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Tag Archives: Afghanistan

Taliban: The Whole World Is Watching

06 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Afghanistan, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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Afghanistan, barbarism, medieval v modern, Modern Ethical Decision-making, Taliban

And what is the world watching?

Potentially barbaric medieval ethical, moral, and spiritual decision-making in near real time for which the modern of this 21st Century need have no respect.

Here are two old examples of that kind of decision-making — According to the lore, Muhammad had had Safiyah’s husband killed for his treasure, and the murder was done in the most gruesome and torturing way: a fire was made on his belly to force his confession of knowledge of where the whole of that treasure had been buried. In proximate time, the prophet had taken Saifyah as war booty and later elevated her status to wife and free woman. How nice.

In near history, the rape of a 13-year-old Aisha Abrahim Duhulow by three men was followed up by stoning her to death for adultery. The private act of her tormentors has never been punished while her punishment unto death took place in a stadium before a thousand or so spectators.

How would such “justice” serve had what was meted to Safiyah or Aish involved your wife, daughter, or mother?

In such primitive manner, Muslims become the victims of more malign, narcissistic, and strident Muslims who have chosen to cover their own piratical behavior with familiar dogma.

Sweet words?

Foul deeds.

Two reports related in ethical, moral, and “spiritual” dimensions have surfaced recently in Afghanistan.

BBC. “Afghanistan: Taliban accused of killing pregnant police officer.” September 6, 2021. To be fair, the BBC has reported, “Details of the incident are still sketchy as many in Firozkoh fear retribution if they speak out. But three sources have told the BBC that the Taliban beat and shot Negar dead in front of her husband and children on Saturday.”

We shall have to wait and see whether the “New Improved Taliban” step up to the challenge of undertaking an empirical investigation using modern forensic methods amidst popular challenge. What integrity will they put on display; with what broad acceptance and trust may their findings be met? So we shall see.

Here’s another telltale with fear in the wind —


Looking pale and shattered having already suffered a beating at the hands of Taliban thugs, Gulafroz spoke in English, saying: ‘I was one of the very senior policewomen in Afghanistan.

‘I did everything to encourage women into the police, against the wishes of the Taliban. Now my life is in danger. Real danger.

‘Please help me and my family.’

Stewart, Will. “Top female Afghan cop beaten and hunted by the Taliban pleads for help from the West after eight-month-pregnant policewoman is executed by the terror group for removing a flag.”. Daily Mail, September 6, 2021.

–33–

Afghanistan, Mexico, and the United States of America: Dying for The Money

02 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Islamic Small Wars

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Afghanistan, Heroin, Taliban

My reading suggests Afghanistan supplies about 84 percent of the world’s opium and heroin supply with now an excursion into amphetamine by way of Ephedra sinica, another native plant; and about 50 percent of America’s supply comes from Mexico. In either source state, the industry appears founded in the kind of economy that finds ready labor for rote work while attracting the bosses and crews that produce and sustain illegal enterprise and all that follows from it. Portmanteau may suffice for what comes of the underworld’s efforts near the source: “narconomy”; “narco-state”; “narcotecture”. Somewhere between the source and the supply chain’s end, the last seller, ne “dealer” (as with any other commodity) has perhaps literally a corner on the market and good living all the way to glamorous.

However, there’s the other ending that one may view here as tragedy attracts its modern video-equipped witnesses who have made the final degradation, desperation, enslavement, humiliation, and isolation unbearably and undeniably apparent.


Published in 2008 and posted again by Journeyman Pictures, September 2, 2021: “That’s Kabul — skateboards and heroin, hope and fear with the Taliban waiting at the doorstep.”

Published by Financial Times, May 28, 2015.

Posted to YouTube by kimgary, September 2, 2021.

The “medicine” ain’t about health.

From mountain farm to urban sidewalk, The Money sings all of the parts of the industry — growing, processing, packaging, shipping — to her and well sustained by the necessity of income and the want of personal aggrandizement, better living, defense, and security. It’s only business, of course, but listen to its testimonials, have a good look (above) at Philadelphia’s portion of America’s hooked-and-lost whose relationships have come down to habitual forms of theft or trade with, perhaps, small talk between.

Of course, The Money talks.

The Pharmacy, no less than every one of its customers, ain’t free.

Related Online

AML Films. Videos (addiction-related video interviews).

Asmann, Parker. “Honduras Tycoon Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering in US.” InSight Crime, July 28, 2017.

Dada, Carlos. “Opinion: Honduras, the narco-state that illustrates U.S. contradictions.” The Washington Post, June 14, 2021.

Felbab-Brown, Vanda. “Poppy, eradication, and alternative livelihoods in Mexico.” Brookings, August 18, 2020.

Felter, Claire. “The U.S. Opioid Epidemic.” Council on Foreign Relations, July 20, 2021.


Today’s killing of Ahmed Wali Karzai, reportedly by a close business associate, is a reminder of the complicated web of loyalties, interests, and contradictions that the U.S. has attempted to navigate for nearly a decade. Ahmed Wali Karzai was a politician working within the system and a criminal working against it; he ran militias on behalf of the CIA and funded drug networks that were the stated enemy of the U.S. military; he worked with trucking contractors that sold services to NATO and that funded anti-NATO warlords; he was a close ally of the U.S. and a tremendous drag on its mission to win over the Afghan people.

Fisher, Max. “Ahmed Wali Karzai Was symbol of Afghan War’s Complexity.” The Atlantic, July 12, 2011.


Frakt, Austin. “Pointers From Portugal on Addiction and the Drug War.” The New York Time, October 5, 2020.

Holligan, Anna. “Is the Netherlands becoming a narco-state?” BBC News, December 19, 2019.

kimgary. “Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Avenue Story, What’s going on Today, August 29, 2021.

Landay, Jonathan. “Profits and poppy: Afghanistan’s illegal drug trade a boon for Taliban.” Reuters, August 16, 2021.

National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Heroin Research Report: What is the scope of heroin use in the United States?” — According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), in 2016 about 948,000 Americans reported using heroin in the past year,1 a number that has been on the rise since 2007. —

Risen, James. “Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade.” The New York Times, October 4, 2008.


Afghanistan is the world’s top source of opium, accounting for 83% of global production from 2015 to 2020, according to the United Nations. In 2018, opium poppy occupied three times more land than it did in 2000. Afghanistan also produces cannabis and increasing quantities of methamphetamine, which can be made cheaply from the local ephedra plant and may eventually rival the production of opiates.

Narcotics is Afghanistan’s largest economic sector, with over 500,000 employed in opium in 2018. Banning drugs would therefore be unpopular and might provoke resistance against the fledgling regime.

Stone, Rupert. “Afghanistan’s vast narcotics trade likely to continue under Taliban.” Nikkei Asia, September 2, 2021.

Transform: Drug Policy Foundation. “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Setting the Record Straight.” May 13, 2021.

Wikipedia. “Ahmed Wali Karzai”: — A June 2009 U.S. embassy cable alleged that much of the actual business of running the Afghan city of Kandahar “takes place out of public sight, where Ahmed Wali Karzai operates, parallel to formal government structures, through a network of political clans that use state institutions to protect and enable licit and illicit enterprises.”[13] —

Wikipedia. “Opium production in Afghanistan”.


Posted to YouTube on October 30, 2021.

Black market Russian arms and materiel supplied the Taliban through their eventual route of American-built Afghan Defense Forces in late summer 2021. Moscow would then waste little time hustling defense sales to allies in states surrounding Afghanistan. The reading and thinking world may take a moment (any time, any place) to contemplate how money has been made to fund guerilla ambitions where war is brewed at the base of cultures and societies — and then how it may be leveraged in the cause of defense from the same. Related Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/04/24/russia-is-sending-weapons-to-taliban-top-u-s-general-confirms/ (April 24, 2017).

–33–

Afghanistan: Fear, Hate, Revulsion for the Taliban

19 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Afghanistan, medieval v modern, Moral Revulsion, Taliban

The Taliban’s medieval program — if installed and as previously expressed — will prove against the grain of every civilized and modern society, but we may have to watch it to believe it.

The wish for societies in their main part to be broad, compassionate, inclusive, just, reasoning, and vibrant carries with it revulsion for those who would believe themselves exclusive and whose narcissistic behavior repeatedly proves fanatical, fascist, hypocritical, and intolerant. Today’s Taliban risk proving themselves and their unique program — the idea of God courses and varies through the world’s 4,300 religions and sects, not only Islam, and not only theirs — confining, egotistical, self-serving, sadistic, selfish and nothing more. They are those whose income have previously been derived from “protection” — demanding pay to be left alone — and the wholesale shipping of poppy juice into the world’s transnational crime organizations — cartel and gangs — not pharmaceutical companies and on to hospitals.

