Thread: Just One Side? Antifa Talks About “Nazi Fighting” In Laguna Beach … Have No Idea What

Thank you for posting that.

The premise the Taliban is responsible is something new. The stories for years has been the Taliban didn't allow the cultivation of poppies, and it only returned when the US took control and made it safe to do so.

Did I miss something? According to our government, the Taliban makes money to fund it's fighting from poppies - and we are protecting the growing of poppies - but we are fighting the Taliban? Did I get that right.


Is it possible, they are downplaying - well, lying - about the amount of heroin from Afghanistan that gets to America. It could not just be coincidence that we are having such a rise in heroin addiction and deaths.

We constantly get told stories of 'the cartels-the cartels' and is it possible that is a attempt to divert attention to the cartels so we won't put 2 and 2 together. To create the perception that all that heroin is coming from Mexico - except for a teeny tiny bit that is coming from those 200K hectares of poppies in Afghanistan?

It is mentioned in the last video that the cartels have agreements with the Talilban to bring it in through Mexico.

It is possible the cartel is bringing some of it in - I'm thinking it is getting brought directly in to the country. I think the idea the Taliban is bringing it to Mexico and they are bringing it all in, and I just can't buy that.

Anytime our government decides to name a bad man/person/country, it bears looking into to see if they are using it for other purposes.

Just my thinking.

Opium Eradication in Afghanistan

By Garrett
Wednesday Oct 29, 2014 · 7:26 PM EDT

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan is at an all time high. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has sent a report to the administration, highlighting the failure of U.S. counternarcotics efforts, and the money spent.

I am writing to provide the results of SIGAR’s analysis of recent trends in opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. As you know, the narcotics trade poisons the Afghan financial sector and undermines the Afghan state’s legitimacy by stoking corruption, sustaining criminal networks, and providing significant financial support to the Taliban and other insurgent groups. Despite spending over $7 billion to combat opium poppy cultivation and to develop the Afghan government’s counternarcotics capacity, opium poppy cultivation levels in Afghanistan hit an all-time high in 2013.According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghan farmers grew an unprecedented 209,000 hectares of opium poppy in 2013, surpassing the previous peak of 193,000 hectares in 2007. With deteriorating security in many parts of rural Afghanistan and low levels of eradication of poppy fields, further increases in cultivation are likely in 2014.

Special Report: Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan, 2012 and 2013, SIGAR

The issue is being picked up by the media.

Over the last dozen years, the United States has poured $7.6 billion into combating Afghanistan’s opium production, and the results are now clear: The program failed.This effectively leaves the Afghan economy heavily dependent on criminal enterprises, rising corruption that undermines efforts to promote democracy, and increased drug addiction among the Afghan people. The uncontrolled opium trade also provides the Taliban with up to $155 million annually, or more than one-quarter of the total funding for its antigovernment insurgency.

Afghanistan’s Unending Addiction, New York Times

If you spent 13 years pounding money down a rathole with little to show for it, you might wake up one morning and say: “Hey, I’m going to stop pounding money down this rathole.”Unfortunately, the U.S. government does not think this way.

The U.S. government wakes up every morning and says: “The rathole is looking a little empty today. Let’s pound a few more billion dollars down there.”

And when that rathole is Afghanistan, the billions are essentially without end.
Down the opium rathole, Politico

In the early years of the occupation, the Bush administration had taken a hands-off policy on opium growing, needing the cooperation of Afghan warlords.

The initial objective of the U.S. intervention in 2001 was to degrade al-Qaida’s capabilities and institute regime change in Afghanistan. Dealing with the illicit economy was not considered to be integral to the military objectives. Thus, until 2003, U.S. counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan was essentially laissez-faire. The U.S. military understood that it would not be able to obtain intelligence on the Taliban and al-Qaida if it tried to eradicate poppy. Meanwhile, it relied on key warlords, who were often deeply involved in the drug economy since the 1980s, not simply to provide intelligence on the Taliban, but also to carry out direct military operations against them and al-Qaida.War and Drugs in Afghanistan, World Politics Review

By 2004, with the Taliban seemingly defeated, eradication efforts grew.

