A comment of mine which I'd like to underline. Concerning Afghanistan.
Now, as I was reading
this, I almost feel for the western democratizators. They're oh so good and clean, and Karzai is soooo bad. Poor things. :-)
Beside his presence on the membership records of various western corporations, he's also present on the records of CIA. As are many of the Talibans who are also, oh so bad, a creation of CIA, the Pakistani services and the Soviet occupation. Afghan orphans are taught in the madrassa schools of Pakistan, later to become Talibans.
The present occupation is no better than the Soviet one, only the killings are performed in a more technological way (sometimes). Preferably with drones without pilots. But this one is much more harmful to the Afghanis at least for one reason - the over-production of opium and respectively heroine. Let me remind you that after every bloody mission for 'democratization', if the climate permits, there's always a boom in the production of opium and other drugs. One of the most famous examples is the production in the Golden Triangle, aka Vietnam War.
Technically, the solution for Afghanistan is insultingly simple. Dozens of agricultural planes stuffed to the roof with thousands of tonnes of herbicides. Sprinkle the poppy fields at once, and next year it'll be super-unprofitable to invest in anything remotely related to opium.
This gets me back to the topic. Who's actually benefiting from the drugs production? Is it the Afghani peasants? No way. Certainly, they manage to make ends meet so-so, similarly to the Colombian peasants. Is it the local drug feudals? OK, they're doing pretty good everywhere around the world. But if you really look deep, who's the organizer and the main profiteer from this global logistical operation called drug trafficking? The circle has narrowed down, hasn't it? And who enters the spotlight? You guessed right - aggressor #1 using the mask of democratizator #1 in the world. Why doesn't any of those inspection authorities ever check what's being transported in those huge transportation military planes which are flying to Turkey and the US bases in the former Soviet Central Asia? That's the place where the opium becomes heroine.
And Karzai is really the perfect guy for the job.
I don't see a change coming to Afghanistan. Neither today, nor in a year, nor in a decade.
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Addendum:Selling western-style kleptodemocracy through penis-shaped bombs pooped by war planes has almost invariably lead to even bigger trouble than a few guys with turbans sitting in the government of the poorest country in the world. And, while in the more 'diluted' regions such as Palestine, Lebanon, etc, the locals have been very familiar with that game for centuries, still nothing but more trouble is what one could expect.
The story is well-known and rehearsed over countless times. We seem to love repetition (only in our case it's not the mother of learning). In 1973, the US brought down what came closest to a king, and tried to invent kleptodemocracy, Orient-style. They duly did that, after which they crapped all over the place; in their turn the Rushkies jumped in to save the turbans from capitalism - didn't work again - then the Shrub (whose memory apparently spans no more than 6 months) decided to re-discover Afghanistan, so now you have the same old troubles, Vietnam-style. Because while Vietnam wanted to kick the kleptodemocratizators back into where they had come from (which they duly did), Afghanistan ensures its bread and butter through export of heroine. Very cheap and very high quality heroine...
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