This demonstrates two things with crystalline clarity. First the Taliban are back in full force with help from surrounding countries and are kicking American ass. The US claims it's winning militarily, but not politically. Well, it's not the US Armed Forces' job to fight a political war, and winning militarily would mean their defeating the Taliban, and the poppy industry as well.
Well....., they're doing neither. The only thing the US military is doing is reducing Afghanistan to a landscape similar to that of the moon and killing people indiscriminately. Sadly, this quagmire long precedes Bush's catastrophic error. His father and Reagan had a good time supporting the Northern Alliance training such stars now as Osama Bin Laden.
They wanted to give the Russians "their own Vietnam" speaking of Russian massive help of the North Vietnamese along with China during the Vietnam War. A sort of tit for tat sort of situation. During all this time, the Afghan people have suffered beyond comprehension. The US and Russia spent a long time fighting each other vicariously through the Afghan people.
Now as the country has become a virtual "no man's land," the US intends to snuff out the poppy plantations and kill the crop. The fact is opium poppies have been Afghanistan's biggest crop in terms of agriculture, and main source of income for many years. The US, in fact the world has known this for years as well and never said a thing. Raising dates comes no where close to producing the income that the poppies do.
Further, it's rather hypocritical for the US, which used drug money it received from CIA drug sales in Vietnam, and in the United States to Americans to finance covert operations in Vietnam and South and Central America, to say anything at all about Afghanistan's opium crop.
For all intents and purposes Afghanistan is a non state. It's US stooge, Hamid Karzai has no authority outside Kabul, and very little inside the capital except in his paying off of drug lords.
The "governments" the US cobbles together have always been a failure. Not one success. Afghanistan and Iraq are no different. The people hate the US with rage that is white hot, and they aren't stupid. They well understand that all the "elections" in Iraq and Afghanistan were rigged by the Americans to place people the US wanted in power as their new "free and democratic" government. These two countries are democracies? I think not, not even by the loosest of terms. They are both failed states, and Iraq is currently engaged in a civil war.
The poppies are all the Afghans have left. What little "economy" exists there will be destroyed along with the poppy crop if the US makes one more in a endless litany of fuckups and destroys the poppies. Massive hunger, starvation, sickness and death will result for the Afghan people who are already hanging on the last rung of their "ladder," or end of their rope.
One thing is for certain, the Afghan people will fight to the last man. What a great American legacy. Like all the other miserable foreign policy failures enjoyed by the US.
