Biden has been on record for 12 years as advocating for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. He hasn’t seen core western interests in Afghanistan. It’s 12,000 miles away from us. It’s barren mountain ranges and deserts. Its also a few hundred miles from the borders of China and Russia. That’s why they care.

Afghanistan’s chief export since Alexander the Great has been defeated empires, then also heroin and Islamic terrorism.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-...-escapes-kabul

Read that washoe that’s Afghanistan not some sea of untapped resources only the Chinese know about. It has important land routes and terrorists that’s it.

Pray we don’t see something like that at the airport

I wanna know what happened in the opium war and China. Opium must have come from Afghanistan. Islamic terrorism is only a product of f with the Taliban.

Yep I'm praying. Your article is great for understanding how the Afghans have been messed with. This is from the article: please tell me wtf was supposed to happen else? What kind of business did the English have to oberthrow the Afghan leadership and install their people? They marched in "to establish authority" jahahaaa and you wonder why they got killed? What would happen if 13.000 Afghan soldiers tried to establish authority in England? The same. A bloody war. The Brits had no business to be f with the Afghans or India.

This is the whole article, first they went in and got overpowered. Then they came back an retaliated. They could because the British military was superior of course due to technical advances.


"In the 19th century, Britain, with a goal of protecting its Indian colonial holdings from Russia, tried to establish authority in neighboring Afghanistan by attempting to replace Emir Dost Mohammad with a former emir known to be sympathetic to the British. This blatant British interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs triggered the outbreak of the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1839. Dost Mohammad surrendered to British forces in 1840 after the Anglo-Indian army had captured Kabul. However, after an Afghan revolt in Kabul the British had no choice but to withdraw. The withdrawal began on January 6, 1842, but bad weather delayed the army’s progress. The column was attacked by swarms of Afghans led by Mohammad’s son, and those who were not killed outright in the attack were later massacred by the Afghan soldiers. A total of 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers were killed. Only one man, Dr. William Bryden, escaped to recount the details of the military disaster.


In retaliation, another British force invaded Kabul in 1843, burning a portion of the city. In the same year, the war came to an end, and in 1857 Emir Dost Mohammad, who had been restored to power in 1843, signed an alliance with the British. In 1878, the Second Anglo-Afghan War began, which ended two years later with Britain winning control of Afghanistan’s foreign affairs. "



The Afghans might not know how to write or read, but they know when someone is taking advantage of them. And now they know how to fight because you trained and equipped them. Great f story guys. Mission accomplished. Terrorism in Europe and around the world.

To say there is nothing might be an understatement. You might find this very interesting. Afghanistan could be one of the richest mining regions of the world. Instead it is one of the poorest countries in the world.

"Afghanistan's resources could make it one of the richest mining regions in the world. ... The major mineral resources include chromium, copper, gold, iron ore, lead and zinc, lithium, marble, precious and semiprecious stones, sulfur and talc among many other minerals."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini...her%20minerals.


"According to Aryana Aid, poverty in Afghanistan stems from two factors: “food insecurity and the lack of a social security net.” As a result, 50 percent of Afghan children are stunted and 20 percent of Afghan women of child-bearing age are underweight."
https://borgenproject.org/tag/poverty-in-afghanistan/

"The country remains among the poorest in the world. The latest World Bank data suggests that only six countries worldwide - among them Burundi, Somalia, and Sierra Leone - have a lower GDP per head (roughly speaking the value of a country's economy divided by its population) than Afghanistan."

Plus it has opium. Wars were made because of opium. It is the major ingredient in many medicines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47861444

Afghanistan is one of the most natural resource rich regions in the world. It has oil, copper, and various rare earth minerals necessary to power the global electronics industry. It's even relatively rich (especially for the region) in arable land/capita, in additional to having a lot of pasturable (but not arable) land for animal agriculture.

The only geographic problem (a huge problem nowadays to be sure) is it's landlocked and dependent on semi hostile neighbors for trade (and therefore sale of the natural resources.)

FYP

Thanks, sounds better.

It has scant railways, it doesn't have stability, it doesn't have security and it doesn't have the relatively low levels of corruption that business needs if business is going to get done.

Sorry missed this

An alert from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Saturday advised citizens “to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates at this time unless you receive individual instructions from a U.S. government representative to do so.” The guidance was issued in response to “potential security threats outside the gates at the Kabul airport” and came as Taliban leaders gathered in Kabul to discuss forming a new government.
“We will contact registered U.S. citizens as the security situation changes to provide further instructions,” the alert said.

