Not useless at all. In fact they did exactly what they set out to do. They produced a fuckin ton of shareholder value for industries that profit off war!
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.
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.
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 US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially
Lol ahahaha good one! Lmfao
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!
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.
The US was willing to kill half a million Iraqi children to prevent Saddam Hussein from rebuilding Iraq.
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.
Lmao the law isn’t some infallible deity. It’s a tool of oppression wielded by those in power. The fact that someone got killed, but a judge said it was ok, doesn’t mean it’s in any way not a murder.
Though I’d like to see the trial of the wedding that got dronestriked, or the many other civilians murdered by the us in Afghanistan.
They aren’t in theory just murdering for the sake of murdering.
or in this case as a directive from the WH.
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.
Maybe Trump shouldn’t have signed that surrender and let them out of jail.
If there’s anything that would have fixed the situation in Afghanistan, it was not having the U.S. stay there indefinitely.
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.
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.
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.
girl power
wasn’t useless for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin
