• Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    The money was transferred to accounts used by US relief agencies.

    So… wait, then what’s your point?

    If I shove you […] Did I just give you food aid?

    Vile sure, but literally yes.

    The sudden loss of an external market for opium exports certainly hurt the Afghan economy overall.

    I’m sorry, this is just me being genuinely unclear on what you’re saying here - do you mean that the US military and the Karzai government was the primary market for / exporter of Afghan heroin, or that in leaving they somehow restricted the export of heroin in a way that it hadn’t been restricted through their presence, or that there suddenly was no global demand for heroin, or… what? Again not trying to be shitty, genuinely just unclear.

    It’s not an impossible sell.

    Sure! But it was an impossible sell - and my use of the past tense there was quite intentional. In Afghanistan under Taliban rule it’s still effectively impossible, but the cultural attitudes of the crossroads region as a whole are, incredibly slowly, changing in a more positive direction with regards to homosexuality (outside the bounds of pederasty, which is it’s own disgusting side topic). However my invocation of the concept was to highlight the use of child rape as a rhetorical tool to polarize attitudes towards the northern alliance, while ignoring that the Taliban’s approach was to simply declare child rape legal if you’re married (but not if it’s gay child rape - no, that’s A Bridge Too Far!). A clever loophole, though still by any other definition child rape.

    should they simply not have left? Afghanistan should just stay a narco-state forever?

    Bit of a false dilemma here. So stepping around it to the issue, I’m genuinely interested in why you’re presenting the export of narcotics as being a Bad Thing™. That was one common piece of rhetoric trotted out to justify having blown the crap out of some random farming village (and that the US is actively using to justify murdering random fishermen in south/central america), and it’s as much a pro-imperialist argument now as it was back then.

    This is how you get the old Soviet “Gayness is just when the Brits do Imperialism” bad take.

    I’ve not encountered this one before, that’s… another one for the inconveniently-on-brand pile, I suppose.

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        It’s unfortunately a valid question. I don’t know how that factors in to the argument that dismantling USAID hasn’t lead to a famine. Or how it shows that USAID to afghanistan didn’t continue for 3.5 years after the US withdrawal.

          • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            You know you could simply elaborate on your point, instead of resorting to accusing me of performatively misunderstanding a confusingly presented argument. This has been quite a pleasant conversation otherwise.