Alarmed by the spread of opium poppy cultivation, some public officials in the United States in 2004 and 2005 also started calling for a stronger poppy eradication campaign, including aerial spraying (.pdf). Thus, between 2004 and 2009, manual eradication was carried out by central Afghan units trained by the U.S. contractor Dyncorp as well as by regional governors and their forces. Immediately, the efforts were met with violent strikes and social protests. Another wave of eradication that took place in 2005 successfully reduced poppy cultivation, with most of the gains due to cultivation suppression in Nangarhar province, where production was slashed by 90 percent (.pdf) through promises of alternative development and threats of imprisonment.War and Drugs in Afghanistan, World Politics Review

In 2009, the Obama administration recognized opium eradication as a counterproductive failure, and shifted course.

The Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan told allies on Saturday that the United States was shifting its drug policy in Afghanistan away from eradicating opium poppy fields and toward interdicting drug supplies and cultivating alternative crops.“The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure,” the representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, told reporters on the margins of the Group of 8 conference in the northern Italian city of Trieste, Reuters reported. “They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban.”

New Course for Antidrug Efforts in Afghanistan, New York Times

"It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban. So we're going to phase out eradication," he [Holbrooke] said.Eradication efforts were seen as inefficient because too little was being destroyed at too high a cost, Antonio Maria Costa, the UN drug chief, said.
The old policy was unpopular among powerless small-scale farmers, who often were targeted in the eradication efforts.

US to reverse Afghan opium strategy, Al-Jazeera

There is no decrease in corruption; in fact, there is a huge amount of corruption associated with eradication. It’s not bankrupting the Taliban; there is more poppy than there was a few years back, and it’s losing the hearts and minds of the population, and making counterinsurgency really difficult. So we are going to change policy.The U.S. government decided to defund the centrally led eradication force, which was the main unit that was eradicating. But the Obama administration wanted to compromise somewhat, and they said if the Afghan government, local governors, wants to do some eradication, that’s their choice. If the local provincial governors decide the want to eradicate, we will provide them assistance, both equipment and technical assistance.

Why Eradication Won’t Solve Afghanistan’s Poppy Problem, PBS

The administration having mostly given up on and defunded eradication, as a failure and a waste of money, and which drives rather than prevents corruption, is background to the SIGAR report telling the administration that anti-opium efforts have been a failure and a waste of money, and that opium in Afghanistan drives corruption.In 2007, the British had tried to eradicate opium in Helmand province. This stirred up a war.

A final cause of local resistance was the attempt by the British to eradicate opium production. It would appear that this triggered a popular revolt against the British in Nad-e Ali in 2007:

In fact the fighting started because of opium. They started destroying the opium fields of the people, that’s why they became angry ... The rich people had land and they grew opium, so it was good for them. For the poor farmers without land who worked the land, it was good, because they got 20 or 30 or some percentage of the opium, so for the poor workers it was also a very good job. When they started destroying the opium fields, the people—landowners, farmers, poor people—everyone became angry. And they started fighting.40The Taliban at war: inside the Helmand insurgency, 2004–2012, International Affairs

In 2008, the British targeted warlords rather than small farmers. This made matters worse.

In 2008 the British attempted to target the poppy fields of warlords, such as ARJ, who had been removed as district chief of police. This made matters even worse. Through his patronage network, ARJ still controlled most of the police in central Helmand. He retaliated by allowing the Taliban to enter and take control of Marjah.42The Taliban at war: inside the Helmand insurgency, 2004–2012, International Affairs

It resulted in the 2010 surge, a major event in U.S. politics, being devoted to trying to retake the small opium growing region around Marjah.The SIGAR report highlights opium eradication in Nangarhar province as having previously been a model of success.

Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, considered a model for successful counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts and deemed ‘poppy free’ by the UNODC in 2008, saw a fourfold increase in opium poppy cultivation between 2012 and 2013.Special Report: Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan, 2012 and 2013, SIGAR

SIGAR does not mention him in their report. But for eradicating corruption by eradicating opium growing, Gul Agha Shirzai's efforts in Nangarhar are probably not that successful a model. His opium is in Kandahar.

