Afghanistan (AKA Graveyard of Empires) has emerged stronger than ever after 19 years of US intervention in the US led war on terrorism. Still intent on protecting its $1 trillion in untouched metals resources from marauding foreign mining companies, Afghanistan and its farmers have adapted to utilizing 21st century technologies to grow opium poppies:
…heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up. […]
Afghanistan was used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game†– as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me. It’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming poppy industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the worlds’ heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017. […]
The Biden administration characterized the May 1, 2021, Afghanistan pullout date for the removal of 2,500 remaining US troops as “hard to meet,” and said it was not his intention “to stay there a long time.” What the President means by hard-to-meet or a long time is anyone’s guess. In the 1940 Battle of Dunkirk, the British pulled 400,000 of their troops out of Normandy in just ten days.
A clue to Biden’s intentions may lie in his consistency. Even though he began his senate career by opposing the war in Viet Nam, Joe Biden never lost faith in using wars to produce a drug free society, or at least a society free of drug users. He seems to believe drug laws can change people’s understanding of what is right or wrong about drugs. With that kind of attitude, it’s possible a new era of drone wars may bloom in the Afghan desert highlands.
Afghanistan has been doing their part to eliminate carbon emissions. Maybe First Solar will start fucking paying me a dividend.
How can America leave? What would Australia say? Don’t they need protections for their fiver year contract for mining? If you pull out, you risk ‘war’ and war risks mining contracts. If we stay in Afghanistan, then we can protect the mining contracts. China relies on Afghanistan since the gold and copper and silver coming from there is less expensive than mined minerals coming from China, which works as a moat for their computer chip empire and aspirations . . . and then we’ve got India, the world’s competitor to China. If America stays in Afghanistan, then we can regulate the trade war between China and India in regards to minerals, just like we do in Iraq when it comes to India and China (oil begets plastics which begets American’s stuff).
And I bet many of the computer chips found in the solar panels come from Afghanistan by way of China and other Asian nations after they were minded in Afghanistan.
I foresee the end of computers and Facebook and Google and Apple and Microsoft in the next year or so, back to #2 lead pencils and paper and books and an old rotary phone . . . we no longer need computer chips–they were a fad like pogs and bellbottoms. Once this happens, we will leave Afghanistan . . . and it’s the Millennials who are leading the way to throwing away their phones and deleting their social media accounts. Then America’s need to stay in the Middle East is gone.
Wow. Can I buy pot from you?
Like, when all your Bosnian and Croatian friends who’ve worked contract work in Iraq and Afghanistan for well over a decade and they all tell you the same narrative from the business side of things, yet none of them know each other or do the same job or work for the same companies on American bases.
And to compete with American oil coming from Iraq, you’ve got Russia securing ports in Syria, seeking contracts with Turkey (Bosporus), and taking Crimea and certain coastlines of Georgia to help secure a pipe-line into Europe.
I’m not a dispo. But if I was, I’d sell 1.2 grams of gas for $4.20 . . . all strains mix and match. When Mexi brick was the only thing available for an average of $100 an OZ, the best way to compete was to offer them a discount price with added weight, like 32 grams for $80. Sometimes being a leaf rep required lots of travel with customers wanting to offer you a taste of what they just got from you, so sometimes a customer might place his order at 11 a.m. and get it filled out by 10 at night, he or she would wait since it was at a reduced price for a fat 8th more.
That’s what Afghanistan does, offers premium dope at reduced prices and they insist on giving you more than you order.
The Taliban only outlawed dope just shortly before 9/11 to jack the price of their reserves since the Triangle of SE Asia had no way of filling the global order, thus making more money per kilo than usual as a way to prepare for war with the U.S., Aide Al Qaeda, and make it harder for their enemies to grow/sell it.
Everyone blames the U.S. invasion for increasing production, but that was the intention. Increased production means America hasn’t been able to control the nation like she’d like to. Who wants to wager that after the place increases production upon a disruption of Taliban rule, the U.S. would stay there longer than 9 or 14 years?
Afghanistan is named “The Graveyard of Empires” for a reason, it has destroyed the British Empire, The USSR and hopefully now the 5 eyed Anglophone empire headed by the US.
“..the British pulled 400,000 of their troops out of Normandy in just ten days…”
and that was under assault from the best army in the world… all US forces need to contend with is airport check-in. Biden has only one thing going for him… he’s not Donald Trump.
Biden may be a career politician with his lips placed firmly on the anus of Christian Imperialism but at least he’s not a malignant narcissist.