The West has waged two wars in Afghanistan, one against the Taliban and one against itself. Therefore, it could not win.

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the features section.

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It was difficult enough to find out who the enemy was on the first front line, because when they were not carrying weapons and putting on an innocent face, they could hardly be distinguished from farmers. The fact that on the second front the West ultimately fought against itself, against its own demons and deficits, against its suffering from conditions that it created itself, and its addiction to overcome this pain with chemical substances: he doesn't want that to himself admit, and in the analyzes of his defeat it is not mentioned. The West, led by the Americans, has fought its war against drugs with particular severity in Afghanistan, especially against the opium poppy - which is only grown, harvested and processed into opium and heroin there for one reason:because there are so many people in North America and Europe who are addicted to this substance that it takes around 10,000 tons of raw opium a year to meet this demand.

The West had nothing to gain and nothing to look for in Afghanistan (except for Osama bin Laden and his men) because it not only does not understand Afghanistan, but understanding is fundamentally impossible: that is the common culturalist explanation that is popular for that reason alone because hardly anything is as understandable as the assertion of incomprehensibility.

The brief history of opium in Afghanistan shows that Afghans understand the West and the global economy it ruled well enough to benefit from it.

The profit margins are exhilarating

Growing opium poppies is no more part of the country's age-old traditions than smoking opium. In his book "In the Shadows of the American Century", Alfred W. McCoy, an expert on drug crime and professor of the history of South Asia, describes the beginnings of opium cultivation as a side effect of the civil war: when the mujahideen made their first land gains in the Soviet Union around 1980 occupied land, they grew opium poppies because it required little preparation and minimal capital investment. The profit margins are intoxicating: Opium poppies are the ideal herb for civil war zones.

At the time, the CIA tolerated cultivation and smuggling, if only because it was interested in strengthening the mujahideen and weakening the Soviets - just as it had no hesitation in working with Mexican cocaine cartels to supply the Nicaraguan Contras with weapons. And because the civil war did not end even after the withdrawal of the Red Army, the opium poppy was as widespread as violence in the 1990s.