So people like Gul Agha Shirzai, who comes from Kandahar and used to be a big drug lord there, has now for a number of years been the provincial governor in Nangarhar Province. He has been very keen to suppress opium cultivation there and has done so through threats and promises about “alternative livelihood” programs for farmers who don’t cultivate opium poppy. He has not been effectively able to deliver on the promise of alternative livelihood to most of the farmers.But he has been doing two things: He has been transforming himself from a reviled warlord whom the international community used to strongly dislike to someone who in the eyes of the full international community is defined now as a good governor for keeping poppy cultivation down, and a man who has big presidential ambitions in Afghanistan.
At the same time, his network’s drug assets are all in Kandahar. So if you suppress cultivation in Nangarhar Province, you are appearing virtuous to the internationals, and at the same time you are eliminating your drug competition from a different ethnic group.

Why Eradication Won’t Solve Afghanistan’s Poppy Problem, PBS

The U.S. efforts apart from Gul Agha Shirzai were not much of a model success either. The U.S. plan to pay some Shinwari tribesmen to burn down the crops of their neighbors, stirred up a tribal war.

But the swirling controversy surrounding the American deal in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province demonstrates that efforts to alter the existing power structure can have unintended and unsettling effects. The plan involving the 400,000-strong Shinwari tribe developed earlier this year when elders told Col. Randy George, a senior commander in eastern Afghanistan, that they wanted to unite to oppose the Taliban and stamp out opium cultivation. As a reward, George offered the Shinwari elders the power to decide how to spend $1 million in U.S.-funded development projects.It ended after the local power broker, Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai, a towering and controversial figure in Afghan politics, complained to President Hamid Karzai, who lambasted U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry in a February meeting for meddling in tribal politics.

Shirzai accused U.S. officials of turning tribal elders into "little governors."
Soon, the State Department ordered its employees to cease working on the deal. The embassy has drafted, but not yet issued, guidance that no civilians in Afghanistan should be involved in tribal pacts.

U.S. military runs into Afghan tribal politics after deal with Pashtuns, Washington Post

Farmers close to the provincial capital, Jalalabad, have often managed to cope by switching to crops such as vegetables, increasing dairy production and working for wages in reconstruction programs. However, farmers away from the provincial center, such as in the districts of Achin, Khogyani and Shinwar, have suffered great economic deprivation. With their income slashed by as much as 80 percent and no alternative livelihoods programs made available to them, their political restlessness has steadily grown(.pdf). Those areas have seen great levels of instability; intensified tribal conflict over land, water and access to resource handouts from the international community; rebellions of young men against the local maliks supporting eradication; physical attacks on eradication teams; intense Taliban mobilization; and increased flows of militants into and through the province from Pakistan.

War and Drugs in Afghanistan, World Politics Review

So opium cultivation in Afghanistan is now at an all time high. And the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has sent a report to the administration, highlighting the $7.6 billion spent with no results.

Opium cultivation being at an all time high serves as a potent symbol of the American failure in Afghanistan, and the report is being picked up by the media for this.

But the SIGAR report, and media reporting on it, is missing context. Eradication had mostly been given up on and defunded in 2009. It starves farmers. It drives people to the insurgency. It creates rather than solves corruption. It doesn't work.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...in-Afghanistan

All the pictures of the soldiers patroling around the poppy fields are nice, but that doesn't mean our soldiers are guarding and protecting the poppy fields. That is not their purpose there. Heck, who would they be protecting the fields from?

Believe what you will.
Why don't we bomb Afghanistan's poppy fields?

By Cecil Adams

Why haven’t we bombed the poppy fields in Afghanistan, wiping out the world’s largest source of opium and blocking the exportation of heroin that’s killing so many Americans? —Billy from Philly
HEARTS and minds, Billy, hearts and minds. We can’t just go around unloading death from above on everyone and everything we don’t like. Or at least we shouldn’t.

True, our nonlethal attempts over the last 15 years to curb Afghan opium-poppy production—which accounts for about 90 percent of the world’s supply—have come up short. And it’s not like we’ve been stingy with air strikes generally: U.S. forces hit Afghanistan with more than 140 in the first seven months of 2016 alone.

But simply obliterating a nation’s most lucrative crop just might cheese off a hard-working farmer or two, and that’s a bad plan when a fundamentalist militia stands ready to hand out Kalashnikovs to the disgruntled and dispossessed.

