Middle East Thread: Clarissa Explains the Fall

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Middle East Thread: Clarissa Explains the Fall

WoodrowSkillson: Feb 24, 2005; *Gestures at 60 years of Lions history*

Sinteres posted:

I'm genuinely curious to know why you think the US even wants there to be more heroin in the first place. This all feels like super motivated reasoning. Like you're basically just assuming the US is nothing but a cartoonishly evil organization bent on global mayhem and then working backwards from there.

to be fair that is a good default position for most things, since by virtue of our sheer stupidity and incompetence, the US does act like that most of the time, even if that was not the actual intent of the moron in charge.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:15

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 24, 2024 22:07

mobby_6kl: Aug 9, 2009; by Fluffdaddy

The conspiracy would make sense if the CIA was selling the drugs to fund illegal poo poo (because they've done it). Just making more heroin is :confused:

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:18

Eric Cantonese: Dec 21, 2004; You should hear my accent.

mobby_6kl posted:

The conspiracy would make sense if the CIA was selling the drugs to fund illegal poo poo (because they've done it). Just making more heroin is

What if the CIA just wants to chase the dragon?!?

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:19

Terminal autist: May 17, 2018; by vyelkin

Sinteres posted:

I'm genuinely curious to know why you think the US even wants there to be more heroin in the first place. This all feels like super motivated reasoning. Like you're basically just assuming the US is nothing but a cartoonishly evil organization bent on global mayhem and then working backwards from there.

The cia uses drug smuggling to fund operations, this is not a conspiracy, this is documented historical fact.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:21

Lost Time: Sep 28, 2012; All necessities, provided. All anxieties, tranquilized. All boredom, amused.

Sinteres posted:

I don't think the neocons particularly gave a poo poo about restarting the opium trade at all, so I don't see it as a lucky coincidence. Obviously the US got involved in both opium destruction and opium protection over the course of the war, but I certainly don't think it was a US objective to increase opium production when we invaded. In the early years my understanding is that we were mostly destroying it until that was viewed as counterproductive to the war effort.

We got interested in opium because we were there, we didn't invade because we were interested in opium.

It's not that we invaded for the opium, but in the positives list column of doing a forever war in Afghanistan and figuring out who to support against the Taliban, I think opium was pretty high up on the list. We're talking $$$$ just like with any bomb or oil or gas extraction.

And since the USA mission after 2001 was to immediately forget about OBL while opium production surged, I agree that the war definitively became more about the resources then and less the nation building and helping women or punishing the Taliban for hosting Al-Qaeda, where we already knew there was very minimal presence there.

https://twitter.com/RealAlexRubi/status/1426324940270284800

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:24

Flip Yr Wig: Feb 21, 2007; Oh please do go on; Fun Shoe

Because the drug trade intersects with all kinds of foreign policy interests, it's better to understand the war on drugs as constant intervention in the global supply chain of drugs without a specific end-goal in mind. While it certainly isn't actually about eliminating the global drug trade, it's not really about boosting it either. It's about using the legal pretext of curbing drugs as a means to meddle with farmers, traffickers, and other people involved in the trade when that meddling serves a US interest.

The invasion of Afghanistan's end goal was much more about paying contractors and arms manufacturers, but it also gave the US the means to control a massive commodity that it already has legal pretext to curb the production of, if that seems useful in the moment.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:24

Dr Kool-AIDS: Mar 26, 2004

I'm just going to say I still don't think the US spent trillions of dollars to secure heroin to fund black ops it could have easily paid for far more cheaply.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:28

Grip it and rip it: Apr 28, 2020

Didnt the CIA and all of the US intelligence agencies get a blank check after 9/11 anyway?

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:39

WoodrowSkillson: Feb 24, 2005; *Gestures at 60 years of Lions history*

Grip it and rip it posted:

Didnt the CIA and all of the US intelligence agencies get a blank check after 9/11 anyway?

Yes, they could have spent billions on $100,000 hammers and never faced any repercussion.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:41

Dr Kool-AIDS: Mar 26, 2004

Grip it and rip it posted:

Didnt the CIA and all of the US intelligence agencies get a blank check after 9/11 anyway?

