• pjhenry1216@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Something the US couldn’t do under the previous government. Plus many switched to wheat beforehand anyway due to food shortages. The US didn’t rule Afghanistan and had to work within Afghanistan’s government. That government is gone. The Taliban can act like a dictator. Sure, armed with little more than sticks, but farmers had a two year lag beforehand to switch to wheat. This ban wasn’t just announced it’s old. It was just never enforced til now. I mean, it’s ridiculous to compare the two situations. If the US did the same, at the time they were there, there would have been total economic collapse plus basically commiting war crimes.

    • SLfgb@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      iirc there was barely any opium production in Afghanistan pre-2001 under Taliban rule. It was in the following 20 years that the industry boomed and a lot of those government officials you refer to and their relatives got extremely rich from that, including President Karzai’s own little brother. The US put those people in power and propped them up for over 2 decades. It’s pretty clear the US decision-makers tried to eradicate poppy just as little as they tried to create peace in the region (not at all).