Comments by "SkyRiver" (@SkyRiver1) on "Top U.S. & World Headlines — August 17, 2021" video.

  1. The CIA, about a thousand US special forces troops, and the Northern Alliance (an alliance of drug dealers and heroin smugglers) ran Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan with minimal ground forces and a few cargo planes full of hundred dollar bills. The mess you are seeing now is entirely the fault of the people who decided to send in the army and nation build. This is the decision that caused the following twenty years of wasted funds and American lives. So who was it that made that fateful and enormously stupid decision? Yes hindsight is 20/20 but apparently so were the many voices that warned of the inevitable quagmire that would develop in Afghanistan twenty years ago. This is who is really responsible for the lose of life and the incredible expense of a meaningless war that anyone with a few brain cells knew, would end as it has: decades ago. The dummy who made the decision: President George W. Bush signs into law a joint resolution, authorizing the use of force against those responsible for attacking the United States on 9/11. This joint resolution will later be cited by the Bush administration as legal rationale for its decision to take sweeping measures to combat terrorism, from invading Afghanistan, to eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a court order, to stetting up the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But of course the usual suspects, the military industrial complex, dose see a huge windfall every time the USA arms it's enemies by giving arms and training to forces who have no intention of standing and fighting. The USA got punked once again by it's own arms industry.
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  2.  @solidaritytime3650  delusions of grandeur
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  3. Stupid comment of the day award! Why is this a stupid comment? There is absolutely no evidence that the US government smuggled heroin out of Afganistan. But that is just a minor point. More important is the fact that the heroin that was produced in Afghanistan went to Iran, and Europe via traditional means. Though the US government attack on Al-Qaeda was temporarily supported by the Northern Alliance, which was largely heroin smugglers, and the US armed forces apparently did nothing to suppress opium production in Afghanistan, it did not in anyway facilitate the transport and smuggling of heroin, like it is rumored to have done out of the the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam conflict. Also of note is the fact that the international banks that have been washing the ill-gotten gains of drug cartels is not in the least dependent upon heroin smuggling to supply them with billions of dollars to wash. Why would anyone go through the trouble of growing fields of poppies, the incredibility labor intensive practice of collecting the poppy latex, processing it into opium, converting the opium into morphine base, and finally processing the morphine base into heroin, all in clandestine labs and fields, then smuggling it across multiple boarders and making all the payoff along the way, when they could just order the precursors for fentnyl legally from China, synthesize a few grams in Mexico and have enough "heroin" to supply their entire US distribution network for a week? Huh? Why? This is why: because either you care nothing about the actual facts of what is going on, and just want to present an anti-USA narrative, or your are living in the sixties, when poppy fields still mattered.
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  4.  @nutcheck3  The photos you saw were not of troops guarding poppy fields, they were told not to interfere or destroy crops back when those photos were taken. They just happened to be standing in a poppy fields for a photo op. Hey mom look, here I am standing in an opium poppy field. The Northern Alliance controlled the poppy production in Afghanistan. So since they basically kicked Al Quada out of Afghanistan we did not destroy their fields. There is some evidence that opioids wee smuggled out of the golden triangle during the Vietnam War. Not as a part of any policy, but like the crack epidemic, by CIA operatives that didn't acknowledge any legal restraints on their activities. So maybe some CIA contractors smuggled some drugs out of Asia, and certainly CIA operatives were involved in supporting the Contras with money they made smuggling cocaine into the states, but the US government is not smuggling heroin anywhere, that is just a myth many people would like to believe. Believe me, if the US government wanted to deal opioids in the US, they would just synthesis it in labs already in the country, or better yet in Mexico, they would not smuggle it out of Afghanistan. You can not only synthesis it thousands of times cheaper than growing poppies and refining them to opium>morphine base> heroin> pure heroin, but you can actually use genetically modified yeast to just piss opioids like brewers yeast does alcohol. On the other hand although the US has spent billions of dollars trying to halt poppy production in Afghanistan and bombed over 2000 targets that supposedly served as production and distribution centers, they were largely impotent at curtailing or even suppressing the poppy production. Almost all of which goes to Iran and Europe. The interesting (and real) question at this point is not whether or not the US government smuggles heroin (they don't) it is: will the Taliban, which formerly ended the entire opioid business in Afghanistan last time they ruled the country, now that they have been profiting from heroin production as an income source while they were out of power, reinstate their zero tolerance policy toward drugs? One thing we know for sure is that it will be much harder for the Taliban to ban drugs now that it is their business.
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