If you ever feel useless....

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.

That's mad. The US would never promote illegal drug trade.
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
Ronald Stark: the world's biggest manufacturer and supplier of LSD for a period after its criminalization, sole supplier of late-period Brotherhood of Eternal Love, threw parties at the US embassy in Brussels, sent letters using their letterhead, and when he was finally arrested in Italy, the judge in his case accused the CIA of protecting him
failed
implies they tried lol
- Touche lol
- tried
  implies they weren’t deliberately making a killing off of it
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.
- 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.
- The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially
  Lol ahahaha good one! Lmfao
- The US DOD was not willing to kill the thousands of people extrajudicially
  
  go listen to blowback and stop embarrassing yourself in public
- 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?
- The US was willing to kill half a million Iraqi children to prevent Saddam Hussein from rebuilding Iraq.
- 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.
- The US military, famous for showing restraint when it comes to extrajudicial murder
- 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.
- 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.
- I will extrajudicially run you over with a fucking tank
- They aren't in theory just murdering for the sake of murdering.
  I hate to break it to you...
  or in this case as a directive from the WH.
  I really hate to break it to you...

wasn't useless for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin

$$$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.
don't forget Halliburton!

Don't forget the tens of thousands of dead civilians.

hundreds of thousands lol
- 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.

and instituting slave markets. don't forget the slave markets.

So THAT'S where my affordable housing and groceries went!

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...

Maybe Trump shouldn't have signed that surrender and let them out of jail.

If there's anything that would have fixed the situation in Afghanistan, it was not having the U.S. stay there indefinitely.
- No, but if you want to assign the end to someone, there is only one.
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.