You must log in or register to comment.
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
Saved this in my notebook thank you
wow, just wow!
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.
That’s mad. The US would never promote illegal drug trade.
failed
implies they tried lol
Touche lol
tried
implies they weren’t deliberately making a killing off of it
Reminder of the time the US overthrew its own dictator in haiti to create a “liberal anticommunist” president but they killed him 3 months in because he wasn’t enough of a fascist dictator
Maybe Trump shouldn’t have signed that surrender and let them out of jail.
Imagine thinking world events happen because of whoever is on TV
The Taliban governs Afghanistan because Americans overthrew the previous secular left-wing Republic of Afghanistan government because the Republic made extracting surplus value from the region difficult.
The Taliban is in power because white Americans are so bloodthirsty and unhinged that Afghanis prefer a far-right evangelical government to a permanent fascist colonial occupation with liberal aesthetics.
They will remain in power because Americans funneled so many weapons to right wing paramilitary death squads like the Mujahideen and others (which consolidated into the Taliban) that the country will never be stable enough to return to secular and left-wing governance.
This is why China is pouring money into Afghanistan, if the country becomes stable enough, Afghanistan becomes a reliable partner nation and connects China to the Europe, right wing thought and nationalism is eroded by education into solidarity and internationalism, and the conditions for left wing organizing can eventually return.
Which means oil is processed in the county, and the surplus value produced by those high-value form petroleum products remain in the hands of the people that live and work there, instead of the surplus value being siphoned of out of the country by the American corporations that Americans like to pretend are separate from the American government. Which is why Americans intervened to begin with.
Afghans don’t prefer the Taliban. They have no choice in the matter. The religious zealots rule.
They have no choice because Americans gave the Mujahideen (and affiliates which later consolidated into the Taliban) guns and Stinger missiles to overthrow the democratically elected socialist Republic of Afghanistan in 1992.
The American government gave rural right-wing evangelists the weapons necessary to overthrow the socialist government elected by a huge majority in the secular left-wing cities. Does that sound familiar?
the US sponsored and financed those religious zealot networks in the 1970s to block a socialist movement in afghanistan that had begun in the 1920s. the farm laborers and workers of the country were sick of the feudal system of massive landowners and were tired of the british soldiers propping it up. they wanted universal secular education, an end to the honor killings of women, and a transition to a democratic republican form of governance uninterested in being occupied by western powers.
the US merely continued the project of the british occupiers: financing, training and arming religious psychos (literally men who threw acid in the faces of women who were literate) and opium gangsters, because these are the kinds of assholes that can be relied upon to kill socialist reforms without compunction. the kind of people that will murder children, burn books, and firebomb schools/hospitals. the US wound this minority of killers up and set them lose on the soviet border to lure the US’ rival into an intractable war.
it worked and then the disease got a mind of its own, containment failed (several of US-backed strongmen who functioned as cutouts in supplying war materiel in the gulf were overthrown), and the violence turned towards outwards, and specifically towards the west. the taliban and ISIS are offshoots of networks the US and the UK established and, at best “lost control” of. but, more cynically, they still play a vital role in goosing the military industrial complex and making americans angry at central asians/arabs, sparking their will to export money and violence at the border of our geopolitical rivals.
If there’s anything that would have fixed the situation in Afghanistan, it was not having the U.S. stay there indefinitely.
No, but if you want to assign the end to someone, there is only one.
There’s plenty of blame to go around; no need to hang it all on one person. If you like Biden, the better argument is that he was correct to leave.
Biden had no choice. Check that…he could have added more troops, set up an armed enclave, told the taliban that Trump didn’t really sign that surrender and hope for the best.
Biden is the president; of course he had a choice. Fortunately, he made the right one.
He made the only one he could make.
Check that…he could have added more troops, set up an armed enclave, told the taliban that Trump didn’t really sign that surrender and hope for the best.
Honestly not sure – were you being sarcastic here? Why couldn’t he have done something like this?
There’s also the ever-possible “find some technical violation the other side did and back out,” or “find some issue that’s larger than imagined and unilaterally delay the agreement,” etc. Who was going to hold him accountable?