Yeah, they got massively larger budgets and I'm pretty sure a larger proportion of what was spent was hidden from view than before too.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:42

Darth Walrus: Feb 13, 2012

This is a pretty good, well-sourced article on Afghanistan as a narcostate:

quote:

The effect of the occupation was to expand drug production to unprecedented new proportions, Afghanistan becoming, in Professor McCoy�s estimation, the world�s first true narco-state. McCoy notes that by 2008, opium was responsible for well over half of the country�s gross domestic product. By comparison, even in Colombia�s darkest days, cocaine accounted for only 3% of its GDP.

Today, the United Nations estimates that around 6,300 tons of opium (and rising) is produced yearly, with 224,000 hectares � an area almost the size of Rhode Island � planted with poppy fields.

But even while it was financing a widespread and deadly aerial spraying campaign in Colombia, the United States refused to countenance the same policy in Afghanistan. �We cannot be in a situation where we remove the only source of income of people who live in the second poorest country in the world without being able to provide them with an alternative,� said NATO spokesman James Appathurai.

Not everyone agreed, however, that a passionate commitment to defending the quality of life of the poorest was the actual reason for rejecting the policy. Matthew Hoh, a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps is one skeptic. Hoh told MintPress that airborne fumigation was not carried out because it would be outside the control of Afghan government officials, who were deeply implicated in the drug trade, owning poppy fields and production plants themselves. �They were afraid that, if they went to aerial eradication, the U.S. pilots would just eradicate willy nilly and a lot of their own poppy fields would be hit.� In 2009, Hoh resigned in protest from his position at the State Department in Zabul Province over the government�s continued occupation of Afghanistan. He told MintPress:

NATO forces were more or less guarding poppy fields and poppy production, under the guise of counterinsurgency. The logic was �we don�t want to take away the livelihoods of the people.� But really, what we were doing at that point was protecting the wealth of our friends in power in Afghanistan. �

According to Hoh, there was widespread disillusionment within the military among service members who had to risk their lives on a day to day basis. �What are we doing here? This is bullshit,� was a common sentiment among the rank and file.

The heroin trade implicated virtually everyone in power, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai�s brother Ahmed Wali, among the biggest and most notorious drug kingpins in the south of the country, a man widely understood to be in the pay of the CIA.

U.S. attempts to stymie the opium trade, such as the policy of paying domestic militias to destroy poppy fields, often backfired. Locals came up with ways of profiting, such as refraining from planting in one area, collecting large sums of money from occupying forces, and using that cash to plant elsewhere � effectively getting paid both to plant and not to plant. Even worse, local warlords and drug bosses would destroy their rivals� crops and collect money from the U.S. for doing so, leaving themselves both enriched and in a stronger position than before, having gained NATO forces� favor.

One notable example of this is local strongman Gul Agha Sherzai, who eradicated his competitors� crops in Nangarhar Province (while quietly leaving his own in Kandahar Province untouched). But all the U.S. saw was a local politician seemingly committed to stamping out an illegal drug trade. They therefore showered him with money and other privileges. �We literally gave the guy $10 million in cash for rubbing out his competition,� Hoh said. �If you were going to write a movie about this, they�d say �This is too far fetched. No one is going to believe this. Nothing is this insane or stupid.� But that is the way it is.�

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:47

Lost Time: Sep 28, 2012; All necessities, provided. All anxieties, tranquilized. All boredom, amused.

Here's what we knew before we invaded:
- Northern Alliance would be our allies and men on the ground
- Northern Alliance was full of pedophile warlords
- Northern Alliance really liked opium production

America did not come out looking good on either of those fronts once the war began. It started bad, got worse, and now it all ends as one would've expected.

But a whole lot of people got rich along the way, and will face no repercussions. And then onto the next one while maintaining the ones still ongoing.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 17:57

Nenonen: Oct 22, 2009; Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

How are u posted:

What about hopium?

It's made from the poppy, clearly it should be popium :catholic:

# ? Aug 17, 2021 18:01

mobby_6kl: Aug 9, 2009; by Fluffdaddy

So this whole nation-building disaster made me think, how did the soviets do it with the other Stans? I understand there might've been some light ethnic cleansing goin on, but were those places in better shape to begin with? Did they do hearts and minds or just sent everyone inconvenient to siberia?

I'll definitely try to read up on that but if anyone is already familiar with it, it'd be interesting to compare.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 19:21

nessin: Feb 7, 2010

mobby_6kl posted:

So this whole nation-building disaster made me think, how did the soviets do it with the other Stans? I understand there might've been some light ethnic cleansing goin on, but were those places in better shape to begin with? Did they do hearts and minds or just sent everyone inconvenient to siberia?

