USA failed to stop the drug trade (opium poppy crops) in that country, Taliban comes in a nuke that trade in 1 year, puts in question if the Americans were in fact running the drug trade themselves under their rule.
Whitey Bulger: protected by the FBI for decades while being the biggest heroin importer in the northeast
Freeway Ricky Ross: supplied by the CIA with coke from the Contras, in a relationship mediated by a DEA informant
Golden Triangle heroin trade: controlled by the CIA for decades after the Korean War, arming and protecting manufacturers and traffickers, with heroin flown on CIA planes
The French Connection: French gangsters were protected by the CIA and allowed to import heroin to their primary market, the US, in exchange for keeping the port of Marseille out of the control of French communists
La Corporacion: the biggest Bolivian cocaine cartel, the "GM of cocaine", started with the cooperation and protection of the CIA according to a DEA agent whose investigations into them were repeatedly thwarted by the State Dept and CIA
They were naturally. Opium is historically a tool of colonial oppressers. Asian opium dens were only a thing after the British Empire brought it to their communities. Gary Web famously shot himself in the head twice after exposing the CIA as the one offloading crack into the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area kick-starting the crack epidemic. Drugs like crack, opium, and other highly addictive drugs help maintain control and division among the exploited population. Pain killers and fentanyl are the new Crack Cocaine of our time. Even if they were not making a direct profit off the opium trade at the time, it did them no good to stop it. It only supported their efforts of looting and plundering.
Puts in question? I'd argue it's 100% obvious. The opioid epidemic lines up pretty well with the invasion of Afghanistan.
The US is willing to kill hundreds of thousands (millions) of people for trying to pass things like small labor reforms i.e the Jakarta Method in Indonesia
Americans are the drug trade, the world supply of opium dropped to almost nothing after Americans retreated from Afghanistan and the Taliban re-established their already right-wing, pre-American invasion policies on poppy crops.
The drug war funds the CIA black budget the same way Civil Asset Forfeiture funds your local police department.
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Not sure why you're drawing a magical difference between the US military telling its troops to do it and the US military telling some other troops to do it. Both are happening at the request of the US.
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It's extrajudicial BOTH WAYS you fucking dipshit. It's not magically different. Both are extrajudicial.
Why the fuck are you treating it differently?? Answer the question.
I love how debate nerds get so caught up in whether something is legal or not. News flash, laws are worthless without enforcement, and there isn’t currently any entity capable of preventing NATO forces from murdering people whenever they please
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Shoot my ex wife.
"I did not kill that man".
Someone is a transphobe in that example of yours, and when I find out who I'm going to kill them (don't worry it's okay, I have a piece of paper that says it's not extra judicial)
The USA is willing to let other people kill people in Jakarta. The US military is not doing it themselves which is the difference here.
That's not what the Jakarta method is, sorry but you don't know what you're talking about.
The rest of your post compounds on that ignorance.
You can try saying that but you have a giant gap in your history education, and with that, a fundamentally incomplete way of seeing and interpreting the world, and world events.
You don't seem to be aware of Afghanistan pre-American intervention, the left direction of Afghanistan's development (the sovietization of Afghanistan), its former place in the international socialist bloc, or the reasons driving the nation's current relations with China.
Take a long look at America's relationship to the UAE and Israeli right-bulwarks and the general relationship and co-operation between the Soviets and the Islamic regions of the world. For whatever mistakes they made there were strong bonds between Soviets and Islam and together they would have built the middle east into the center of the advanced world again. The eastern republics would have landed on the Lunar South pole well before India did this month.
The US has no interest in mutual and internationalist development, the entire core logic of the American project is post-colonial extraction. There aren't sufficient democratic structures of enough robustness and sophistication to steer the project otherwise. Underlying any and all decisions by the American state is nothing and only capital.
