Posted on 01/20/2014 6:34:59 PM PST by LeoWindhorse
In the sharpest warnings they have ever issued on the topic, Pentagon officials told Congress the growing opium trade is threatening the costly US war effort to build a stable Afghanistan.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Nuke and nerve gas the entire country and be done with it.
I knew instantly when Obama said Afghanistan was the right war and Iraq was the wrong war. Now you all know He was protecting the supply line.
Wonder how Obama is gonna blame Bush for this one?
I don’t know why we don’t buy the poppies from the farmers to make pharmaceutical morphine. Do they get higher prices from the drug merchants who turn it into heroin?
A perfect place to send our finest gay and women combat units.
I don’t have much faith in anything good coming out of Afghanistan long-term, simply because I don’t trust the Afghani government. or any of their troops/police/etc., any further than I can throw a greyhound bus.
That said, I often wondered why we didn’t try to bring the peasant opium growers into the fold, so to speak, through legal opium production. They do this in parts of India - licensed farmers can legally grow opium poppies for the pharmaceutical industries. The farmers make a fat profit, and the drug companies get cheap raw material. I would think that at least some of the opium production in Afghanistan could have been diverted that way.
OTOH, the cartels who dominate the growing now - including those who use their profits to support Taliban and other terrorist types - wouldn’t like that much. And, with the RoE our troops fight under, wiping them out probably wouldn’t be possible. It was just a thought, though.
Scratch a drug addict, find a Democrat.
Good ideas
Personally , I believe that the Taliban , or elements loyal or beholden to them , move the raw opium that the rural Afghan farmers produce , to points along the borders of the former Soviet states , there to trade with the Russian mafia for weapons and ordnance resupplies . Where else can they resupply ? How else ? The Russian mafia then refines it into heroin and transports the heroin to Europe and the Americas , taking advantage of their connection with Russian immigrants in U.S. organized crime syndicates and the protections corrupt fully unionized ports in America .
Bush was right : When you do drugs you directly support terrorism . People ( especially stoners) laughed at the time , but he had it exactly right . Now , as another mentioned here , it is actually against now established political ROE’s to go after or affect the rural Afgahn opium production . Little in the way of alternative crops being introduced . And how the move the product ? One can only imagine . Maybe a whistle blower will enlighten us . Soon!
“THE PENTAGON” We knew Afghanistan was the epic center of opium production for far longer than we have been in Afghanistan. The powers that be know that opium is king and is used as wampum/currency. The British SAS built a fort across a field from my office... they were going to go after the drug kingpins. They planned to fly helos in and out of the fortified structure so as to remain as elusive and untouchable as they could be... the fortification lay between the Afghan guarded outer perimeter, and the US guarded inner perimeter. Up, up, up went the walls, next thing ya’ know, old Jed’s a millionaire- not really, but the mission was cancelled. There simply wasn’t enough will to rock the boat, as the doo-doo was REALLY going to hit the fan when Coalition Forces went for the jugular.
The already horseshit rules of engagement meant the blow back from poppy eradication wasn’t a dynamic the military wanted to tackle or take heat from.
The level of corruption in these third world shit holes is very straight forward. Kill or be killed. The toughest and most ruthless SOB on the block calls the shots. The warlords are like mafia dons on steroids times ten! They have upwards of thousands of hired guns on call. One warlord had a compound across the street from the base entrance. Another had a compound down the same road. One was decked out and was referred to as the McDonalds’, due to the similarity in architecture (a mansard style roof). The other warlord was ghetto and had a single story compound that looked like something out of a spaghetti western. Chickens running loose and trash blowing across the road.
A third country national worker (Pakistani) made false ID badges in the event he ever left his badge at his residence, which would prevent him from gaining access to the base, meaning no work and no pay. That is considered espionage and the unlucky dude was turned over to a warlord. The warlord had him beaten with a pipe to an inch of death. Then they hanged him. The other warlord caught wind of this, so to keep his stature, he had some unlucky cuss executed too. They are very bad people and operate with a strict code. We are so f****d by the way we approach and prosecute the military actions that we do over there, and get this- that was 2004!
These are all Muslims involved, and these drugs are poison to us Infidels.
It'a a double bubble; degrade the Infidel, and use the Infidel's money to buy weaponry. -Tom
The Taliban tell the farmers that you grow the poppies or we will come and kill you. They ask the farmers if the Americans will protect them. What do you think the farmers think, and what do you think the farmers say when they answer the Taliban? What do YOU think the Americans will do? What are we doing over there? What would we have done in world war two? What was the outcome of world war two, especially regarding our rules of engagement? What were the results? The questions are not necessarily aimed at you personally.
How China got rid of opium
http://www.sacu.org/opium.html
We could legalize heroin world wide and take the profit out. Or we could secretly sterilize most poppy seeds and distribute them to farmers.
well THAT is enlightening
Is there any reason why we can’t deployed aerial herbicide spraying drones ?
Round-up/ Glyphosate is the way to go . Unlike Vietnam ,where we were trying to deal with vast rain soaked ,broadleaf , impenetrable jungle , AFG is open and dry and not jungle . A little bit of Round-up is nowhere near as toxic as what they cooked up as Agent Orange ( 24D-245T ) . Every opium field should receive a light misting of Roundup , right as they start to bud with flowers . Eliminate the seed pod cycle . Do this for a few years and that’s it . In the meantime , introduce alternative crops . In Thailand it was cabbages and coffee . In AFG it could be hemp , for rope . It’s obvious that MJ grows well there . There is an endless market for quality hemp , if the nylon industry lobbyists stay out of the picture .
Our ROE have simply continued to strangle our war fighting tactics resulting in perhaps a slinking towards a castle siege mentality/strategy. Hey, who wants to get smoked if we are just going to di di mau anyway?
I believe 5 times as many lives have been lost on zero's watch than were lost on Bush's.
Not only are we not eradicating the poppy fields, but in not doing so they are proliferating exponentially.
The local saying is- the Americans have the watches, but we have the time.
Being landlocked and over 600 miles inland makes for some hairy travel thru Injun country, and makes logistics a nightmare and very very expensive. Bribes for the governments, bribes for the robbers/raiders/highwaymen/ bribes for the terrorists/ bribes for the warlords, etc., etc., etc.
We joked that it wasn't at the end of the world, but that you could see it from there.
Money? I stood in a finance office and they had money stacked like bales of hay, at least 8 feet tall. A pallet of hundred dollar bills 4 feet high is a billion dollars. There were billions of dollars in the damn vault. I held a stack of brand new $50 bills the size of a toaster, which was $150,000. UNBELIEVABLE! Lights out. Keep the faith. Goodnight.
geez ! give me a minute % of all that dough.... Way too much $ in the hands of the least deserving , and especially in the hands of all the rotten ragheads . They should all be soaked in cyanide
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