I'll definitely try to read up on that but if anyone is already familiar with it, it'd be interesting to compare.

A combination of several factors. Famine, loss of the people who would resist in WW2, no qualms about use of labor and prison camps. Probably the biggest though is the population redistribution the Soviets did across the country. Suddenly have a significant "other" population means you've got a target for frustration that isn't rebellion and some of that effort put into pushing back against the Soviet's gets put on others.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 19:53

Randarkman: Jul 18, 2011

mobby_6kl posted:

So this whole nation-building disaster made me think, how did the soviets do it with the other Stans? I understand there might've been some light ethnic cleansing goin on, but were those places in better shape to begin with? Did they do hearts and minds or just sent everyone inconvenient to siberia?

I'll definitely try to read up on that but if anyone is already familiar with it, it'd be interesting to compare.

Well, the Soviet Union first of inherited what was already there from the Russian Empire, which really was a kind of colonial frontier region with locals practising traditional nomads and a small but growing population of Russian colonists, farmers, urban workers, government bureaucrats and soldiers.

The new thing the Soviets added to the picture, particularly from the mid and late 20s was an objective (involved in this were also local native communist cadres) of turning these natives into modern socialist nationalities. Under Stalin and the collectivization and industrialization schemes carried out at the time in the Soviet Union, this became very tied up with attempts to eradicate pastoral nomadism and settle the natives on new collective farms that were enviisoned to cultivate goods for export to the rest of the Soviet Union, particularly cattle meat (later you also have the focus on establishing the region as a cotton growing center).

It should be noted that in Kazakhstan this was an absolute disaster, creating a famine that ravaged the native Kazakh population specifically, killing between 1 and a half and 2 million people, about 90 % of them ethnic Kazakhs, around a third of whom perished during this famine, with many others fleeing to neighboring countries, essentially emptying Kazakhstan itself to which was added more Russian settlers as well forcibly resettled ethnicities from other parts of the country. Kazakhstan did have the reputation of being the most Russified and prosperous of the Central Asian republics during the Soviet era, but it also bears mentioning that during this time the majority of the population actually were Russian (many of these left as much of the Kazakh diaspora were allowed to return following the collapse of the Soviet Union, reversing the demographic situation).

The rest of Central Asia didn't face disaster on the same level, nor later relative success either, and many of the Soviet agricultural and industrial projects in the region had profound negative ecological effects down the line. The somewhat arbitrary sorting of populations into different nationalities and drawing up of borders alongside that is also something that has been problematic post-independence.

It could also be worth mentioning that part of the Soviet rationale for intervening to save the Afghan communist regime, of whom they were not really fond at all, was a fear that with the revolution in Iran and the looming collapse of the government in Afghanistan, Islamic revolutionary unrest might spread to and destabilize Soviet Central Asia.

For some more info on the Kazakh famine here's an article (and video presentation) from a historian who wrote a book on it, also deals some with the efforts to create the new Soviet nationalities in Central Asia, so it has some general information on Soviet nation-building and colonization of Central Asia as well.

Also by the way, calling what went on in Soviet Central Asia "light ethnic cleansing" is gross, though I assume it wasn't really on purpose.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 20:01

Saladman: Jan 12, 2010

Randarkman posted:

[A bunch of recent Kazakh history]

Also by the way, calling what went on in Soviet Central Asia "light ethnic cleansing" is gross, though I assume it wasn't really on purpose.

Jesus, I had no idea of any of that -- and certainly not anywhere to that scale. I assume what he meant by "light ethnic cleansing" would be "policies that generally favored ethnic Russians and disfavored ethnic Kazakhs/Uzbeks/Turkmen/Tajiks/Kyrgyz/etc but without explicitly forcing anything" which is what I had thought went on in central Asia under the USSR.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 20:28

Elias_Maluco: Aug 23, 2007; I need to sleep

https://twitter.com/BurgerPilled/status/1427547500773322767

# ? Aug 17, 2021 20:41

Dr Kool-AIDS: Mar 26, 2004

I wish that was real.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 20:48

Herstory Begins Now: Aug 5, 2003; SOME REALLY TEDIOUS DUMB SHIT THAT SUCKS ASS TO READ ->>

