Guess what. It doesn’t burn.
Any other bright ideas, sunshine?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Have you ever BEEN to Afghanistan?
They have a saying there: You can defeat us, but you cannot defeat our poverty.
Seriously. Carpet bombing?
I don’t think anyone joined the mil to go to some 3rd world shit hole, and tell the farmers there what they can, and cannot grow.
The only real issue with the poppies is the Taliban makes money off it, and they are our enemy. The people growing it are not (usually). I could care less if it ends up as drugs. It wont affect the vast majority of people who are smart enough not to be a dumb ass druggie.
And guess what…Afghanistan is not the US, and never will be. If you want them to adopt some US style stupid ass drug laws that never accomplishes anything but making the drug market a black market then what do you expect all these farmers to grow? After you burn their crop down they are going to put the hoe down, and pick up an AK because they have nothing else to do. You just destroyed their livelihood. At the very least you just made another Taliban sympathizer who is going to give assistance to our enemy when he comes through town.
They are a sovereign country with an elected government, and they can set their own laws as to what people can grow. Its not our problem, and poppy is but one of many ways they make money. If you want to go scorched Earth you are going to take something that is really a minor problem to completely blowing it up to be the premier issue.
Whats next? Some of you going to advocate burning down the mosques, and sending over missionaries to turn them into good Christian souls?
It would be difficult to bomb them back into the stone age given that in many areas of the country it’s not readily apparent that they never actually left the stone age…
having been to the country can say that poppy eradication and the usda replace opium with pomegranate programs are a joke. I also agree that many places I visited some as little as 15 miles from kabul were in the stone age. I agree we have to seperate the population from the taliban and such- but like in vietnam with a cambodian sanctuary unless we get tough at the border with pakistan we are going to continue to have a tough time.
Winner! We are talking about a country that barely has running water, electricity, improved roads, etc. in a vast majority of it.
For Afghanistan being the shithole that it is, it is known as the place where empires go to die.
Not to mention very isolated pockets of population.
for obvious reasons. one need only read the history books and see what russia attempted to do and failed at.
Comparing the Russian experience to ours is apples and oranges.
I was not comparing the Russian experience to ours.
I was commenting on VBs post saying that empires die there, i.e., Russia dying there.
Go back and look at what the British did long before Russia was there. In many ways the mistakes we have made in the last 9 years are very similar to the Brits mistakes.
It is said that the President of Afghanistan is only the leader of the area he can project power to through force and that is just about within eyesight of his populated area. The outlying Warlords control everything else. We cannot expect these Warlords to relinquish any of their power to enhance the influence of some Governmental system.
Those people have failed to stop their countries from becoming clear and present dangers to the rest of the world and it is not like I am giving them a chance to step up and do the right thing. IMO the drug problem is the biggest we face.
I would like to think that we would like to see all mankind move forward with their societies and goals. Are countries like Afghanistan and Columbia contributing to that forward momentum with their opium and coca exports or are they like a boat anchor holding us up?
Yeah, I was there last week. I think I might have been parked across you at the Sonic, I was in the red Z/28.
I don’t care about defeating them or their poverty, just dropping enough bombs on them to wipe out the opium crops or the entire country. Whatever it takes, I really do not care.
Care to explain why the poppies are such a big deal?
Yeah people use drugs. They have for centuries. If you think taking out some poppies in Afghanistan is going to change that you are sorely mistaken. The war on drugs since the 60’s has been a complete failure, waste of manpower, and has CREATED the drug related crime we see today. Illegalizing drugs has forced the entire market underground, and where there is a market someone will fill it. Legal or not. Its not something any government can eradicate. We’ve been doing it for decades, and still over half the population has used an illegal drug. None of that shit works, and its plain stupid to keep pumping billions into, facilitating criminals, and now I guess telling some farmer 10k miles away what crops he has to grow.
Guess what. There wouldn’t be a market if Americans were smart enough not to become druggies. If anyone should know better it should be our population. But the world is not perfect, and what we have been doing has been a huge failure. Instead of having legit tax paying businesses supplying the demand we have criminal networks doing it right under our noses.
Puts money in the pockets of people we dont like. Here and abroad.
Disrupting drug assholes livelihood is a good thing.
So does a lot of other things the west does like oil. We gonna stop putting hundreds of billions of dollars into the ME because some of that money is funding terrorists?