The Jakarta method, underselling it, describes US collaboration with right-wing capitalist governments to violently suppress left-wing organizing toward the transition to a socialist economy and mode of production. The Jakarta method differs from previous interventions with a wildly increased emphasis on daily terror, sexual violence and raising home-grown colonial-born, American trained, armed, and funded, equivalents of Weimar Germany's Freikorp via the convergence of interests between liberals (capitalists) and fascists (capitalists).
You're outing yourself by either not knowing, or purposely omitting, the role of the PKI, the world's largest Communist Party outside of China and the Soviet Union. A varied but ultimately democratic socialist organization historically defined and remembered by and because of its pacifism, and self-disarmament.
This Party came in the wave of the Soviet-aligned post-war wave of anti-colonial revolutions and class consciousness that supported solidified after the Soviet defeat of the newcomer fascist bloc of capital (as opposed to the incumbent 'liberal' bloc of capital) during the second world war. Their destruction came after a string of successful resistances to American anti-socialist intervention immediately after the war. In Eastern Europe, in Korea and in Vietnam. The Jakarta method describes a more sophisticated, and wildly more violent and shocking, fascist response to the left-wing self-organization of former-colonial subject states. An intensity and volume of bloodshed, sexual violence, terrorism, and lies that you're repeating to this day.
Repeating because of something as simple and flimsy as an address on a spreadsheet.
Edit: and yes communists and anti-colonialists have for what you're describing, they're called collaborators. You're describing the administrative state that's left in place to manage the flow of commodities and western capital during both formal colonial occupation and the imperialist post-colonial period of capital penetration.
The US actively supported the killing and provided names of people to be killed, they didn’t just “not stop it” you fucking dingus. They ARE the “world police” and like other police they are murderous scumbags
it's a good thing girls could go to school
What do you call drone striking weddings and funerals? What else would you call the murder of children? Bombing a hospital to rubble surely isn't extrajudicial murder at the hands of American soldiers? Forgive me for linking wikipedia, but strafing civilians including journalists with attack helicopters must count as extrajudicial murders by the hands of American troops
You are a clown.
and thus almost certainly really bad at thinking
That very smart liberal is very good at thinking because their treats are full of The Adults In The Room that Make The Hard Decisions and Get Shit Done and they are fun to LARP about! 
Yes, but you see, a judge said the attack helicopter was right to strafe the ambulance full of children. So not extrajudicial like, say, the former and current government of Afghanistan, because only US laws count.
As if a militaries entire reason for being isn't arming and training people to pull triggers for them lmfao
uhhhhh, well in my simulator games, super advanced ones by the way (hoi4), you just spam divisions, line them up on the border, and point them. The real trick is to wait for when the green bubbles (good) turn into red bubbles) bad, and wait for a bit. I am very smart.
how many qualifiers do you need for an adjective as boring as “bad”? you are certainly entirely absolutely unequivocally horrible at writing
The US actively backed Suharto to coup the democratically elected government of Indonesia and then western press ran apologia for both the military coup and the murder of 1 million communists, feminists and ethnic minorities by the aforementioned unelected US backed military dictatorship
So what you're saying is, if I were to hire a hitman to take out your sorry white cracker ass, I would be completely justified and be free of any blame?
One of the few times reading something actually made me laugh irl. 'Sorry white cracker ass.'
I'm sorry what? What do you think the US was doing in Afghanistan for 20 years. The US loves an extrajudicial killing.
The Taliban have achieved this by offering better prices for food crops, which is what they need due to us sanctions. So it turns out that the us did have the power all along.
Also, that's another thing the us likes to do, starve countries that don't dance to their tune.
Intrajudicial killings are when you blow up civili---I'm sorry, the "terrorists" with a huge number of drone strikes, am I right fellow liberal?
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Extrajudicial means a killing without a legal ruling, what do you thing it means? The taleban executing someone isn't extrajudicial, because the government of Afghanistan (the taleban) has ruled that it isn't. Notice how legality in no way informs morality. Also the United States killed a shitton of people extrajudiciously in Afghanistan.