The United States has control over the inside of the airport, but the Taliban has been patrolling the exterior, beating and whipping some in the crowd. Some Americans were reportedly beaten by militants despite a promise of safe passage.

No, the opium that the British exported to China to address the trade deficit came from India. (Bengal and Madras.) But from the mid-19th century, Chinese production was actually ahead of imports, to the tune of tens of thousands of tons annually. The world produced a lot more opium then than it does now, and the Chinese Qing government depended heavily on opium for its tax revenues. Early in the 20th century the British and the Qing reached an agreement to end the trade, only then the Qing government fell and domestic production took off again and wasn't shut down till Mao came along with his rather extreme methods of coercion.


No, it's an ideological product of Qutbism, originating with an oddball incel in Egypt in the 1950s. And the Afghan variant stems from Qutbist madrassas (indoctrination centres) in Pakistan, and from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which sponsors the Taliban as part of its Great Game with India.

Biden is a lot more like Trump than people think. The whole '**** that, we'll get away with it like Nixon and Kissinger did with Vietnam' thing, in response to advisers' concerns about the fate of Afghan women and girls after withdrawal, is whoppingly Trumpian, but it was Biden who said it.

USA got all the people out that they cared to get it. They certainly could get more out, they just don't want to.

Give it 15 years and China will get that place pumping out the trillion worth of minerals buried

washoe,

No one in this thread has claimed that the U.S. got involved in Afghanistan because of treatment of women. Why do you keep saying this? Are you actually reading the thread?

On an unrelated note, are you claiming that the U.S. bears more responsibility than the Soviet Union for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?

Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up. - Obama.

Getting dangerous? It's friggin Afghanistan

Thats some beautiful fireworks. Does anyone know what they do? They say flares. Is that some type of warning shot in the air or something?

Edit: found this explanation. "For anybody who doesn't know why they do that - the flares exist as a counter measure to heat-seeking anti-air weapons. The flares distract missiles from the aircraft, basically." From the Tweet comments.

So that's where the trillions went. Into bombing the Talibans opium fields. So they can't sell it and become more powerful imo. So it was all about drugs?

"How the US military's opium war in Afghanistan was lost"

"Published25 April
The US has spent $1.5m (£1.15m) a day since 2001 fighting the opium war in Afghanistan. So why is business still booming?"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47861444



"How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan
US and Afghan soldiers patrol in Zharay district in Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan. Photograph: Reuters
After 16 years and $1tn spent, there is no end to the fighting – but western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state. By Alfred W McCoy

by Alfred W McCoy
Tue 9 Jan 2018 06.00 GMT

After fighting the longest war in its history, the US stands at the brink of defeat in Afghanistan. How could this be possible? How could the world’s sole superpower have battled continuously for more than 16 years – deploying more than 100,000 troops at the conflict’s peak, sacrificing the lives of nearly 2,300 soldiers, spending more than $1tn (£740bn) on its military operations, lavishing a record $100bn more on “nation-building”, helping fund and train an army of 350,000 Afghan allies – and still not be able to pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations? So dismal is the prospect of stability in Afghanistan that, in 2016, the Obama White House cancelled a planned withdrawal of its forces, ordering more than 8,000 troops to remain in the country indefinitely."

https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...in-afghanistan

They need rare earth metals (rre) desperately for electric car batteries I just read. Their main business partners are uae, Pakistan and India. Type in "Afghanistan exports" first row opium. So it is officially a narco state like Mexico. I guess we already know that.

"the country once said could be worth up to $3 trillion".
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...es-2021-08-19/

I should have said official business. Im sure they do just as much if not more unofficialy. Afghanistan is imo the the largest producer of heroin, with now mexico focusing on fentayl and chemical drugs. Im not a drug expert but I think I heard this say in one of these cartel docs.

Thats is indeed dangerous. Hope they don't shoot anyone from the sky.

If it is actually true that a mere 100,000 men are seriously in favor of reversing most of the gains in a way that 5,000,000 or so women find horrific to contemplate, I am quite sure that if they really implement that plan, they will be overthrown, and quite quickly, in any one of several possible scenarios.

The Taliban gave the opium farmers like 3 year's notice to find an alternative crop. By 2001, poppy production in Taliban was just a fraction of past production and most sales were from the year's before inventory.
So if opium played any part in the war then it was because of a supply chain disruption that the US needed to rectify.
Within a year of America's occupation, the poppy fields were back in production with the Afghan President's brother suspected of being neck deep in it

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...afghan-warlord