Elias_Maluco posted:

https://twitter.com/BurgerPilled/status/1427547500773322767

wait until they get to the marine barracks' 'prank' dildo collection

Sinteres posted:

I wish that was real.

next you're gonna tell me he didn't taze himself in the balls to death

# ? Aug 17, 2021 21:08

Grip it and rip it: Apr 28, 2020

Lost Time posted:

It's not that we invaded for the opium, but in the positives list column of doing a forever war in Afghanistan and figuring out who to support against the Taliban, I think opium was pretty high up on the list. We're talking $$$$ just like with any bomb or oil or gas extraction.

And since the USA mission after 2001 was to immediately forget about OBL while opium production surged, I agree that the war definitively became more about the resources then and less the nation building and helping women or punishing the Taliban for hosting Al-Qaeda, where we already knew there was very minimal presence there.

https://twitter.com/RealAlexRubi/status/1426324940270284800

You think the USA made a pros / cons list in the aftermath of 9/11?

# ? Aug 17, 2021 22:51

Lost Time: Sep 28, 2012; All necessities, provided. All anxieties, tranquilized. All boredom, amused.

Grip it and rip it posted:

You think the USA made a pros / cons list in the aftermath of 9/11?

Pros/cons about their list of targets to attack and to regime change and what they can get out of each one, which guided their blueprint for the ensuing War on Terror.

# ? Aug 17, 2021 23:59

Dr Kool-AIDS: Mar 26, 2004

I think a lot of what we ended up doing in Afghanistan for 20 years was a continuity (even after it stopped being true) of 'oh gently caress we didn't catch him so now we have to pretend we're here for democracy promotion and poo poo.' And conveniently there were a lot of guys in the government around that time who genuinely believed in democracy promotion, and liberals who genuinely bought in on the promoting women's rights part, so it dovetailed with distracting people from the fact that the invasion had failed to achieve its top emotional priority, even if the top practical priority of disrupting AQ networks actually had been accomplished.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:01

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Saladman posted:

Jesus, I had no idea of any of that -- and certainly not anywhere to that scale. I assume what he meant by "light ethnic cleansing" would be "policies that generally favored ethnic Russians and disfavored ethnic Kazakhs/Uzbeks/Turkmen/Tajiks/Kyrgyz/etc but without explicitly forcing anything" which is what I had thought went on in central Asia under the USSR.

Same.

I was also going to say: it probably mattered what sort of exposure to the outside world these various countries had prior to large-scale foreign intervention.

With Soviet intervention followed by civil war and the Taliban and now the American occupation, there's this view that Afghanistan is exceptionally cut off from the modern world. But it was not always so; if you look up the even fairly recent history of the Overland, it was arguably far more connected with the rest of the world at the dawn of serious imperialist attempts to gently caress with it than, say, some of the Central Asian former Soviet republics were when they were assimilated.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:02

Zedhe Khoja: Nov 10, 2017; sürgünden selamlar
yıkıcılar ulusuna

mobby_6kl posted:

So this whole nation-building disaster made me think, how did the soviets do it with the other Stans? I understand there might've been some light ethnic cleansing goin on, but were those places in better shape to begin with? Did they do hearts and minds or just sent everyone inconvenient to siberia?

I'll definitely try to read up on that but if anyone is already familiar with it, it'd be interesting to compare.

If you want a good in depth look the book my avatar is from is extremely good.
"Making Uzbekistan" by Adeeb Khalid, who specializes in the subject of central asian nationalism and statebuilding specifically. All respect to Cameron but her field of study is pretty much the mother of all warped lenses and it probably shouldn't be the first or only thing you read if your focus is on central asian nation-building and not the Kazakh famine.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:03

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

mobby_6kl posted:

The conspiracy would make sense if the CIA was selling the drugs to fund illegal poo poo (because they've done it). Just making more heroin is

Especially if the contention is that the US supply of heroin is largely non-Afghan. Surely it would be supply chains within the Americas that US government agencies would exert the greatest degree of control over? Wouldn't a reduction in supply from competing networks using Afghanistan mean the demand for your product goes up? If I was running some sort of massive clandestine government drug smuggling ring I'd be over the loving moon about a supply chain disruption on that scale; now its both easier and more profitable for my network to expand to countries previously obtaining their heroin supply from the Afghans.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:59

Count Roland: Oct 6, 2013

Sure enough, I go out in the woods for a few days and that's when poo poo really goes down.