The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially
Lol ahahaha good one! Lmfao
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if Americans were willing to accept the wholesale destruction of Afghanistan.
Americans didn't give a fuck what happened in Afghanistan what fucking planet are you on???? They supported carpet bombing it. How old are you? Were you still a child when it started and can't remember what it was actually like?
They never gave a fuck even when they armed the afghans to shoot down Russian planes, they were just a proxy US-Russia war with afghan as puppets.
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It was fucking disgusting back then. You could speak to 99 random americans and they'd support bombing the shit out of afghan and killing whoever was necessary to get osama. It was SO fucking different to how it is now with libs at least being performative about not being bloodthirsty monsters. Back then it was bipartisan support for mass killing and obliteration. Nobody gave a fuck.
Don't get me started on the constant omnipresent casual racism.
The first time I realized I was, for lack of a better word, different than the people I grew up around is when one of my high school buddies just casually said we should "just glass the middle east and get it over with". Glassing is a term we got from Halo which means to incinerate an area with such a high heat the surface turns to glass. His proposed method was obviously nuclear bombs.
No one else thought it was an outlandish thing to say, much less a truly abhorrent one.
They don't care, Americans destroyed every building in Korea (the famous "no targets remaining" quote). Giving almost every right-wing group in the country rifles and stinger missiles, to throw the country into a permanent state of civil war, has the exact same effect as carpet bombing.
Minus the invasion consolidating into a left-wing anti-American socialist front, which happened in Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba.
A permanent civil war, lead by a right wing government, still allows the export of surplus value which is collected by Americans. A left-wing government would try to keep that surplus inside the country to further develop means of production.
It's called Shock therapy and even some liberals (the most politically educated and articulate) are conscious of this happening.
Henry Kissinger's life work is architecting American interventions that result in right-wing reactions rather than left-wing ones. Give all the right-wing groups guns, they kill the left, the country remains defenceless from extraction, and by the time Americans intervene it's multiple squabbling right-wing militias instead of a united socialist front with an industrial base and functioning anti-air missiles.
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How so?
Swear to god you libs are just fed a steady supply of propaganda and are then handed a stock set of phrases you can throw out whenever you feel you might have to challenge your worldview or think for yourselves.
America was the one running the drug trade you absolute fucking dipshit. They didn’t want to stop it because they made bank off of it.
if they were willing to accept the wholesale destruction of Afghanistan
They were, and they did destroy it. What are you smoking?
Ah yes, there it is. The 'stabbed in the back' 'we weren't really trying to win' American military apologia.
Even if you bombed every single building in Afghanistan, you wouldn't have won that war. That's why they stopped doing it. Get fucked you stupid loser.
The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially
go listen to blowback and stop embarrassing yourself in public
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The Taliban is willing to murder people to keep them in line. The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA holy shit people actually believe this.
Have you read the Jakarta Method?
They are an idiot troll and I feel like I wasted my time reading through their deranged contributions to this thread.
But your book recommendation made it worth it! Thanks!
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It is very painful and difficult to read.
Every single person the book talks about is a person like every user here on Hexbear, with the same beliefs and ideals of a world future united and free of capitalist exploitation. It is very painful and very difficult to get through if you humanise the numbers, each with a family that was destroyed.
For any americans looking to seriously break lingering nationalist brainworms they may have I also like:
Yeah, I can imagine. I saw Act of Killing which was similarly brutal to watch for similar reasons.
I don't think I have any nationalist brainworms to break but I'll look that one up too. Thanks!
It makes you go from "The US is evil and the current power structure must be destroyed, but with revolution it can become a force of peace and humanity on the world stage" to "JDPON wen?"
The US was willing to kill half a million Iraqi children to prevent Saddam Hussein from rebuilding Iraq.
