was a 20-year ****show that ended in a 3-day **** show.
Click to expand...
Great job
 
It's a unfortunate situation. The Taliban is going to enforce the Sharia Laws and erase any progress we made the last 20 years. Hopefully some of the more progressive areas can break off and form there own autonomous societies. Afghanistan was always more of a collection of separate regional groups rather than whole country anyways and something tells me the border changes will reflect that in the coming years.
 
wballz said:
Why stay if there is no oil or Gold ?
Click to expand...

once we started "helping" post 9/11 it's no coincidence that we suddenly had an opioid crisis in America as well. they've been using this same play for decades. US is responsible for training some people who went on to Al-Queda/ Taliban..... We now have to send troops to fight those very same people & also fund an "opposition". Constant war for 20 years, TRILLIONS spent..... we know the military is GREAT with allocating funds :lol:.

Not to mention you take a community with deep religious ties, practices & strength & shake it to it's core with Drug abuse, while simultaneously doing the same in America both legally through the drug companies & illegally. Destabilize a community through drugs, profit heavily off of the drug trade, "police" that community without ever offering real solutions or stability & leave them to fend for themselves....... where have we seen this before??? :smh:

Might as well name this Crack Era: Afghanistan Remix

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ev7kzw/afghanistans-opium-economy-is-doing-better-than-ever

Afghanistan's opium production is set to break records this year — a booming illicit economy in a country with few opportunities.
AS
By Alice Speri
May 21, 2014, 8:25am
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PHOTO VIA ISAF
Despite billions spent in eradication efforts, Afghanistan’s opium harvest is set to break all records this year, as one of the country’s primary agricultural activities and most profitable export trades blooms in the midst of an uncertain political and military transition.
Afghanistan produced tons of opium in 2013 — an estimated 6,062 tons in fact, — growing its output for the third consecutive year, and up 36 percent from the year before.
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The hike followed a short-lived drop in production as international and Afghan officials attempted to eradicate cultivation of the delicate plant, which produces the main ingredient used in heroin.
As most foreign troops prepare to leave by year’s end, likely followed out the door by billions in development aid, Afghanistan’s blossoming illicit trade is a reflection of many of the uncertainties ahead — as the country deals with massive unemployment, a fragile security, and the fear of losing ground on progress made in the last few years.
The US just can’t stop blowing billions in Afghanistan. Read more here.
Afghanistan’s opium economy is bad news to the country’s growing population of drug addicts — up to 1.5 million, according to the UN, — and as all illicit trades, it is vulnerable to violence and abuse.
But it may not be such bad news for the country's economy and political stability, as things in Afghanistan might actually be worse without it.
For one, opium employs a lot of people. And at least until the end of harvesting season, it keeps them too busy to join the insurgency.
'The alternative right now would be huge political instability and it would also be huge unemployment.'
Click to expand...
“There’s no legal economy in Afghanistan that can match the profits and the amount of people opium can employ,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and expert on counter-narcotic efforts in Afghanistan, told VICE News.
Opium is both profitable and labor-intensive, an important combination in a country with some 400,000 people entering the workforce every year. To put things in perspective, if the 806 square miles Afghans cultivated with opium last year were to grow wheat instead, they would employ about 20 percent of the people currently working on opium fields, Felbab-Brown said.
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“What we really need to ask ourselves is, is it bad to have this illicit economy? It probably is bad, but is it much worse than the alternative? The alternative right now would be huge political instability and it would also be huge unemployment,” she said. “So yes, it’s undesirable that there is a major illicit economy that constitutes so much of the country’s GDP, but there’s just no way to walk away from that.”