How the Taliban now respond to the fears voiced by those representing millions of Afghans and how they meet their modern criticism will tell their true character, and should the past prove prelude, they will founder and drown in their own malign reflections.

August 18, 2021.

August 18, 2021.

August 19, 2021.

August 18, 2021.

Related Online

Ali, Idrees, Patricia Zengerie, Jonathan Landay. “Planes, guns, night-vision goggles: The Taliban’s new U.S.-made war chest.” Reuters, August 19, 2021.

Durns, Sean. “We need journalists like Clarissa Ward to cut through Taliban lies.” Washington Examiner, August 19, 2021.

Lipsky, Josh and William F. Wechsler. “The IMF Acts Against the Taliban.” Opinion, The Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2021.

NPR. “Where Are Taliban Officials Getting The Money to Run Afghanistan?” August 19, 2021.

Reuters. “Biden, UK’s Johnson discuss Afghanistan, agree to hold G7 meeting.” August 17, 2021 .

Seir, Ahmad, Rahim Faiez, Kathy Gannon, and Jon Gambrell. “Afghans protest Taliban in emerging challenge to their rule.” AP, August 19, 2021.

Stein, Jeff. “Biden administration freezes billions of dollars in Afghan reserves, depriving Taliban of cash.” The Washington Post, August 17, 2021.

Talley, Ian, Kate Davidson, Benoit Faucon. “Taliban is Denied Aid Tagged for Afghanistan, but Taps Billion-Dollar Drug Trade.” The Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2021.


August 19, 2021.

–33–

Taliban Poised to Suffocate Afghanistan (Again)

18 Wednesday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Afghanistan, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

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Afghanistan, Fate of Freedom, medieval v modern, Taliban

August 18, 2021.

Wikipedia offers a term for what happens next: “Talibanization“.

Read it and weep.


India Times, August 14, 2021.

From Journeyman Pictures, “Afghani Life Under Taliban Rule (1998)” — and regarding filming (in 1998): “According to Islam and according to our society, we are not allowed . . . under Islamic rule, there is no question of ‘why’. In Islamic society, nothing is allowed such as television, such as type (stet) such as any other recording, uh, recorders to play . . . .” (1:46-2:13).


From U.S. Department of State (November 17, 2001): “Report on the Taliban’s War Against Women”: “The life of Afghan women is so bad. We are locked at home and cannot see the sun” (Nageeba, a 35-year-old widow in Kabul).


The Taliban wants to establish an Islamic government in Afghanistan, ideally as an emirate, which would be led by a religious leader and draw its legitimacy from clerics. Afghanistan is currently an Islamic republic, which is led by a president and draws legitimacy from universal suffrage and accordance with international laws and norms.

Maizland, Lindsay. “The Taliban in Afghanistan.” Council on Foreign Relations, August 3, 2021 (last update).

Welcome back to the Old New (Old Medieval) World.

How long before Darkness — the affirmation of ignorance and the revival of medieval “Islamic” codes, punishments, and tortures resume?

Having won their war, the Taliban have seen Muslims flee their presence en masse.

Having won their war, the Taliban must now defend with weapons their authority in Afghanistan.

August 18, 2021.

Having won their war, the Taliban must impose their will on modern Afghani people.

August 16, 2021.

Must watch interview with Mahbooba Seraj the founder of the Afghan Women’s Network pic.twitter.com/ILyFGoN4m1

— Saad Mohseni (@saadmohseni) August 10, 2021
The full interview with Mahbooba Seraj may be viewed on YouTube –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjYh6p0CGi8&t=5s

(August 9, 2021).

–33–

The best and worst thing to ever happen to the Taliban?

17 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Afghanistan, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Islamic Small Wars

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Afghanistan, medieval v modern, Taliban Rule

Winning.

The Taliban will have to defend Afghanistan now, and they will not be able to do that without serious Chinese and Russian and other support in the navigating of modern international legal, political, and technology systems.

Worse for the Taliban: Afghanis appear to fear them, not respect them.

Apart from fighting, first the Russians — and then the Americans who helped them stave off the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan — they have done nothing for Afghanistan apart from threatening, at least, to again impose their medieval will on a modern society. In that way, their “win” may more resemble the tyranny of the Islamic Revolution in Iran than true modern cultural Afghani self-determination.


Today, August 17, 2021.