"half a million iraqi children" is a reference to the sanctions in the 90s that were explicitly a punishment meant to prevent iraq from rebuilding post gulf war
You're somewhat agreeing - by preventing rebuilding, it becomes a lot easier to build/steal a country's oil refineries. You already admit one invasion was over oil - Surely you can see how invading a country and killing tens/hundreds of thousands of civilians just to steal oil is 'extrajudicial' killing?
The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially that would have bern needed to stop the drug trade.
this might unironically be the funniest and most incorrect statement ever posted. it's so divorced from reality that you must have typoed and meant some other place. the US has not once ever stopped murdering tens of thousands -- or even millions -- of people for the sake of a quick buck. please, dear god, listen to the Blowback podcast. you're talking about the military that firebombed Korea so hard that people had to live in caves in order to survive after virtually every single city was completely and totally leveled, kill 20% of the population, all to institute a despotic police state in the name of repressing every single progressive tendency in the population.
This might actually take the award for Most Unhinged Comment Since Federation. Holy fucking shit.
Fuck the Taliban and the US war machine, they are both fucking assholes esp. the way Americans ran the fuck away from AFGHANISTAN, but facts are fact, Taliban nuked that trade while the US allowed it to flourished. It does not make Taliban better in general, they are still close minded, uneducated door knobs, just like half the US rednecks.
The Taliban closed the opium trade but the big picture is they are still exporting low-value form commodities (raw oil, ore) instead of retaining enough surplus to develop the means to produce high-value form goods (gasoline, electronics, stainless steel medical needles) which is what a left wing government would (did, 1987-1992) do.
If the U.S Government was unsuccessful in supplying and elevating the Gorbachev clique into power and unsuccessful in arming the Mujahideen+ affiliates (which consolidated into the Taliban), the Republic of Afghanistan would probably have fully secularized and industrialized by now.
Any space for right extremism would have been taken up by universal high education, land-reform, cyberneticist economic planning, advanced high-value production and other zero-poverty + full-employment initiatives.
Literal BS.
This crackdown seems to be successful, causing a significant drop in opium farming. While the ban impacts farmers financially, the long-term effects on heroin markets remain uncertain
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Lmao the law isn't some infallible deity. It's a tool of oppression wielded by those in power. The fact that someone got killed, but a judge said it was ok, doesn't mean it's in any way not a murder.
Though I'd like to see the trial of the wedding that got dronestriked, or the many other civilians murdered by the us in Afghanistan.
They aren't in theory just murdering for the sake of murdering.
or in this case as a directive from the WH.
$$$billions in profits, I bet shareholders attend their, temples, synagogues, churches, and mosques, to thank their fucking God's for having blessed them with wealth.
Yeah, I just quickly looked at Wikipedia for the approximations. Of course NATOpedia probably is full of shit on that. And they probably pin most of the casualties on the air forces of the Taliban (hint: there were none).
Well the war machine did a bang up job at preventing Ghadaffi from implementing gold backed currency to keep our scam money system going.
Not useless at all. In fact they did exactly what they set out to do. They produced a fuckin ton of shareholder value for industries that profit off war!
Reminder of the time the US overthrew its own dictator in haiti to create a "liberal anticommunist" president but they killed him 3 months in because he wasn't enough of a fascist dictator
Blowback season 5 should be Haiti, but honestly the shit the US has done to Haiti would take at least 5 seasons to recount in abridged form
blowback slowly becoming the podcast documentary form of "killing hope" by william blum
More like 30 if you count US support for the "Moderate" Mudjahadeen that took the L in the mid 1990s.
You should see Russian law majors faces when Taliban envoys went to Kremlin and got their diplomats approved by MFA, even though the supreme court has ruled that Taliban is a terrorist organization and any of it's members should be arrested on sight and put in jail for 10+ years just for being a part of it. And now we get people who, under one law, are terrorists and have diplomatic immunity at the same time...
If there's anything that would have fixed the situation in Afghanistan, it was not having the U.S. stay there indefinitely.
There's plenty of blame to go around; no need to hang it all on one person. If you like Biden, the better argument is that he was correct to leave.
