First post. A doozy if you can believe it. Here's a post I saw from a forum, not political, but, nonetheless a damning post to the current admin. If you can refute it, it would be helpful.

It's a long one, please forgive the time it takes to read:


There has been too easy an acceptance of the lazy notion that the war in Afghanistan is the 'good' war, while the war in Iraq is the 'bad'war, the blunder.

Afghanistan was not militarily winnable by the British Empire at the height of its supremacy. It was not winnable by Darius orAlexander, by Shah, Tsar or Great Moghul. It could not be subdued by240,000 Soviet troops. So what, precisely, are we trying to win?

In six years, the occupation has wrought one massive transformation in Afghanistan, a development so huge that it has increased Afghan GDP by66 per cent and constitutes 40 per cent of the entire economy. That is a startling achievement, by any standards. Yet we are not trumpeting it. Why not?

The answer is this. The achievement is the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.

The Taliban had reduced the opium crop to precisely nil. That is an inconvenient truth that our spin has managed to obscure. They stamped out the opium trade, and impoverished and drove out the drug warlords whose warring and rapacity had ruined what was left of the country after the Soviet war. That is about the only good thing you can say about the Taliban. There are plenty of very bad things to say about them. But their suppression of the opium trade and the drug barons is undeniable fact.

Now we are occupying the country, that has changed. According to the United Nations, 2006 was the biggest opium harvest in history, smashing the previous record by 60 per cent. This year will be even bigger.

Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone intomanufacturing and 'value-added' operations. It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.

How can this have happened, and on this scale? The answer is simple.The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government – the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect. When we attacked Afghanistan, America bombed from the air while the CIA paid, armed and equipped the dispirited warlord drug barons – especially those grouped in the Northern Alliance – to do the ground occupation. We bombed the Taliban and their allies into submission, while the warlords moved in to claim the spoils. Then we made them ministers.

My knowledge of all this comes from my time as British Ambassador in neighbouring Uzbekistan from 2002 until 2004. I stood at the Friendship Bridge at Termez in 2003 and watched the Jeeps with blacked-out windows bringing the heroin through from Afghanistan, en route to Europe.

I watched the tankers of chemicals roaring into Afghanistan. The heroin passes over the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, where it is taken over by President Islam Karimov's people. It is then shipped up the railway line, in bales of cotton, to St Petersburg and Riga. The UK, United States and Germany have all invested large sums in donating the most sophisticated detection and screening equipment to the Uzbek customs centre at Termez to stop the heroin coming through.  But the convoys of Jeeps running between Dostum and Karimov are simply waved around the side of the facility.

As the great diplomat, soldier and adventurer Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alexander Burnes pointed out before his death in the First Afghan Warin 1841, there is no point in a military campaign in Afghanistan as every time you beat them, you just swell their numbers. Our only real achievement to date is falling street prices for heroin in London.

Remember this the next time you hear a politician calling for more troops to go into Afghanistan. And when you hear of another brave British life wasted there, remember you can add to the casualty figures all the young lives ruined, made miserable or ended by heroin in theUK.

They, too, are casualties of our Afghan policy.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=469983&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true
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I, for one, can live with higher opium production, if it means a lot less Al-quada/Talaban terrorists.  It is the lesser of two evils.

I would hope that 9/11 proved to all of us just how much damage a small group of dedicated terrorists can inflict on a nation.  Have we so quickly forgotten?

For me, both Afghanistan and Iraq are 'good' wars.  I rather be fighting terrorists on their own turf; than in our own cities.  Do you think these radicals are just going to go away on their own?  What a recruiting 'bonanza' it would be for the radical Islamists, if we just walk away and allow them to declare victory.

If we walk away from Iraq & Afghanistan with our 'heads tucked between our tails' we will just be asking for the next horrific terrorist acts on our own soil.

I agree with both of you.

This is a big problem; however, it is not the problem that needs to be focused on right now.  Afghanistan has little else to offer.  In other words, Afghanistan is geographical, geological, and climatological WRECK - why anyone (U.S., U.S.S.R., historical empires, or even Afghanis) would WANT it is beyond me. This can't be changed overnight.  If Heroine addicts in the U.S. and elsewhere get a cheaper high - for the time being - seems a small price to pay for eliminating terrorist regimes.


Also, Alexander WAS able to conquer Afghanistan, he was only ever defeated by Porusp of India.  Of course, control of Afghanistan did not outlast Alexander's death.  I don't know enough history to say whether this is because it couldn't be held, or because no one wanted to hold it.

I'm really not sure on the history of this country, but has anyone wondered about the pipeline going thru there country, why,and what's in it?????? And where does it end up at?????? Read. Investigate.

I think that opium is the last of our worries. What are they going to do? Get us all high enough we forget that were fighting them?

Drafter wrote:I'm really not sure on the history of this country, but has anyone wondered about the pipeline going thru there country, why,and what's in it?????? And where does it end up at?????? Read. Investigate.

There is NO pipeline in Afghanistan.  What loony-toon conspiracy-filled world do you live in?  A simple google or wikipedia search would show you this obvious fact but I guess that is too much investigation to expect from conspiracy nuts.

Defineately dittohead and Eyas hit the point on this i'm defineately against having a war in the long run but its true if it means less terrorists than hey i couldn't complain!

Drafter is one of those classic loony conspiracy theory types.  He claims the war is caused by a pipeline and then urges everyone else to investigate the facts!  Except the facts prove there is no pipeline!  Let's ignore the basic fact that the Taliban lent material aid and comfort to the people who crashed 4 jetliners and killed 3,000 people on 9/11.  That couldn't be reason enough to attack.  So it must obviously be the pipeline that doesn't exist!  

<<<TWISTED LOGIC>>>

At least we have an idea where all that opium is going!

paleocon wrote:Drafter is one of those classic loony conspiracy theory types.  He claims the war is caused by a pipeline and then urges everyone else to investigate the facts!  Except the facts prove there is no pipeline!  Let's ignore the basic fact that the Taliban lent material aid and comfort to the people who crashed 4 jetliners and killed 3,000 people on 9/11.  That couldn't be reason enough to attack.  So it must obviously be the pipeline that doesn't exist!  

<<<TWISTED LOGIC>>>

At least we have an idea where all that opium is going!

Yeah lets look at the facts, along with that i've come to the conclusion that bush did 9/11, i'm just kidding though.