Total war, in fact, helped make Afghanistan the world poppy-growing champ in the first place. Among many dubious accomplishments during their ten-year occupation of the country, Soviet troops tore up orchards, destroyed irrigation systems, and generally flattened the Afghan agricultural infrastructure. But farmers gotta farm, so they turned to a hardy plant that doesn’t require much intervention to thrive, and also happens to net its cultivators stacks and stacks of cash.

The Cold War ended: out went the Russkies, in rushed the Taliban. For a spell Mullah Omar and his cronies taxed poppy production, but in 2000 they shifted gears and implemented a total ban—less, seemingly, out of Islamic principle (though of course that was the local spin) than as a <acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym> move, to get in good with the U.N. and gain international recognition for Afghanistan’s pariah government.

The Taliban is bad at lots of things—teaching little girls to read, for instance—but they were very good at terrifying their constituents into abandoning the drug trade. Afghan poppy cultivation dropped 91 percent; the opium supply worldwide took a 65 percent plummet. Afghanistan had temporarily won its war on drugs.

After 9/11, though, Omar stuck by his buddy Osama, and the U.S. swooped in. We basically trampled the Afghan economy in the process, though to be fair the Taliban’s prohibition effort had already brought it to the brink of collapse. The farmers who’d been terrorized out of the drug biz resumed planting poppies, and the U.S. military pretty much ignored them. (Ever reliable, those conspiracy-minded sorts will tell you the “real reason” for the war was that the CIA needed to jump-start the heroin trade.) There was a country to be rebuilt from scratch, after all—oh, and did I mention that the Northern Alliance warlords helping us keep the peace had a little drug hustle going on the side?

It wasn’t till 2006 that the Bush administration tried a no-poppies policy of its own, where we went beyond targeting drug traffickers and processors and got into crop eradication. This was a strictly ground-level campaign of plowing and burning—not only weren’t we bombing anything, we weren’t even doing as much aerial spraying as we’d have liked. Such self-restraint came at the insistence of Afghan president Hamid Karzai: spraying from the air would alienate farmers and imperil his government, he argued, though critics noted that many of Karzai’s supporters were cashing in on the opium trade themselves.

Meanwhile the U.S. assisted poppy farmers in planting alternative crops like almonds or wheat, but this was a bit like telling a successful American street dealer he should really look into managing an Arby’s instead. The drug trade offered tastier carrots than we did, and the Taliban, whose protection the farmers sought out, wielded bigger sticks. And those Taliban insurgents were now profiting off the opium market themselves. Violence flared up, and expectations were soon adjusted accordingly: “American officials hope that Afghanistan’s drug problem will someday be only as bad as that of Colombia,” the New York Times reported in 2007.

Obama ended the Bush crop-eradication plan in ‘09. “The poppy farmer is not our enemy,” declared special representative Richard Holbrooke, “the Taliban are.” Economic stability in Afghanistan, the current reasoning goes, is more important than stemming the heroin tide. Counternarcotics efforts have continued, but U.S. soldiers aren’t even allowed to trespass in poppy fields nowadays. Eradication is left to the Afghans, who collect $250 from the U.S. per hectare knocked out—though corruption has led to selective enforcement, with farmers who cozy up to local officials keeping their fields in flower.

The U.N. reported a slight dip in Afghan poppy cultivation for 2015, the first downturn in six years. But it sure wasn’t cheap: as of 2014, the United States had sunk $7.6 billion into curtailing Afghanistan’s drug trade. I know, I know—that sure could have bought a lot of air strikes, right? With demand showing no signs of going away, the poppies would likely just have been planted again. Afghanistan has enough broken eggs for its omelet already, thank you very much.

https://www.connectsavannah.com/sava...nt?oid=3766602

We don't have to bomb them. They can be burned. Early on, I remember seeing videos of flame throwers being used to burn the fields.

You know if you want to talk about 'weapons of mass destruction', I'm thinking opium fits that category.

The statement we tried to curtail it doesn't seem right.

It is probably true it is very lucrative for the farmers, but if they can grow poppies, surely there are some other crops they can grow.