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Why are the Taliban still so powerful in Afghanistan?

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    #32
    Skyknight
    Registered Users Posts: 391 ✭✭Skyknight


    BanditLuke wrote: »
    Watched a documentary about them must have been back in 2004-2005. The reporter asked a Taliban fighter if he was worried the Americans would finally push them out and he just looked at the reporter smiled and answered no.

    When asked why he simply answered "the Americans have the clock and we have forever"


    Sounds like The Power of Nightmares -Adam Crutis......Bitter Lake (2015) is another interesting one of his (and more relevant).


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    #33
    RandomName2
    Registered Users Posts: 5,570 ✭✭✭RandomName2


    spring lane jack wrote: »
    The innocence surrounding the auld dhrugs is astonishing. The prick was smuggling it in from off shore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

    Of conspiracy theories this is one of the more silly.

    The GOP in America has long favored the War on Drugs.

    "We welcome the Taliban's enforcement of the ban and hope it will be sustained," the Bush administration's senior policy-maker for South Asia said during her visit to Pakistan.

    That Taliban ban was very short lived. It lasted less than a year. Now the majority of opiate production is controlled by the Taliban, and despite US bombing it still flourishes. This makes sense, the Taliban need a steady revenue stream, and they are willing to shelve their religiosity over drug use in order to buy bombs.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-opium-poppy-production/
    https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/09/how-the-heroin-trade-explains-the-us-uk-failure-in-afghanistan
    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47861444

    If the US wanted to cultivate poppies they could easily do so domestically.

    The way to defeat the Taliban was give the Afghan government control over opiate production. If you didn't want this heroin to end up on the black market internationally you could then purchase all of that product yourself adn destroy it if you like. The stubbornness of the US to pursue the War on Drugs at the same time as the War on Terror ironically doomed both. It is further ironic to see the loony Taliban being more pragmatic than the US government.


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