Afghanistan

After cornering the market on heroin, they’ve pivoted to a quicker and more profitable alternative.

As if Coca-Cola gave up making soft drinks, the Taliban announced to great fanfare last year that they were getting out of the drug business. The group that rode big opium profits to a takeover of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 suddenly, seemingly, swore off the stuff. Poppy planting was banned and drugs were off the menu. Or that, at least, is what they want the world to believe.

Sept 10 (Reuters) – Methamphetamine trafficking in and around Afghanistan has surged in recent years, even as the Taliban has curbed heroin trafficking since taking power, a United Nations report said on Sunday.

“The surge in methamphetamine trafficking in Afghanistan and the region suggests a significant shift in the illicit drug market and demands our immediate attention,” said Ghada Waly, executive director of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

How the Left’s woke religion kills.

Two years later, people are still paying the price for the catastrophe of Old Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. And people will be paying the price for decades to come.

The Associated Press reported on August 22 that “more than 200 extrajudicial killings of former Afghan government officials and security forces have taken place since the Taliban took over the country two years ago, according to a U.N. report.” These were people the Taliban had promised not to kill, but as Muhammad said, “War is deceit” (Bukhari 4.52.268). Nine days before that, the Daily Mail reported that “militants who left fingerprints on IEDs meant to kill Americans in Afghanistan and a prisoner freed by the Taliban were among more than 65 terrorists allowed into the United States after the catastrophic withdrawal.” What could possibly go wrong? Celebrate diversity!

It is not just the beleaguered people of Afghanistan who are suffering as a result of US President Joe Biden’s catastrophic decision to arbitrarily end America’s military involvement in the country two years ago.

It is now abundantly clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch his brutal invasion of Ukraine was taken as a direct consequence of the weak leadership Biden displayed over his handling of the Afghan issue.

Two years ago today, the fall of Kabul exposed the delusions of ‘liberal interventionism’.

Two years ago today, Taliban fighters arrived at the gates of Kabul. Afghan security forces put up no resistance. Within hours, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and his assorted cronies fled the country. By the evening of 15 August 2021, the Taliban had effectively retaken power. The shiny new modern Afghanistan, liberated from Taliban rule, that the US and its allies had spent 20 years trying to build had crumbled upon first contact with reality.

Militants who left fingerprints on IEDs meant to kill Americans in Afghanistan and a prisoner freed by the Taliban were among more than 65 terrorists allowed into the United States after the catastrophic withdrawal.

Most of them could still be roaming the country, and the government cannot track them down.

The damning revelations made in a new book add to the laundry list of blunders from the Biden administration during and after the disastrous evacuation of Kabul in August 2021.

The first of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals to fall to the Taliban was the city of Zaranj in the southern deserts of Nimroz, near the border with Iran, on Friday, Aug. 6, 2021. The following day in the far northwest, the Talibs roared into Sheberghan, the capital of Jawzjan, on the border with Turkmenistan.

The next to fall was Sar-e-Pul, then Kunduz, Taloqan and Aybak. Then Kandahar and Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, then Jalalabad. Only the month before, U.S. president Joe Biden had scoffed at suggestions that his capitulation to the Taliban would echo the humiliating American retreat from Vietnam, with its indelible images of diplomatic staff scrambling into helicopters on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

Afghanistan and the Bud light fiasco may have something in common.

The marketing wiz for Bud was comfortably ensconced in Manhattan while her Afghan counterparts were similarly situated in Kabul.

They are the same people, they exist above the hoi polloi whose sole purpose is to be told what to do when they aren’t being ignored.

They had it all figured out until they didn’t.

The Taliban have burned musical instruments in Afghanistan, claiming music “causes moral corruption”.

Thousands of dollars worth of musical equipment went up in smoke on a bonfire on Saturday in western Herat province.

Since taking power in 2021, the Taliban have imposed numerous restrictions, including on playing music in public.

Ahmad Sarmast, Afghanistan National Institute of Music founder, likened their actions to “cultural genocide and musical vandalism”.

The Taliban has ordered all beauty salons to close in a further reduction of women’s freedoms in Afghanistan.

“The deadline for the closing of beauty parlours for women is one month,” Mohammad Sadiq Akif, a spokesman for the ministry for the prevention of vice and propagation of virtue, said on Tuesday.