Biden had no choice. Check that...he could have added more troops, set up an armed enclave, told the taliban that Trump didn't really sign that surrender and hope for the best.
Check that...he could have added more troops, set up an armed enclave, told the taliban that Trump didn't really sign that surrender and hope for the best.
Honestly not sure -- were you being sarcastic here? Why couldn't he have done something like this?
There's also the ever-possible "find some technical violation the other side did and back out," or "find some issue that's larger than imagined and unilaterally delay the agreement," etc. Who was going to hold him accountable?
Imagine thinking world events happen because of whoever is on TV
The Taliban governs Afghanistan because Americans overthrew the previous secular left-wing Republic of Afghanistan government because the Republic made extracting surplus value from the region difficult.
The Taliban is in power because white Americans are so bloodthirsty and unhinged that Afghanis prefer a far-right evangelical government to a permanent fascist colonial occupation with liberal aesthetics.
They will remain in power because Americans funneled so many weapons to right wing paramilitary death squads like the Mujahideen and others (which consolidated into the Taliban) that the country will never be stable enough to return to secular and left-wing governance.
This is why China is pouring money into Afghanistan, if the country becomes stable enough, Afghanistan becomes a reliable partner nation and connects China to the Europe, right wing thought and nationalism is eroded by education into solidarity and internationalism, and the conditions for left wing organizing can eventually return.
Which means oil is processed in the county, and the surplus value produced by those high-value form petroleum products remain in the hands of the people that live and work there, instead of the surplus value being siphoned of out of the country by the American corporations that Americans like to pretend are separate from the American government. Which is why Americans intervened to begin with.
They will remain in power because Americans funneled so many weapons to right wing paramilitary death squads like the Mujahideen and others (which consolidated into the Taliban) that the country will never be stable enough to return to secular and left-wing governance.
girl power 
Afghans don't prefer the Taliban. They have no choice in the matter. The religious zealots rule.
They have no choice because Americans gave the Mujahideen (and affiliates which later consolidated into the Taliban) guns and Stinger missiles to overthrow the democratically elected socialist Republic of Afghanistan in 1992.
The American government gave rural right-wing evangelists the weapons necessary to overthrow the socialist government elected by a huge majority in the secular left-wing cities. Does that sound familiar?
The US gave weapons and trained with NATO the Afghanistan military to safeguard an elected government. The military surrendered in days. That is why Afghans have no choice.
Have you ever considered the possibility that the training NATO gave them was just that shit rather then the Afgans being unable to comprehend the miracles of western tactics? 
The US gave weapons and trained with NATO the Afghanistan military to safeguard an elected government. The military surrendered in days.
these two facts might be more intimately related than you think
the US sponsored and financed those religious zealot networks in the 1970s to block a socialist movement in afghanistan that had begun in the 1920s. the farm laborers and workers of the country were sick of the feudal system of massive landowners and were tired of the british soldiers propping it up. they wanted universal secular education, an end to the honor killings of women, and a transition to a democratic republican form of governance uninterested in being occupied by western powers.
the US merely continued the project of the british occupiers: financing, training and arming religious psychos (literally men who threw acid in the faces of women who were literate) and opium gangsters, because these are the kinds of assholes that can be relied upon to kill socialist reforms without compunction. the kind of people that will murder children, burn books, and firebomb schools/hospitals. the US wound this minority of killers up and set them lose on the soviet border to lure the US' rival into an intractable war.
it worked and then the disease got a mind of its own, containment failed (several of US-backed strongmen who functioned as cutouts in supplying war materiel in the gulf were overthrown), and the violence turned towards outwards, and specifically towards the west. the taliban and ISIS are offshoots of networks the US and the UK established and, at best "lost control" of. but, more cynically, they still play a vital role in goosing the military industrial complex and making americans angry at central asians/arabs, sparking their will to export money and violence at the border of our geopolitical rivals.