USA & its puppet rulers in Afghanistan…

They had an election. They are not our puppets.

The money the farmers get for opium is only four or five times better than for food crops. When it comes to the drugs trade it is those that sell it on the street in the west that make all real the money. Even those that take the risks and transport it don’t make that much. Besides this opium is going to Europe and it normally goes through the foremr Soviet Union. If the Afghans started legalising trade the volume of traffic would balloon and the ex soviet states would have to act… probably ZAB incendiary bombs on the fields… that will likely kill the farmers rather than the dealers… if not directly then through lack of money/food.

“only four or five times better”? They are scratching out a subsistance living and you expect them to voluntarily cut their income by 80%? Not going to happen. If someone tried to force me to do that, I’d pick up an AK-47 and start shooting back. Which is what usually happens.

So why not give them printing presses to make American dollars. That would have huge profit margins.

That’s fraud. If someone takes drugs, smokes cigarettes, or destroys their liver with alcohol, they are doing it to themselves knowingly.

Sure someone else might suffer, but as long as they are making money it should be OK.

As long as no one puts a gun to someone’s head and makes them stick that needle in their arm. If they want to eat rat poison its their buisness.

You mean it is currently based on poppy traders. You can sell wheat on international markets. What the world can do is open up the markets to the Afghan farmers so they can get foreign dollars for what they produce. The west can buy afghan wheat and the farmers could make as much money as they do from opium. (they don’t make that much for Opium… they just make a lot compared to what they can get locally for wheat… which probably isn’t much.)

1=5 ? Thats interesting math.

Will not be done, when ~ 60% of present Afghan national income came from those drugs.
As long as someone can buy drugs for personal use, without fear to be jailed for years, nothing will change about that. No buyers = no market. :diablo:

Heroin users are so screwed up they are always going to want their next fix more than they fear getting caught. (Exactly who are you trying to help by putting the herion user in prison for years? The heroin user???) The war on drugs in the US hasn’t dented the number of addicts. The numbers of buyers is not going to change no matter what we do. But if heroin was legal, the price would crash, and Afghanis could make just as much money growing wheat. Which isn’t much. Perhaps we should keep heroin illegal to provide a price support for Afghani poppy growers. 😀

A10 to destroy heroin production facilities? Do we need uranium enriched bullets to do that? And taxing drugs? In that nation you will get shot if they find that in your pockets. You are talking about a nation that has been shooting womens in soccerstadiums. They need somthing else then some more weapons. The drug was introduced by CIA to get cash and deliver weapons to the freedomfighters. After that it became a handy way to earn cash. Maybe you should think about eradication of the buying market. These farmers earn not as much as the middle men or the seller on the street. Maybe the farmers should get help to start other agricultural products. Someday you will see that adding more weapons isn’t exactly solution if the living standards are low.

That was the Taliban shooting those women, and executing people with drugs. I think if you asked the women, they would have a different attitude.

The CIA did not introduce heroin to Afganistan. That sounds like Soviet or Taliban propoganda. The opium poppy is a flower that is as old as the hills and no one needs the CIA or anyone to grow it in Afganistan. Nature gave us flowers, not the CIA. The fact is that farmers can make way more money growing poppies than any other crop. Until the west outlaws food crops, illegal drugs are going to have a vastly higher profit margin.

If the Taliban is going to come and shoot you in a soccer stadium, what you need more than anything else is plenty of weapons.

It was a later aircraft, but I think that the F-5A was actually a closer equivalent to the MiG-19 than the F-100. Like the MiG-19, the F-5A was a nimble little twin engined point defense fighter with about the same max speed. As far as I know, it didn’t have any of the vices that plagued the F-100 or the MiG-19. I really couldn’t say which one would prevail in a dogfight.

hi,
this is a hypothetical scenario b/w soviet mig-23s and f-16s in the 1980s.when the AIM-120AMRAAM was not in use.The numerical advantage soviets enjoyed on the central front,was roughly 5:2 over the NATO f-16s based in europe.(not all the USAF f-16s)
Even if 1 out of 10 AA-7s launched by the 5 migs score a hit that would leave 1 f-16 against five floggers. 😀 in the 80s floggers enjoyed a firstlook firstshoot advantage over the f-16s.

The AA-7 is a challange for the F-16, but the North Vietnamese demonstrated that even a fighter armed only with guns can shoot down an opponent armed with missiles similar to the AA-7. The F-4 was a rough equivalent to the MiG-23, and NVAF MiG-17s, MiG-19s and MiG-21s gave it a very hard time. The F-16 is far superior to those aircraft.
The AA-7 can’t shoot down, so an F-16 could approach on the deck and pop up behind the MiG-23, as MiGs did in Vietnam. If a MiG-23 fires an AA-7 at the F-16, the F-16 could fire an AIM-9L at the MiG and turn hard, breaking the lock of the MiG-23’s radar. If an AA-7 has the same failure rate as an AIM-7E, most of them will miss anyway. If an F-16 gets close to the MiG-23, it will eat MiG for dinner. I’ll put my money on the F-16s, even with the MiG’s numerical advantage. 😎

I’m all for a dictatorship. Democracy hasn’t given us anything.

Democracy gave you the freedom to elect a new government if you don’t like the one you have. If this doesn’t appeal to you, perhaps you would prefer to live under a Pinochet, or Saddam Hussain, or Castro, where men come in the night and take your family members away, never to be seen or heard from again. Maybe you prefer to worry that you might disappear. Or would you really prefer to be one of the men who comes in the night?

Does anyone have a photo of an Omani Hunter from around 1980?