Congrats to Boat Stuck for winning the pool. Thanks to all that ventured a guess.

I must say the fall of Kabul was a great deal less bloody than I thought it would be. I assumed some sort of fight would be put up. The scenes at the airport I just watched now were very disturbing and very Saigon-like but that so far seems to be the worst of it? The Taliban so far seem to be intelligently playing the role of a responsible government-in-waiting; frankly they've been a lot more responsible than the actual, "elected" government had been. It is so cowardly of Ghani to just up and flee the country, especially in light of those offers of a Taliban cease-fire with his resignation as a demand.

I'm hoping the Taliban doesn't go back to its old ways. For the short term I'm optimistic-- I don't think it will go back on its own statements immediately. But after a few months or a year when the government feels itself more firmly in power, that's when I think we'll really see what sort of Taliban we'll get.

In the meantime I'm curious what foreign governments will recognize the Taliban. I'd guess Pakistan as being the first to do so.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 02:32

AHH F/UGH: May 25, 2002

The bloodiest part of the whole thing was a guy ISIS-ing himself off of a plane, which sucks but yeah like at least not many people have been killed, I don't even think any Americans have died yet, precious as they are

# ? Aug 18, 2021 03:49

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lr8_OUa58c

# ? Aug 18, 2021 04:09

Lost Time: Sep 28, 2012; All necessities, provided. All anxieties, tranquilized. All boredom, amused.

mobby_6kl posted:

The conspiracy would make sense if the CIA was selling the drugs to fund illegal poo poo (because they've done it). Just making more heroin is

This literally happened with Afghanistan opium already. The CIA is basically the reasons it even became a thing in that country. And opium has been used the last 20 years to fund the corrupt, two-faced American regime there that was up to a lot of illegal poo poo.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2010/03/31/opium-wars-afghanistan

quote:

CIA Covert Warfare, Spreading Poppy Fields, and Drug Labs: the 1980s
[...]
This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold War years. First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet conventional warfare led to the devastation of Afghanistan's fragile highland ecology, damaging its traditional agriculture beyond immediate recovery, and fostering a growing dependence on the international drug trade. Of equal import, instead of conducting this covert warfare on its own as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War years, the CIA outsourced much of the operation to Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which soon became a powerful and ever more problematic ally.

[...]Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.

Once the Afghan guerrillas brought the opium across the border, they sold it to hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs operating under the ISI's protection. Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan's opium production grew ten-fold -- from 250 tons to 2,000 tons. After just two years of covert CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the U.S. Attorney General announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the source of 60% of the American heroin supply. Across Europe and Russia, Afghan-Pakistani heroin soon captured an even larger share of local markets, while inside Pakistan itself the number of addicts soared from zero in 1979 to 1.2 million just five years later.

After investing $3 billion in Afghanistan's destruction, Washington just walked away in 1992, leaving behind a thoroughly ravaged country with over one million dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million landmines still in place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords prepared to fight among themselves for control of the capital. Even when Washington finally cut its covert CIA funding at the end of 1991, however, Pakistan's ISI continued to back favored local warlords in pursuit of its long-term goal of installing a Pashtun client regime in Kabul.[/b]

quote:

The Return of the CIA, Opium, and Counterinsurgency: 2001-

To defeat the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA successfully mobilized former warlords long active in the heroin trade to seize towns and cities across eastern Afghanistan. In other words, the Agency and its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban's opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar. At a Tokyo international donors' conference in January 2002, Hamid Karzai, the new Prime Minister put in place by the Bush administration, issued a pro forma ban on opium growing -- without any means of enforcing it against the power of these resurgent local warlords.

After investing some three billion dollars in Afghanistan's destruction during the Cold War, Washington and its allies now proved parsimonious in the reconstruction funds they offered. At that 2002 Tokyo conference, international donors promised just four billion dollars of an estimated $10 billion needed to rebuild the economy over the next five years. In addition, the total U.S. spending of $22 billion for Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007 turned out to be skewed sharply toward military operations, leaving, for instance, just $237 million for agriculture. (And as in Iraq, significant sums from what reconstruction funds were available simply went into the pockets of Western experts, private contractors, and their local counterparts.)