To garner respect, the Taliban would have to deliver into their own outlook and politics the most advanced of the world’s standards having to do with comprehension of the human condition, the individual yearning for autonomy and freedom from absolute power — authoritarianism — and the dogma and propaganda employed to justify its own sadism. It has missed its own complete education thus far in the collective poetry of the world and while offering assurances has been quick nonetheless to paint over a vibrant modernity with its own darkness.

Will the Taliban escape their own darkness, in essence their own culturally suffocating presence, and make the steep climb into the light of awareness, compassion, and responsibility in concert with the decent, engaged, and responsible of the world?


The Obama White House, June 4, 2009.

While today’s west will always support indigenous self-determination and respect the sovereignty of independent states, it has demonstrated that it will not respect claims to ethnic, racial, or religious supremacism within its own bounds, and it will not approve or endorse as much elsewhere in the world. As a political bloc, EU/NATO will forever abhor absolutism, bigotry, cruelty, enslavement, hate, and subjugation — and all of that whether threatened by forces or processes within or by the enemies of freedom and security without.

Related Online

American Islamic Forum for Democracy

Fair, C. Christine. “Pakistan and the United States Have Betrayed the Afghan People.” Foreign Policy, August 16, 2021.

Jason, Mike. “What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan.” The Atlantic, August 12, 2021.

Muslim American Leadership Alliance

–33–

Afghanistan Welcomes the Taliban

16 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Afghanistan, Islamic Small Wars

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Afghanistan, authoritarianism, Islamic Revolution, medieval v modern, political absolutism

The Telegraph, August 16, 2021.

Russia, duplicitous and playing beneath the table as well as above it, fairly owns that deck of cards labelled “REALPOLITIK”. It has in its underhanded fashion furnished the Taliban all along with Russian arms and materiel while at the same time mouthing its anti-terrorist stance. Yesterday, while former Afghani President Ghani fled Kabul with, possibly, so much loot that it would not fit in his helicopter, the Taliban was deploying guards to the Russian Embassy.

How sweet this victory for the most archaic, medieval, narcissistic, and selfish of human political minds across cultures.

The Afghan People, the Afghan Military, the United States of America, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been not only humiliated by the Taliban’s guerrilla putsch made possible by corruption within the Afghan government — or money would have reached its troops and those troops would have been more appreciated, moved, and better defended when most needed — the same have been looted by Moscow, more or less, and left to do their “lessons learned” back home, which from today may become less safe in relation to the deeply retrograde Islamic Revolution in Afghanistan.

Keys

–Rightful CIA intercession on behalf of the mujaheddin during the Soviet Army’s invasion of Afghanistan (see “Operation Cyclone” for the details).

— While both the CIA and Russian interests appeared to mirror one another in retreat from Afghanistan and leaving the state to its own devices, BackChannels believes Moscow directly influenced Ayman Al-Zawahiri during a 1996-97 detention in Russia and through him the compact with Osama Bin Laden that would produce Al-Qaeda and lead to 9/11 and successive acts of Islamist terror worldwide. Conspiratorial? Delusional? Look again at whose embassy is not only staying put in Kabul but which has Taliban guards keeping it secured.

–Today, “Moscow-Kabul” may be added to “Moscow-Tehran”, another block-and-goad nexus against western culture, democracy, humanism, and liberalism.

For peace, Asian powers as well as EU/NATO have with half-measures navigated what they have believed to be an “East-West Rivalry” sustained on business and political accommodations and tensions, and as much would seem in the natural course of diplomatic and international affairs. However, BackChannels has long noted a much different axis in conflict, and that has been the tension between Feudal-Medieval Personalities and States, the chief representatives of “Political Absolutism”, and the Modern of Mind devoted to universal dignity and freedom in the address of common and global challenges to human well-being and the survival of Earth herself.

Moscow and Company (lately Beijing as well) have been most interested in Power and Wealth benefiting select elites as determined in each respective absolutist and feudal-medieval framework while much of the rest of the world now cries for deliverance from them with hopes for modern improvements in Qualities of Living wherever life has planted them.

The deeply archaic and medieval Taliban were not welcomed yesterday in Kabul nearly as much as dreaded and feared.

Modern universal moral revulsion will now oppose the Taliban’s primitive narcissism, rigidity, and violence, and however disorganized it may be, it will by way of species-wide intellectual evolution emerge naturally and implacably — no less so than what mankind has done to create the culturally interwoven complex machinery that delivers the modern world in materials and services — and yesterday’s “victory” (over millions determined to flee it and now subject to living beneath the lowering shadow of the fear of it) may yet prove but the beginning of the Islamists own end.


