how stupid are we???

[myrrh]

Originally Posted by Rog

the reason he gave for being in afghanistan was to 'kick his heroin addiction' which to me is like buggering off to columbia to kick your coke habit or down the pub to kick your alcohol habit.....it just don't follow.

I am not sure if you are aware but the Taliban eradicated the production of poppy from their country while they were ruling. Interestingly enough, since the US 'liberated' Afghanistan, the whole production is back in action. And it is even mentioned here that the Taliban is once again using the money from the poppy to fund itself. I can't help but take this as an absolute lie put out by the US government to brainwash the people into making the Taliban look like the 'badguys'.

From 8 years ago:

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (February 15, 2001 8:19 p.m. EST)

U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.


A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.


"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies.


A State Department official said Thursday all the information the United States has received so far indicates the poppy crop had decreased, but he did not believe it was eliminated.


Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium, about 75 percent of the world's supply, U.N. officials said. Opium -- the milky substance drained from the poppy plant -- is converted into heroin and sold in Europe and North America. The 1999 output was a world record for opium production, the United Nations said -- more than all other countries combined, including the "Golden Triangle," where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.


Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.


The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.


The U.N. surveyors, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others -- areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan last year, Frahi said in an interview Wednesday. They covered 80 percent of the land in those provinces that last year had been awash in poppies.


This year they found poppies growing on barely an acre here and there, Frahi said. The rest -- about 175,000 acres -- was clean.

taken from: http://opioids.com/afghanistan/index.html

I really find it extremely difficult for the Taliban to have turn on their heals now, and allow poppy to be grown again.

[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by myrrh

I am not sure if you are aware but the Taliban eradicated the production of poppy from their country while they were ruling. Interestingly enough, since the US 'liberated' Afghanistan, the whole production is back in action. And it is even mentioned here that the Taliban is once again using the money from the poppy to fund itself. I can't help but take this as an absolute lie put out by the US government to brainwash the people into making the Taliban look like the 'badguys'.

So then saying you're going to wander around the afghani/paki border with false documents to kick a heroin habit is more like saying you're going to a ku klux klan rally because you're feeling like socializing, or going to a gay bath house to take a shower.

What happened to this guy is reprehensible, and is a drop in the slop bucket of the moral standing that the u.s. has shown in Iraq and afghanistan. but I really get Rog's ire.

Regarding the opium trade. The "islamist" growers may not be taliban, but they are still thugs running as drug lords in tandem with the CIA. And I suppose that the taliban not being part of this means they deserver a perfunctory three second golf clap. clap clap clap.

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

Originally Posted by myrrh

... I can't help but take this as an absolute lie put out by the US government to brainwash the people into making the Taliban look like the 'badguys'...

Have you noticed the abundance of the term "Hydro" everywhere?

And I think it sucks, even when tagged to a bar of soap.

[IsiliRunite]

Originally Posted by jOHN rODRIGUEZ

And I think it sucks, even when tagged to a bar of soap.

I can think of one commodity where the word "hydro" is always a good thing..

[Rog]

Originally Posted by myrrh

I am not sure if you are aware but the Taliban eradicated the production of poppy from their country while they were ruling.

I really find it extremely difficult for the Taliban to have turn on their heals now, and allow poppy to be grown again.

Maybe they did but the poppy production is back in full swing and from what i can gather the taliban are using heroin to finance themselves.......

oh, and the taliban were not good guys in the first place the way they treated people - especially women.

[myrrh]

I am not in anyway saying that the Taliban were ever the good guys. I am just pointing out some facts.

And just because we hear that the opium trade is back and that the Taliban are using it to fund themselves, doesn't mean that it is truth because we are hearing it from Western media sources, who no doubt paint the Taliban to be straight up evil.

Why can't the run Afghanistan? Just because they don't have a democracy that is approved by the US and it's allies? Look at China. Look at all the South American governments, etc etc. Why can't people of their country run their country however they want, without the Western countries stepping in and trying to dictate 'how' they should be run.

The typical thing people say (this is not directed to you Rog) is about the women, but look how women are treated in the US. Sure they are not forced to wear a burka but really they are treated like complete sex objects. They are portrayed this way in the media, they are used to sell everything from sex to cars, to whatever.

I am not trying to debate the treatment of women, but lets be fair here, when we say that the while the Taliban took the women issue to one extreme, in the West we have taken it to the other.

[Rog]

Its possible i suppose but if he knows something that damaging i would have thought the govt. would have refused him entry at any price as he will be guaranteed to 'spill the beans' once back here.