Under these circumstances, no one should have been surprised when, during the first year of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan's opium harvest surged to 3,400 tons. Over the next five years, international donors would contribute $8 billion to rebuild Afghanistan, while opium would infuse nearly twice that amount, $14 billion, directly into the rural economy without any deductions by either those Western experts or Kabul's bloated bureaucracy.

While opium production continued its relentless rise, the Bush administration downplayed the problem, outsourcing narcotics control to Great Britain and police training to Germany. As the lead agency in Allied operations, Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department regarded opium as a distraction from its main mission of defeating the Taliban (and, of course, invading Iraq). Waving away the problem in late 2004, President Bush said he did not want to "waste another American life on a narco-state.'' Meanwhile, in their counterinsurgency operations, U.S. forces worked closely with local warlords who proved to be leading druglords.

After five years of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan's drug production had swelled to unprecedented proportions. In August 2007, the U.N. reported that the country's record opium crop covered almost 500,000 acres, an area larger than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185 tons at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country's GDP and 93% of global heroin supply. In this way, Afghanistan became the world's first true "narco-state." If a cocaine traffic that provided just 3% of Colombia's GDP could bring in its wake endless violence and powerful cartels capable of corrupting that country's government, then we can only imagine the consequences of Afghanistan's dependence on opium for more than 50% of its entire economy.

At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia's Federal Narcotics Service estimated the value of Afghanistan's current opium crop at $65 billion. Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan's farmers, $300 million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance "to the drug mafia," leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government in a nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.

Indeed, opium's influence is so pervasive that many Afghan officials, from village leaders to Kabul's police chief, the defense minister, and the president's brother, have been tainted by the traffic. So cancerous and crippling is this corruption that, according to recent U.N. estimates, Afghans are forced to spend a stunning $2.5 billion in bribes. Not surprisingly, the government's repeated attempts at opium eradication have been thoroughly compromised by what the U.N. has called "corrupt deals between field owners, village elders, and eradication teams."
[...]

You don't just accidentally create the world's first true narco-state, not really. There are people who knew exactly what was going to go down, and how to benefit. And apparently this was all an open secret given you have Dem senators admitting to knowing this at least a decade ago and questioning the logic of it.

Reveilled posted:

Especially if the contention is that the US supply of heroin is largely non-Afghan. Surely it would be supply chains within the Americas that US government agencies would exert the greatest degree of control over? Wouldn't a reduction in supply from competing networks using Afghanistan mean the demand for your product goes up? If I was running some sort of massive clandestine government drug smuggling ring I'd be over the loving moon about a supply chain disruption on that scale; now its both easier and more profitable for my network to expand to countries previously obtaining their heroin supply from the Afghans.

Good luck funding and keeping happy your puppet regime in a broken country that relies on drugs. Or is this that alternate reality where we ofc spend the money to actually invest in the country's infrastructure?

# ? Aug 18, 2021 04:09

Tweezer Reprise: Aug 6, 2013; It hasn't got six strings, but it's a lot of fun.

So, is this newly christened Panjshir resistance a real thing to any degree?

# ? Aug 18, 2021 04:21

Conspiratiorist: Nov 12, 2015; 17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the ~~fifth~~ ~~sixth~~ some day

Tweezer Reprise posted:

So, is this newly christened Panjshir resistance a real thing to any degree?

Until they get crushed, yes.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 04:22

Herstory Begins Now: Aug 5, 2003; SOME REALLY TEDIOUS DUMB SHIT THAT SUCKS ASS TO READ ->>

Lost Time posted:

This literally happened with Afghanistan opium already. The CIA is basically the reasons it even became a thing in that country. And opium has been used the last 20 years to fund the corrupt, two-faced American regime there that was up to a lot of illegal poo poo.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2010/03/31/opium-wars-afghanistan

You don't just accidentally create the world's first true narco-state, not really. There are people who knew exactly what was going to go down, and how to benefit. And apparently this was all an open secret given you have Dem senators admitting to knowing this at least a decade ago and questioning the logic of it.

Good luck funding and keeping happy your puppet regime in a broken country that relies on drugs. Or is this that alternate reality where we ofc spend the money to actually invest in the country's infrastructure?