Crowds of people desperate to escape Afghanistan stormed Kabul’s international airport, rushing onto the tarmac.

People clung to the sides of military planes, even as one taxied down the runway, in a bid to flee as the Taliban takes control.https://t.co/BMfaEkDykr pic.twitter.com/WkX0JQx3io

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 16, 2021


Sky News, August 16, 2021.

–33–

Afghanistan: On The Fall of Kabul

15 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Afghanistan, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

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Afghanistan, Kabul, Taliban

CBC News, August 15, 2021.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Two Afghan officials say President Ashraf Ghani has left the country.

The officials, one from former President Hamid Karzai’s office and another an aide on the Afghan security council, told The Associated Press that Ghani left Sunday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief journalists.

Ghani left along with his National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib and a second close associate. It wasn’t immediately clear where they went.

Meanwhile, the Taliban said it would further enter Kabul on Sunday night after spending hours on the city’s outskirts.

Seir, Ahmad, Rahim Faiez, Tameem Akhgar, Jon Gambrell. “Officials: Afghan president has left the country.” AP, August 15, 2021.

While ordinary Afghani cower within or flee their presence, the Taliban appear to have just won their chance to further fail and horrify Afghanistan.

Posted by Astra, May 11, 2016.

The Taliban were born when Mullah Omar took revenge on a tank crew and its commander for the rape of two village girls. The crew were killed and the commander as well by hanging him from his own tank barrel. Omar then fled with his band to recruit an army of resistance to the then Soviet invasion.

Most who have followed Afghanistan from the Cold War forward know that story and the subsequent arming of the mujaheddin, the defeat of the Soviet Army, the mirroring CIA retreat from the theater, and the final bankrupting of Soviet Union and the opening of the gangway for the lawless of Russia for 1992. At the time, I believe — unless corrected — the mujaheddin were left with their ideologies and weapons and a broken nation that would then be subdued by arms, but in an interesting turnabout, that loose energy would fall to Russian encouragement. The situation would be analogous to clearing a house of burglars only to leave one’s own gun out on the dining room table.

Ayman al-Zawahiri appears to have been by mutual intent detained in Russia at the end of 1996 and released to travel to Afghanistan in 1997. By 1998, he and Osama Bin Laden would have a deal plus funding plus manpower motivated against the west and would three years later deliver “9/11“. For the big recap of the narrative that followed, see Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “The U.S. War in Afghanistan: 1999-2021. Here’s the copy at the end of that piece —

April 14, 2021
Biden Decides on Complete U.S. Withdrawal by 9/11

President Biden announces that the United States will not meet the deadline set under the U.S.-Taliban agreement to withdraw all troops by May 1 and instead releases a plan for a full withdrawal by September 11, 2021. “It’s time to end America’s longest war,” he says. The remaining 3,500 troops in Afghanistan will be withdrawn regardless of whether progress is made in intra-Afghan peace talks or the Taliban reduces its attacks on Afghan security forces and citizens. NATO troops in Afghanistan will also leave. Biden says Washington will continue to assist Afghan security forces and support the peace process. The Taliban says it will not participate in “any conference” on Afghanistan’s future until all foreign troops leave.


What have the Afghani People to look forward to under Taliban rule?

Compelled affirmation of archaic attitudes and beliefs enforced by continuous surveillance, intimidation, and violence — Afghanistan has just been returned to the status of a medieval theocracy;

Feudal-medieval conflict as religious principles fail to resolve personal, tribal, state, and international disputes or temper the criminality and greed that have corrupted not only the politics of the state but have seen the most unsavory of receipts fill the Taliban’s own war chest.

Afghanistan’s women will be diminished as persons, conservative or modern, and again mastered by a patriarchy infamous for its cruelties and most unbalanced and terrifying “guidance” as laid out by Islamic law.

Related Online

Coren, Anna, Sandi Sidhu, Tim Lister, and Abdul Basir Bina. “Taliban fighters execute 22 Afghan commandos as they try to surrender.” CNN, July 14, 2021.

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “The U.S. War in Afghanistan: 1999-2021.

Felbab-Brown, Vanda. “Drugs, security, and counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan.” Brookings, October 29, 2020.

Goodhand, Jonathan. “What the Taliban’s advance in Afghanistan means for the global drug trade.” Scroll.In, August 13, 2021.

