of course, wrecking a country to NOT prevent its use for heroine AND funding the stated enemy is even worse (much worse when you take into account how much we spend to fail). I say legalize all uses, and regulate some more than others. It woudl cost less and likely damage less lives. ..addicts coudl be provided treatment rather than destroying lives to pretend no one does it.

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"You down wit OPM?"
Fumo: "Yeah, you know me!"

Did you know thar it's illegal to use drugs in that country. It's a very serious crime in fact.

What they're doing is growing and selling these drugs to "the infidel" because they believe we're morally inferior. That's the only logical conclusion if they're protecting their own and not the outside world. So, these crops are a kind of chemical/biological warfare.

I believe that they should have been Naplamed or whatever. Frankly, I cannot understand our military. Either you rule people and tell them what to do, until they do, or leave them alone. Not invade and then leave the important choices to the natives. What the hell is that.

I think that the US has lost the will to fight, because the average person, and the leaders, believe we have no moral authority. We need to retire.

This puzzles me...

As horrible as the Taliban is, they did get rid of the drug crop, before we invaded them.

Then, the US comes in, and its all back there again.

And from what I understand, none of the neighborhood drug dealers fly planes in or out of Afghanistan, and regular people cannot carry as much as a bottle of contact lens fluid on a plane...

So how does it get here?

Is this like Iran-Contra again? Is someone in a US military plane flying the stuff here????

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Someone ought to do something about it...

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The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1

that's not entirely true. The Taliban siezed the crops, and intended to put an end to poppy production but ended up selling it because they needed the money. The Taliban were, at first, tolerated because they brought stability. the country is run by drug lords who have been made enemies of the state by the US. The US is, indeed, telling them what to do and making them enforce it. Even the brutal soviets stumbled in Afghanistan using the Adlerian's philosophy. It's a coutnry whose geography doesn't lend well to control and whose decades of war has led to a militant society full of people who know how to fight. It is my understanding that the only thing you can trust in Afghanistan is that everyone has their price.

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"You down wit OPM?"
Fumo: "Yeah, you know me!"

Right. Neither Europe nor Japan had any history before 1945.

And Afghanistan was founded in 1747 and has had human inhabitants for about 50,000 years.
You seem to have no point.

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The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1

I don't think this attitude is new to the U.S. military. Since Teddy Roosevelt left office, there has been very little enthusiasm in this country for anything resembling an empire (that is, when "you rule people and tell them what to do"). In both World Wars, the president had a hard time persuading the American people that there was any reason to send U.S. troops to Europe - and in fact couldn't do it without enemy attacks on the U.S. Once the active fighting was over, Americans couldn't wait to get out. There has never been a popular American desire for sustained occupation of another country - the two examples that Tannhauser cites above (Europe and Japan after 1945) are the exceptions.

So a loss of "moral authority" is less a cause than the twin strands of isolationism and anti-imperialism endemic to the post-1900 U.S.A.

Let me make it clearer. You imply that the cause of Japanese and Europe's economic success was the postwar U.S. occupation. That ignores that Japan and Europe were both advanced industrial economies with well-established centralized states. Neither is an example of "nation building." Afghanistan has never had either an industrial economy or a strong central state in its 300 years. It is not at all comparable to the situations MacArthur and Marshall faced.

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The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1