Eh this is kind of a stretch and the first part in particular is i think conflating the transition in the region from opium production to heroin production (particularly at the urging of the ISI, who are 1000x more capable of actually effecting this than the cia, who, at the time had precious few people with any pashto or urdu or dari ability at all). Like the region was producing substantial amounts of opium already back to the 50s when Afghanistan started supplying the massive Iranian demand for opium after Iran prohibited poppy cultivation.

Like I don't doubt that the cia had some involvement, the russians certainly thought so, and I also wouldn't put it past them to both encourage the drug trade and to encourage anti-drug madrassas at the same time, but purely chocking that one up as all the cia is, I think, myopically amerocentric. It also neglects the far simpler and much more likely explanation of pakistan's isi (and probably to some similar extent, Iranian organized crime) seeking to exploit afghanistan's lawlessness to make huge piles of money exporting first opium and later heroin to first Iran and later the world. Which we also know that they did do and quite enthusiastically, as the article you quote mentions.

Similarly the 'america started it' explanation neglects that the afghan poppy trade predates americans knowing jack poo poo about afghanistan or caring about afghanistan. When Iran banned poppy cultivation in 1955, they put several hundred thousand poppy farmers out of work. The knowledge and the market very much was already in the region separate of anything the US later did.

that said, yeah the us was 1000% complicit in turning afghanistan into a narcostate later on. zero argument there

Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Aug 18, 2021

# ? Aug 18, 2021 05:16

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

https://twitter.com/i/status/1427561777722798084

Ah, a nice Afghan airforce heli chilling in Uzbekistan. aswell as other Afghan air assets.

WAR CRIME GIGOLO fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Aug 18, 2021

# ? Aug 18, 2021 05:52

wisconsingreg: Jan 13, 2019

Tweezer Reprise posted:

So, is this newly christened Panjshir resistance a real thing to any degree?

Not really, its all leaders and no troops, like the white army.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 05:56

WAR CRIME GIGOLO: Oct 3, 2012; The Hague
tryna get me
for these glutes

I will say this, from that heli video there's some very weak piloting going on. the heli should have enough lift to pickup without the weird taking off procedure.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 06:05

AHH F/UGH: May 25, 2002

WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1427561777722798084

Ah, a nice Afghan airforce heli chilling in Uzbekistan. aswell as other Afghan air assets.

lol Y O I N K

# ? Aug 18, 2021 06:25

Zedhe Khoja: Nov 10, 2017; sürgünden selamlar
yıkıcılar ulusuna

Tweezer Reprise posted:

So, is this newly christened Panjshir resistance a real thing to any degree?

The son is not the father when it comes to the Massouds, in alot of ways. Massoud himself was charismatic and was able to keep his soldiers with him even after breaking with Hekmetyar and going to war against the Taliban. But he was still first and foremost an Islamist. He got his start in the same university islamist groups Hekmetyar did whose primary goal was to purify what they saw as an overly tolerant and decadent rural ulema which had been compromised by wealth and Sufi mystics, and drive women off campus. Credit where it's due he never melted womens faces in acid, and he preferred the hijab to the burka, and wouldn't decapitate women for teaching their daughters to read like some mujahids. But his group was, throughout the entirety of it's existence, a radically islamist one. All those Tajik islamists he relied on for his forces scattered to the winds when he died. They're in the Taliban's Tajik subgroups, or ISIS, or that one "Uzbek" group which is almost entirely Tajiks. This hyper westernized failson larping as his dad is probably not going to get the same forces to align around him as his father could command. There might be enough people who hate the Taliban enough that an actual militia forms, but there is not going to be a Lion of Panjshir pt2.

# ? Aug 18, 2021 07:16

Redgrendel2001: Sep 1, 2006; you literally think a person saying their NBA team of choice being better than the fucking 76ers is a 'schtick'

a literal thing you think.

https://twitter.com/RichardEngel/status/1427958824800071680?s=19

# ? Aug 18, 2021 13:03

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 24, 2024 22:07

Redgrendel2001: Sep 1, 2006; you literally think a person saying their NBA team of choice being better than the fucking 76ers is a 'schtick'

a literal thing you think.

Redgrendel2001 posted:

https://twitter.com/RichardEngel/status/1427958824800071680?s=19

But on the outside.
https://twitter.com/brikeilarcnn/status/1427952278409859075?s=19

# ? Aug 18, 2021 13:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Middle East Thread: Clarissa Explains the Fall

«‹›636 »