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We are even under the table talking to the Taliban, why? Because we are looking for a way out and if we were to push on the Opium production we would get push back (we would end up fighting more, more IEDs, more mortar attacks, more RPG attacks...). This isn’t so much that the US government is profiting from opium production (the conspiracy theories), but rather that she is trying to “pick her battles,” and if some guy is making his money from opium production, but is generally a “not so bad guy,” we don’t start a fight with him too.

That's pretty much the story that is fed to the sheeple, word for word. And it would be a good story were it not for the fact that since the US could use, oh, I don't know... ITS INTELLIGENCE SERVICES... (let's see... drones, monitoring communications, financial transactions, shaking down people to get them to talk, etc.) the drug operations could be reduced to nothing rather easily.

You can't hide a poppy field. You have to pick the poppies, process them, pack and ship them.

Aerial surveillance anyone ???????

A few more IEDs would be like shooting spitballs against a US force of tens of thousands, air support, spy networks, satellites, etc., etc., etc.

The technology for dealing with these things has gotten better and better and better..... etc.

If you stop to think about it, and really honestly think about it....

There was a NIE (national intelligence report to the President) at the end of Klintoon that labeled AIDS in Africa as a "national security" crisis for AMERICA. We're in this trillion dollar "war on global warming" because it's "vital to the safety of the world". Sounds like a 1940's war movie ! We're saving the world !

We have to have our brains in our @ss if we don't think that rampant heroin use in America is not a problem that, while we're hangin' out in Afghanistan watchin' the poppies grow, spending a cool trillion or so, we could maybe turn off the production right were we have a massive military force.

To start to fit the puzzle pieces together (difficult for the sheeple, none of our pieces fit, we're looking at the wrong side, etc.), we could start by reading up on some history, say of BCCI. Rather than pass it off as a few "rogue corrupt actors", if we really get into the testimony, find out what people admitted to, since they are undoubtedly hiding even more, we get into some very serious implications.

Perhaps remember that March Rich received a Presidential pardon. We'd have to do some digging to actually understand what that implies.

The more you research, and pick out just the facts and discard speculation, the worse it looks.

Sorry for the rant !

The irony in this story is that the Taliban historically were against opium production. Some of our allies such as the Northern Alliance (which helped bring down the Taliban), were big producers and you can read about this as far back as 2001: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/25/afghanistan.drugstrade

Intelligence is nice, in WWII it let the Germans know that there was a huge invasion in Normandy, or that Stalingrad was surrounded and the 6th Army was about to be swallowed up. Intelligence doesn’t fight the fight for you, and we can only afford and deal with so much at once. The US Army and Marine Corps were already stretched to their limits in 2003 - 2011 committed in the Sinai, Balkans, Korea, Somalia, Sudan, and fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines (Abu Saeff) all awhile still conducting things like evacuation operations in Liberia, post tsunami assistance etc. While our casualties were in all reality below any threshold of real statistical concern, the burn out on troops deploying repeatedly was real, so were the operational costs, and the political damage. Pushing harder would have required more troops (which we didn’t have) and would have gotten us more casualties, and more political damage.

We live in a world with finite resources. How to best allocate them, matters. Picking a fight with everyone we disagree with in “any aspect,” might not be the smart thing to do.