PHOTO VIA ISAF
Is an Illicit Economy Better than no Economy?
But if the opium economy is illicit and fraught with potential for violence and devastating public health implications, it is an economy nonetheless, and a thriving one at that.
Afghanistan produced 75 percent of the world’s heroin supply in 2013, and it’s on its way to produce as much as 90 percent this year. The country is also one of the world's top exporters of cannabis — mostly hashish.
“You have a sector, the poppy cultivation, which provides employment for more than 200,000 families in Afghanistan and accounts for 73 million hours of labor annually," A****a Mittal, acting country director for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Kabul told VICE News. "Those are huge numbers we are talking about.”
'Right now, growing opium makes more money than anything else for Afghan farmers so it’s going to be very hard to stomp out.'
Click to expand...
In the early 2000s, the $18 billion-worth trade accounted for as much as 50 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP, she noted, and was down to about 15 percent of it last year. But Afghanistan — which doomsayers have dubbed a "narcostate" years ago — lacks the determination to do away from such profits, despite massive financial incentives to do so, including some $7.5 billion from the US alone.
"The US has put three times more money on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan than it did in Colombia, but what distinguishes Colombia from Afghanistan is the political will that was demonstrated by the ruling parties there," Mittal said. "Unless there's a firm commitment from the top, it's not going to change. Perhaps the new government will be an opportunity to place this on the agenda."
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The profits of the opium trade, she added, are not exactly enriching the country's most destitute. While the economic impact trickles down somewhat, the largely poor farmers harvesting the white and pink poppy blooms are not the ones reaping the profits.
It’s spring in Afghanistan, time for Taliban fighting season. Read more here.
Local warlords and the Taliban often have their hands in the trade, but it is wealthy elites with deep ties to the country’s government that have no interest in seeing the opium cultivation stop.
“Afghanistan is a very corrupt country, we all know that. It’s an opportunity, when there is weak governance, when there is insecurity, and where there is a culture of impunity,” Mittal said. “These levels of cultivation cannot take place without the cognizance of several actors, from top to bottom. After all, it’s not an invisible crop, you can actually see where it’s growing and that just goes to show that it’s under the patronage of someone.”
At the end of the day, there’s too much money to be made in opium for eradication to really work — at least until better economic opportunities become available, which could take decades.
“It’s economics: growing poppy is the most profitable agricultural activity in a country where the industry is overwhelmingly agricultural,” Graeme Smith, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group based in Kabul, told VICE News. “Right now, growing opium makes more money than anything else for Afghan farmers so it’s going to be very hard to stomp out. The fact of the matter is that Afghanistan will continue to be the world’s leading opium producer probably for many years to come and the international community will need to help Afghanistan get off the sauce when it comes to finding another way to bring in hard currency.”
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Stupid Policies
But while it may keep people employed, Afghanistan’s thriving opium economy is also a testimony to one of the failures of US-led reconstruction efforts in the country.
The drug trade was never enough of a priority, critics said, and efforts to eradicate opium were not integrated within counterinsurgency strategies, despite the trade’s deep ties to the country’s politics.
And fighting the drug war, in many cases, promoted violence.
"Some of the counter-narcotics campaigns over the years have not just been useless, but actually dangerous," Smith said.
In a survey of Taliban fighters he carried out, he found that "a huge number of them had personal experience with poppy eradication. Someone they knew or someone in their family had their opium fields visited by eradicators who slashed and burned the fields. There's a strong correlation between people who have their fields eradicated and people who decide to take up arms and fight the government."

AN AFGHAN POLICE OFFICER INSPECTS A BAG OF POPPY SEED IN NIMRUZ PROVINCE. PHOTO VIA ISAF
“We have never been able to integrate narcotics in a serious manner within the top priorities for Afghanistan,” Jean-Luc Lemahieu, UNODC’s director of policy analysis, told VICE News. “The underlying factor is the governance, the clientelism, the corruption, the fact that we have been pushing tons of money into the country over the last decade.”
Departing troops are leaving behind an explosive mess in Afghanistan. Read more here.
“We need to understand that development takes 10, 15, 20 years, and that will be no less for the narcotics agenda; we need a long term strategy,” he added.
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Some of the strategies deployed so far — including a massive campaign of eradication — failed to do that, and in fact did more damage than good. Eradication alone, Lemahieu charged, won’t cut it.
“It may look great on your opium map the year after, but it may have no sustainability and you may have increased the poverty and human rights abuses by threefold, fivefold,” he said.
'The best way to be a drug dealer in Afghanistan is to be part of the Afghan government or closely associated with it.'
Click to expand...
About 70 percent of the country’s opium is produced in three of the provinces targeted by the US military surge of 2009. But as soon as foreign troops started leaving those areas — including Helmand and Kandahar — production spiked back up.

PHOTO BY URSULA DONNER.
Eradication — destroying crops, naively hoping they won’t grow back — was a “stupid policy,” Felbab-Brown agreed.
“There were very simplistic notions that it could be somehow resolved quickly. But without being able to be specific, what would inevitably happen is that eradication would target the poorest sectors of society, and they would then become dependent on the support of the Taliban for basic survival, and consequently they would dislike the state and dislike the counterinsurgency, and strengthen their bond to militants like the Taliban,” she said. "Eradication strengthens the militants. Fighting intensifies because people are out of work."
Hope and fear as Afghan women head to the polls. Read more here.
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Where they were implemented, eradication policies were both uneven and subject to the whims of corrupt local elites. “Most of the times they simply eradicated the plots of their political rivals or of poor farmers who don’t have enough money to bribe the eradication team,” Felbab-Brown added.
'There are enough reasons, all bad ones, for Afghanistan to be very vulnerable to addiction, and with that enormous supply that's exactly what's happening.'
Click to expand...
Similarly, an effort to go after opium cultivations tied to the Taliban served the interests of drug growers on the authorities’ good books, contributing to the development of a much more powerful and integrated criminal industry, and “sending the message that the best way to be a drug dealer in Afghanistan is to be part of the Afghan government or closely associated with it. This drives to all sorts of nasty characters with lots of political and economic power," according to Felbab-Brown.
Eventually, economists say, Afghanistan’s opium output will level back down, because of a saturated market and dropping prices.
Raw opium prices have fluctuated with the country’s politics — from $80 a kilogram at the beginning of the surge, to $300 one year later.