Haider, Mobarak. Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg. Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, May 16, 2010.

Mohamed, Hamza and Ramy Allahoum. “President Ashraf Ghani leaves Afghanistan: Live”. Al Jazeera, August 15, 2021.

Sanger, David E. and Helene Cooper. “Taliban Sweep in Afghanistan Follows Years of U.S. Miscalculations.” The New York Times, August 15, 2021.

Schindler, John. “Exploring Al Qaeda’s Murky Connection to Russian Intelligence.” Business Insider, June 10, 2014.

Shamoun, Sam. “Compel them or Not?” Answering Islam, n.d.

Shamoun, Sam. “Fighting All People Until They Do What?” Answering Islam. n.d.

Ward, Alexander, Paul McLeary, Lara Seligman, David Cohen. “Taliban seize power amid chaos in Kabul.” Politico, August 15, 2021.


France 24 English, August 15, 2021.

–33–

Taliban: Another Russian Wrecking Crew

10 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Afghanistan, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Tags

Afghanistan, narcotics, Russia & Taliban, Taliban, Taliban TCO

When something stinks, people flee from it.

With arms and materiel supplied by Russian smugglers — and now with the same captured from overrun government forces — the Taliban have been picking up all the chips left abandoned by NATO’s general withdrawal. Game over. Fold up the board. Hand it to the world’s foremost advocate for Rule by the Ruthless Rich. Whether in weeks, months, or years, the Taliban too will have cleared themselves from the field — they are destroying themselves by the hour and don’t know it — and there will remain Afghanistan, bereft of order, debased, depopulated, disillusioned, disorganized, traumatized — rather like Syria, also deeply beholden to Moscow and Tehran for all of the miseries dispensed by the Tyrant in Damascus.

There is another side to Taliban mayhem and misrule.

Call it a new plant.

Narcoticus Talibanus

KABUL—The escalating war in Afghanistan is directly linked to the multibillion-dollar global trade in illicit drugs, as the Taliban seek to expand and consolidate control over the production and trafficking of narcotics and to diversify from heroin into methamphetamine, in what an Afghan counternarcotics officer called “a coming catastrophe for the world.”

Afghan and international counternarcotics experts said violence in Afghanistan has spiked in recent years alongside increased cultivation of opium poppies, used for heroin production, and ephedra, a plant that grows wild across the country and is being used to make methamphetamine.

O’Donnell, Lynne. “The Taliban Are Breaking Bad: Meth is even more profitable than heroin–and is turbocharging the insurgency.” Foreign Policy, July 19, 2021.

And you thought the Taliban were bringing Islam to Afghanistan.

As listed by Hanif Suvizada in an article in The Conversation (Dec. 8, 2020), here is how the Taliban makes its money — drugs, protection (“mining”), other extortion plus taxation, skimming from “charitable donations” to finance terrorism, export that might be legitimate if it didn’t include poppy and looted minerals.

Related Online

Goodman, Ryan. “Trump Pushed CIA to Give Intelligence to Kremlin, While Taking No Action Against Russia Arming Taliban.” Just Security, July 8, 2020.

Mashal, Mujib and Michael Schwirtz. “How Russia Built a Channel to the Taliban, Once an Enemy”. The New York Times, July 13, 2020.

Noorzai, Roshan, Ezel Sahinkaya, Rahim Gul Sarwan. “Afghan Lawmakers: Russian Support to Taliban No Secret.” VOA, July 3, 2020.

O’Donnell, Lynne. “The Taliban Are Breaking Bad: Meth is even more profitable than heroin–and is turbocharging the insurgency.” Foreign Policy, July 19, 2021.

Reuters. “Russia says boosts arms supplies to Central Asia amid Afghan conflict.” August 5, 2021. Open query: with corruption practically a given worldwide, what part will make it to the Taliban?

Ross, Jamie. “Trump Appears to Defend Russia Arming the Taliban Against U.S. Troops.” Daily Beast, July 29, 2020 .

Rowlatt, Justin. “Russia ‘arming the Afghan Taliban’, says US.” BBC News, March 23, 2018.

Savage, Charlie, Eric Schmitt, Michael Schwirtz. Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.” The New York Times, July 29, 2020.

Sufizada, Hanif. “The Taliban are megarich — here’s where they get the money they use to wage war in Afghanistan.” The Conversation, December 8, 2020.

–33–

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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