I guess you didn’t get my post but the WOD has been a complete failure, and the supply is getting bigger all the time. How many more decades is it going to take before people wake up and realize fighting drugs is completely futile, and causes more problems than it aims to solve. There is always going to be junkies, and people selling drugs. IF they can’t do it legally they are going to do it illegally, and Id rather have legal people following the rule of law than gangs, cartels, and corner street dealers running the show.
The same thing happened with prohibition. The business went underground, and was controlled by ruthless organized crime just like drugs are today. The only difference is back then they had enough common sense to realize prohibition doesnt work. We just havent figured out, as a society, that prohibition of drugs is an even more massive failure than alcohol was. You can also thank prohibition for much of the NFA laws we have today. It was aimed at stopping the street gangs, and organized crime syndicates from obtaining machine guns they used to mow people down in the streets with. Gee look at what we are facing today. A government pushing for more gun laws because organized crime is once again using guns to protect their drug trade we made illegal. History repeats itself…
Upon interacting with lots of Afghan poppy growers…
They’re quite content to live in shitty adobe houses made of gathered reeds, dirt, and a mixture of their and their livestock’s excrement, with little to no services we consider basic.
Wholesale eradication is no-go at this point, as any hope of funding a national government critical to an exit strategy is going to have to rely heavily on taxing some sort of crop - coincidentally this also means that the federal government is still going to be extremely corrupt.
These are people with the ability to grow corn, but who will go hungry in order to cultivate more poppy instead - taking away their livelihood on what will seem to them like a whim is not a winning long-term strategy.
It’s hard for Americans to comprehend a people who only wants to subsist and procreate, and couldn’t give half a crap about bettering their surroundings. They want security, but won’t provide it for themselves, and the only things that give them a sense of unity is when some Taliban jackass desecrates some Qurans and tries to blame the Infidels, or when something disturbs their access to opium markets.
Lets legalize in your neighborhood first and see how it works out.
I already know people in my neighborhood use illegal drugs. I used to work for a Dish Network sub-contractor, and were in 2-5 people’s homes a day. Even in middle class homes you could take one step in and smell weed. Ive had people smoke it in front of me on the job, and no I don’t use drugs. I quit that job because I refused to be exposed to that type of shit, and my boss told me, “We don’t care what our customers do.”
When someone is smoking something like this or going so far as to inject something into their body I don’t really think the fact its illegal to do so is much of a deterent. People are either smart enough to not do drugs, or they aren’t. What the law says isnt a big factor. Especially not, as I pointed out, over half our population has used an illegal drug. Drugs being illegal has not kept them out of where I live. Not where you live. Not where anyone lives in this country. We can’t even keep them out of super max jails. Even mil and LEO has been caught using.
Now Im not for a free for all. It should be controlled just like tobacco, and alcohol are. I think drug testing employees is a good idea. Then guess what. Anyone who wants a decent job isn’t going to be a druggie. I don’t know why people think if you legalized, and regulated this crap suddenly our whole society would be in a drug induced trance. People who are going to use it are going to do it no matter what. The only real thing drug prohibition has accomplished is to push the market underground, and into the hands of dangerous organized crime. I don’t think drugs are a good idea, and certainly have no sympathy for people who let it ruin their lives. This is something we are never going to “win”, and we have made the situation worse. Everything from the cartels, the pot farmers up in the hills shooting people who get too close, street gangs, drug dealers, prostitution, the allure of doing something illegal, the lives of officers lost, the laws that restrict everyones freedom in the name of drugs, jail system packed with petty drug offenders so we can’t properly incarcerate ‘real’ criminals, huge expense of the court system, and the list can go on.
So tell me what the WOD has accomplished in 5 decades?
Eh, not quite. There are pressures you don’t know about and understand vis-a-vis growing corn, wheat or poppy.
It’s hard for Americans to comprehend a people who only wants to subsist and procreate, and couldn’t give half a crap about bettering their surroundings. They want security, but won’t provide it for themselves, and the only things that give them a sense of unity is when some Taliban jackass desecrates some Qurans and tries to blame the Infidels, or when something disturbs their access to opium markets.
That’s primarily because Americans are ignorant and uneducated, imo. The arrogance of the typical American “Derrr, but why don’ they HAVE a Dairy Queen? Derrr!” blows my mind sometimes.
The problem is infrastructure. Why do American farmers stick with commodities that guarantee that most of them lose money, gain debt, and eventually go broke? It’s INFRASTRUCTURE.
Right now, there are established markets for poppy and damned little else. If farmer Khalil wants to feed his family and not starve, he raises poppy.