AN OPIUM ADDICT AT A DETOX CENTER IN MAZAR-I-SHARIF. PHOTO VIA FLICKR
But until then, the public health costs (about $300 million a year) associated to being the world’s leading opium producer will continue to be huge, because if Afghanistan exports tons of opium, it is also increasingly consuming a lot.
Opium addiction has been on the rise across all classes in Afghanistan — a sad "social equalizer," Mittal said — and it has particularly impacted the country's large population of returning refugees, coming home to a country devastated by decades of war and with few opportunities.
“Demand creates supply but supply creates demand too,” Lemahieu said. "There are enough reasons, all bad ones, for Afghanistan to be very vulnerable to addiction, and with that enormous supply that's exactly what's happening. The addiction rates are going up and the government does not have the resources to deal with it. It's very tragic."
Follow Alice Speri on Twitter: @alicesperi
Photo via Flickr
Click to expand...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/isafmedia/3455510738/in/set-72157616946194255#
 
America should have stayed out to begin with.

"Freedom", "helping", "progress". FOH.

US created the Taliban by funding/helping the Mujahideen. They didnt care about the Afghan people, they were shook of the possibility the Soviets winning that war and taking control.

9/11 and everything after is BS. Those terrorists were all Saudis. Bin Laden, Saudi. The US puppets in the ME. Bush's business partner and "bestie". "Fighting for freedom", FOH. America is an enterprise, people profited off that **** and made an already poor country even worse.
 
The article says America's invasion hurt the opioid production in Afghanistan

And generally, people put the opioid crisis as starting before we went over there

OxyContin that helped fuel the rise of the epidemic was introduced in 1996

Even if America never goes to Afghanistan, the opioid crisis probably still happens
 
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Last edited:
"The Taliban have 80,000 troops in comparison with a nominal 300,699 serving the Afghan government, yet the whole country has been effectively overrun in a matter of weeks as military commanders surrendered without a fight in a matter of hours."

www.theguardian.com

A tale of two armies: why Afghan forces proved no match for the Taliban

Poorly led and riddled with corruption, the Afghan army was overrun in a matter of weeks
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

"The Sigar report found that from 2005 the US military had been seeking to evaluate the battle-readiness of the troops they had been training, but by 2010 acknowledged that its monitoring and evaluation procedures “failed to measure more intangible readiness factors, such as leadership, corruption and motivation – all factors that could affect a unit’s ability to put its staffing and equipment to use during actual war-fighting”.

The assessment mechanism changed again in 2013, but in 2014, with few signs of progress emerging, it was decided that the assessment reports should become classified. The focus shifted from battalions to command headquarters."
 
brendasdeadbaby said:
Were we suppose to leave troops stationed there forever?
Click to expand...
Biden 100% made the right decision to leave but what people are criticizing is how QUICKLY he left.

アキラ said:
So is it true that the US trained and equipped over 300k Afghanistan soldiers to build up their military?

What happened to them? I'm hearing they didn't want to fight and backed down?
Click to expand...
This is what I saw at first too but Al Jazeera reported APPARENTLY that the afghan president told the military to stand down and not rescue and attack due to a US withdrawal treaty he signed with trump or something

but like rusty said up there I’m sure corruption was the main reason
the president of Afghanistan left his country in a helicopter and bags full of cash
 
Zainjal26 said:
the president of Afghanistan left his country in a helicopter and bags full of cash
Click to expand...

Wouldn’t surprise me one bit. I feel awful for the people who will be suffering from the Taliban, you know they’re going to back to the old ways of mistreating people. Especially the women :smh: Still though, what else could the U.S. do after doing 20 years there?

I’m cool with pulling back now and spending that money on taking care of home. This virus is still doing numbers here and folks having a tough time getting by.
 
Zainjal26 said:
Biden 100% made the right decision to leave but what people are criticizing is how QUICKLY he left.


This is what I saw at first too but Al Jazeera reported APPARENTLY that the afghan president told the military to stand down and not rescue and attack due to a US withdrawal treaty he signed with trump or something

but like rusty said up there I’m sure corruption was the main reason
the president of Afghanistan left his country in a helicopter and bags full of cash
Click to expand...
Yeah, to say it’s the USA’s fault is a cop out. That places leadership let that place go

Now take those funds no longer spent on “defending” that area and cut me several more stimulus checks, put it towards education, etc.
 
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