Afghanistan and US Intervention Policies

The Taliban have taken over Afghanistan. That's a creepy one, huh? That looks weird. Um, I... You see the people falling from the plane? I did. That's wild. It's, it's weird. People rushing the plane trying to get on board and trying to get rescued and taken out of the country. It's like, fuck. It's so odd. You know, I was having a conversation with, um, with friends just, just yesterday and I was saying, I literally had forgotten, like, I was like, why, why was the US in Afghanistan again? It had been so long. I was literally trying to remember what the initial reason for going in there was. Yeah. But I mean, I'm no foreign policy expert and not going to pretend to be, but it seems very obvious that the way they withdrew was crazy and leaving all the, leaving all the weapons and ammunition and vehicles and stuff like that for the Taliban to just come and scoop up. One was a legit conspiracy theorist, like a real tinfoil hatter. You would look at this and go, this is probably the best way to ensure the support of a re-invasion. Like leave a bunch of weapons behind, make the whole thing disastrous, have the Taliban take over the entire country in a short period of time, start executing women mayors, do all the crazy shit that they're probably going to do, and then, you know, have some real public outcry. So weird. People are, I still get people who are confused as to why I do not generally trust the government and I don't know how many examples I need to pull out from recent times and from further history to just feel like, look, whether, whether this is malice or its incompetence or, um, with some things, it doesn't matter. It seems more like incompetence than anything. But how can, with certain things I'm like, how, how can it be? Like it's so obvious, right? It's so obvious what is going to happen in a certain situation and then you do it anyway. And I don't, I don't understand that. One person can be incompetent, but it's like, it's not just one person who makes all these ideas. They've got actual people who are supposed to be experts and advisors, et cetera. I mean, you even had people in the media last, last month and the media is pretty friendly towards Joe Biden here for the most part. And people in the media are saying, hey, if you do this, aren't the Taliban going to just take over everything? He's like, no. And he's like, no, no, there's a three thousand Afghanistan armed soldiers, only 75,000 Taliban. Meanwhile they took it over and they just did it. Yeah. Yeah. And there was no gunshots fired. It's no. I just, I just think the whole thing is a disaster. The whole, this nation building idea is a disaster. And Afghanistan itself has never been a traditional country in the sense of like a central leadership. It's like, it's basically for most of history has been run by warlords. It's like warlords that controlled regions. Here's a question, Joe. This isn't something I wonder about a lot. Both on an individual level and on an on a nation level, how much and at what point should say a country get involved with the affairs of another one? It's a good question. Well, it's it should be probably at all. We should have levels of atrocity that are intolerable. Right. Where it's like Nazi Germany type levels. But if that's the case, why aren't we not invading North Korea? Because North Korea talked to Winomi Park or any of the people that have escaped from North Korea. It's essentially a form of Holocaust. There's people that are in concentration camps. They've lived their whole lives there. Their children will be born there. There's people that are starving to death. There's people that are cannibalizing people. It's a weird fucked up horrific situation over there. And there's no there's no plan to do anything about it. Yeah. But yet we keep talking about doing things in the Middle East. And there's a lot of resources in the Middle East that may or may not be a motive to being there. One of them is drugs. It's up until the invasion of Afghanistan. I mean, I'm not sure what the number is now. But Afghanistan, once we invaded, I think they were the supplier of 94 percent of the world's opium. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. I didn't know that. Well, the fucking United States troops were guarding poppy fields because these people that were there, that was their main way of making a living. And the US troops were guarding the poppy fields. It's fucking crazy. Let's find out what the actual number is as of today. But I believe that I think that was the number at one point in time that 94 percent of the world's opium supply was from Afghanistan. Afghanistan specifically. Wow. There's also a massive supply of minerals, of conflict minerals, ironically. In 2014, the estimated opium production was 6,400. What is an empty yet in 2017 production climbed to a new record of 9,000. Empty. Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh. Result of a drought. These levels of production are enough to supply most of the world's opiate markets. Wow. This is a study from the Brookings. Brookings.edu. Oh, metric tons. That's what it is. Okay, there you go. Okay. The 2007 Afghan opium production climbed to what was then seen as a staggering 8,200 metric tons. Interesting. Interesting. In 2018, climbed to a new record of 9,000 metric tons and falling in 2018, 6,400 metric tons. Massive amounts of opium. Wow. Yeah. This is what's crazy. The trafficking, okay, here it is. Estimated the gross value of the Afghan opium economy, including the cultivation of poppy, processing into heroin, and trafficking up to Afghan borders to be between US 4.1 billion and 6.6 billion in 2017. Wow. It's so funny seeing those numbers there compared to these trillions and trillions that they just keep printing. Yeah. Sounds like nothing. I don't even know how these numbers are just ... What does that mean? It gets to a stage where you can't fathom. What does that mean? It's just like 20 zeros. It's also like, where's that money going? They're making that much money selling heroin. Where's it going? Who's getting it? Who's selling it? I don't know. Where's it going? How's it getting out of the country? Are you guys watching it? Watch the fields. Keep an eye on it. I have no idea, man. The world is such a weird place and always has been. I did listen to that podcast you did with Yomie Park, which was amazing. Amazing, by the way. Yeah, it was wild. North Korea is ... It blows my mind that here in 2021 with everything we're doing and whatever, that there's just one country out there that we know almost nothing about. It's just blacked out, totally disconnected from the world. Virtually everyone ... No one's met anyone from there. Virtually no one's been there. Even if you've been there, you can only go on a guided tour to one small part of it. It amazes me that that's a thing. I always just think, how is that possible, given how interconnected we all are? She was saying that if it wasn't for China's support, they wouldn't be able to survive a week. They need China's support. That's the reason. China props them up. It's so weird. How do you think that that will come to an end? It might not. It might go on for hundreds of years. I think it will. I think evil always falls eventually. It does eventually. What is eventually, if a human lifetime is 100 years if you're lucky, there's been many evil regimes that have lasted longer than that. Many, many, many generations of people are going to suffer. It's so odd. I don't know the word. They can't do anything about it. The thing is, they're starving. They have no access to weapons. The government has full complete control over them. When you pass the borders, they have landmines set up. If you're making a run for it, you're going to fucking blow up. Do you know what's China's interest with keeping or allowing it to stay that way? Is there some benefit to them? That's a good question. Because I know that they're propped up by China, but why would China want it to stay like that? I don't really understand that. Well, they probably enjoy the fact that there's a conflict between North and South Korea, as they're both close to each other, and South Korea's allies with the United States. You know, China has their fucking tentacles in so many different things. It's wild. I've got some more numbers here for you to help with the Afghan thing. It's from Wiki, but they're from the Afghan papers, I think, is where a lot of this information came from. As of 2017, opium production provides about 400,000 jobs in Afghanistan. More than the Afghan national security forces, the opium trade spiked in 2006 after the Taliban lost control of the local warlords. 93 percent? 93 percent of the non-pharmaceutical-grade opiates of the world market originated in Afghanistan. A bit more land is used in Afghanistan to grow for opium than cocoa cultivation in all of Latin America. Wow. I did not know this. I never linked Afghanistan with huge amounts of opium. Yeah, man. It's in a Sturgill-Simpson song. I mean, we are repeating what happened in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War, that was a big part of what the Vietnam War was all about, was the heroin trade. That's what's going on here, man. It's got to be a factor. This idea that it's not a factor of why we're there and that some fucking scumbag is not profiting off of this, for sure it is. There's no way they're not. If these are the same people that paid Barry Seals to run coke over from South America and drop it into Mina, Arkansas, you don't think that they would be making money over in Afghanistan? No, I do, man. I believe that every government is corrupt. They're going to make a documentary about the poppies. They're going to have to. Now that we're out of Afghanistan, someone's going to make a documentary about the heroin trade and people are going to fucking blow their wig off. They're going to be like, what? Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.