Time To Leave Afghanistan

[erpowers]

If President Hamid Karzai is threatening to join the Taliban if the United States does not stop pressuring Karzai to end the corruption in that country the United States should remove all troops from Afghanistan.

[spanone]

1. bring the troops home.....now

[ixion]

2. we should never have invaded in the first place

in my opinion.

[driver8]

3. I share that opinion.

Get the hell out, now!

[WhiteTara]

4. except for that damned pipeline from the Caspian Sea

I'm sure he would. But you and I both know that the oil flowing through belongs to us and we must stand and protect.
:sarcasm:

[kgnu_fan]

5. Stop being a criminal theif and get back and start caring own people!

[Mari333]

6. amen.

[happy_liberal]

7. But...the Opium harvest is coming in....

[happy_liberal]

8. hmmmmm

Afghanistan now supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin, generating nearly $200 billion in revenue. Since the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, opium output has increased 33-fold (to over 8,250 metric tons a year).

The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons.

Still, bumper crops keep flourishing year after year, even though heroin production is a laborious, intricate process. The poppies must be planted, grown and harvested; then after the morphine is extracted it has to be cooked, refined, packaged into bricks and transported from rural locales across national borders. To make heroin from morphine requires another 12-14 hours of laborious chemical reactions. Thousands of people are involved, yet—despite the massive resources at our disposal—heroin keeps flowing at record levels.

[happy_liberal]

9. On the Poppy Trail

From 2000 to 2001, under international pressure, the Taliban stopped poppy growing. But the trade sprang back within weeks after the U.S. invasion in October 2001.

It was simple free market economics. The West had a demand for heroin. Afghanistan had hardworking farmers and entrepreneurial drug traffickers who could match supply with demand. Once the U.S. invaded, there were no more of those pesky government regulations to bother the narco-capitalists.

The U.S.-allied Northern Alliance, the mujahedeen who had continued to fight the Taliban in the 1990s, supported themselves through heroin production and distribution. After the U.S. invasion, they simply moved their headquarters to Kabul as part of the newly installed Hamid Karzai government. Poppy was back in bloom, and Afghanistan quickly became the world’s number one heroin supplier.

Those were boom times for the Ebad family. Starting in 2004, they grew poppy. Raw opium was fetching $220/kilo. “It made economic sense,” Ebad says. “With that money, we solved all of our problems.”

Local drug traffickers loaned him money to plant the crop. The traffickers shipped the opium to primitive labs where it was turned into heroin for eventual shipment to nearby Pakistan. Each step of the process was protected by local police and political officials. They, in turn, were protected by networks of traffickers reaching all the way to the Karzai cabinet. The mainstream media largely ignored the role of government officials, however, instead spreading the myth that the Taliban controlled most of the drug trade.

http://www.progressive.org/erlich1109.html

[amborin]

10. yes, time to leave

[rug]

11. We should leave even if Karzai joins the Democratic Party.

[kenny blankenship]

12. Yeah. But watch what happens instead

I mean, the fucking awful futility of this errand was something you could smell and feel even before we put the first troop on the ground. We're going to war with Afgannystans!! Vengeance is ourn! They's some Medieval cave dwellin trogmuludytes! We can't possibly lose!

Uh. All right, but be back before dark OK? That's not a good place to go or get stuck in.

And 8 years later...