That's a bit of a surprise, it's a huge amount. I know a few years ago he did an about face and announced more troops would be sent to afghanistan. I think that was on the basis of the pentagon and generals convincing him that something was achievable, perhaps a negotiated deal with the taliban? And this bombing is a Trump tactic to negotiate from a stronger position? I wonder how many have died.
I can't see the US and Allies achieving anything long term in afghanistan, it's a tribal nation, the tribe is more important in their society/history than the government, so as soon as nato leaves the afghan govt will fold in 6 months. What I would do or threaten to do is target the poppy/heroin fields with japanese knotweed or some other invasive plant species and keep doing it till they stop growing the stuff
Washington, still wounded by the fall of Saigon four years earlier, decided to give Moscow its “own Vietnam” by backing the Islamic resistance. For the next 10 years, the CIA would provide the mujahideen guerrillas with an estimated $3bn in arms. These funds, along with an expanding opium harvest, would sustain the Afghan resistance for the decade it would take to force a Soviet withdrawal. One reason the US strategy succeeded was that the surrogate war launched by the CIA did not disrupt the way its Afghan allies used the country’s swelling drug traffic to sustain their decade-long struggle.
...The CIA looked the other way while Afghanistan’s opium production grew from about 100 tonnes annually in the 1970s to 2,000 tonnes by 1991. In 1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer. By 1984, it supplied a staggering 60% of the US market and 80% of the European. Inside Pakistan, the number of heroin addicts surged from near zero (yes, zero) in 1979 to 5,000 in 1980, and 1.3 million by 1985 – a rate of addiction so high the UN termed it “particularly shocking”.
...In late 2004, after nearly two years of outsourcing opium control to its British allies and police training to the Germans, the White House was suddenly
confronted with troubling CIA intelligence suggesting that the escalating drug trade was fuelling a revival of the Taliban. Backed by George W Bush, secretary of state
Colin Powell then urged a forceful counter-narcotics strategy for parts of rural Afghanistan, including the same kind of aggressive aerial defoliation then being used against Colombia’s illicit coca crop. But the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, resisted this approach, seconded by his local ally Ashraf Ghani, then the country’s finance minister (and, since 2014, its president), who warned that such an eradication program would mean “widespread impoverishment” in the country, without $20bn in foreign aid to create a “genuine alternative livelihood”
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Its unbelievable what's gone on in the name of geopolitics in that region, people never joined the dots to things happening in their own society regarding this new heroin addiction, it's been a scourge of western countries, and it all links back to afghanistan and the fight to who controls it.
I was hoping Trump would approach all these areas differently, look at them with a fresh pair of eyes, but he's just given the green light to ramp things up militarily and hope it achieves something.
Be interesting if Bernie sanders was to win the presidency, apparently he is surging atm past biden and warren, I just can't seem him winning enough middle ground voters though, and if he loses then the democrats would probably swing back more central for the 2024 election.
