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Taliban's Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along (www.mintpressnews.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml
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[–] 58 points 3 years ago (2 children)

I mean... Sure there are major improvements that can be had in the US, but punishment and consequences as defined in Sharia law isn't exactly something that the US can simply adopt.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 years ago* (5 children)

    Three million dead due to the Afghanistan war alone wasn't brutal enough for you?

    The systematic, institutional rape and torture of men, women, and children in Abu Ghraib was more brutal than anything defined in Sharia law but we still pretend that the occupation was clean.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Both can be wrong, Sounds like you’re just here to derail into having a different conversation you want to have entirely separate to the topic rather than addressing the actual topic.

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  • [+] -14 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    I'm staying on topic.

    I am demonstrating how the American occupational forces handed out harsher punishments and consequences than the Taliban did, yet couldn't curb opium production. Ergo, the Americans were never interested in curbing opium production.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    The Americans didn't intend to kill all those people. They intended to kill soldiers, and lots of other people who they deemed evil, but growing drugs was never deemed evil enough to be worth killing someone over. The Taliban intended to kill those growing drugs, along with a lot of other people doing things they deem to be evil I'll leave moral judgements to you.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    Unscholy_source is referring to domestically. US can't adopt wholesale murder of drug-users because it doesn't benefit the dealer to kill their clientele. Plus, it's super-cool to kill and torture people from the middle-east because we don't like the way they pray to their invisible friend.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    the US didn’t go to Afghanistan to combat the opium trade. thanks for the false equivalence, though.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    So all those DEA guys, FDA folks teaching wheat farming, millions of pounds of drugs burned, raids we conducted to "combat opium traffickers", and all the reports we were fed about how we are responsible for eradicating Afghan opium all means what, exactly? What were we (and Myself, personally) doing there, again?

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    So all those DEA guys, FDA folks teaching wheat farming,

    hilarious. you should do stand-up.

    so, you’re claiming, without evidence I might add, that people from the DEA and hehehe… the FDA were teaching wheat farming to the Afghani people? The DEA and FDA. And you expect anyone to take you seriously? lmao

    and all the reports we were fed about how we are responsible for eradicating Afghan opium

    what reports? let’s see these alleged “reports”

    What were we (and Myself, personally) doing there, again?

    I have no idea what you were doing there, and if you think this is what was happening, I seriously doubt you were ever there at all.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Man you libs really just sometimes shit all over the floor and declare you won the "argument". Its cringe as fuck.

    FDA being clearly wrong aside, its clear your reading comprehension skills fail in the face of your debate bro antics of wanting to dunk on OP and avoid addressing any of the facts said.

    https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/08/obama-afghanistan-drug-war-taliban-616316

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    aww, look at you, with your tantrums and your insults because you have no facts to back up your claims.

    and look! you even have a link that contains exactly nothing that backs up your claims. funny how you insult my reading comprehension, but if yours wasn’t so terrible, you’d see that for yourself. it’s cute how angry you are.

    sleep well.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    May I suggest you read the article before commenting

    Armed with little more than sticks, teams of counter-narcotics brigades travel the country, cutting down Afghanistan’s poppy fields.

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  • [–] 41 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    And may I suggest you do some research before replying?

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65787391

    Balancing an AK-47 assault rifle slung around his left shoulder and a large stick in his right hand, Abdul hits the heads of poppies as hard as he can. The stalks fly in the air, as does the sap from the poppy bulb, releasing the distinctive, pungent smell of opium in its most raw form.

    In April 2022, Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada decreed that cultivation of the poppy - from which opium, the key ingredient for the drug heroin can be extracted - was strictly prohibited. Anyone violating the ban would have their field destroyed and be penalised according to Sharia law.

    The sticks are used to destroy the fields, not beat people 🤦

    And punishment under Sharia law is much more severe than getting beat by a stick, which isn't something that obviously will never fly in the US.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    The sticks are used to destroy the fields, not beat people

    That was my point exactly.

    But invoking the spectre of "Sharia law" is just as vague as referring to "US law".

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Something the US couldn't do under the previous government. Plus many switched to wheat beforehand anyway due to food shortages. The US didn't rule Afghanistan and had to work within Afghanistan's government. That government is gone. The Taliban can act like a dictator. Sure, armed with little more than sticks, but farmers had a two year lag beforehand to switch to wheat. This ban wasn't just announced it's old. It was just never enforced til now. I mean, it's ridiculous to compare the two situations. If the US did the same, at the time they were there, there would have been total economic collapse plus basically commiting war crimes.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 years ago

    iirc there was barely any opium production in Afghanistan pre-2001 under Taliban rule. It was in the following 20 years that the industry boomed and a lot of those government officials you refer to and their relatives got extremely rich from that, including President Karzai's own little brother. The US put those people in power and propped them up for over 2 decades. It's pretty clear the US decision-makers tried to eradicate poppy just as little as they tried to create peace in the region (not at all).

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