Fun Facts about Afghanistan! #conspiracy

In July 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, collaborating with the UN to eradicate heroin production in Afghanistan, declared that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world's most successful anti-drug campaigns. The Taliban enforced a ban on poppy farming via threats, forced eradication, and public punishment of transgressors. The result was a 99% reduction in the area of opium poppy farming in Taliban-controlled areas, roughly three quarters of the world's supply of heroin at the time. The ban was effective only briefly due to the deposition of the Taliban in 2002.
Before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, there were around 189,000 heroin users in the United States. By 2016, that figure increased to 4.5 million—an estimated 2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users.
Opium production in Afghanistan increased by 87 per cent to a record level of 9,000 metric tons in 2017...The area under opium poppy cultivation also increased to a record 328,000 hectares in 2017, up 63 per cent compared with 201,000 hectares in 2016.

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There's trillions of dollars worth of minerals underneath Afghanistan, and it's been well known for a long time. Following the third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, Afghanistan won its independence from diplomatic domination by the British and it was not long after that a Soviet publication onmineral “riches” first appeared, published by a man who later came to be revered as an early Russian ‘father’ of geologic studies. Nevertheless, in spite of early attempts by the government of Afghanistan to entice Americans to become engaged in resource discovery and extraction in the country, distance from market, economic concerns, and looming worries about World War II caused rejection of the project...It wasn't until the Soviet occupation in the 80's that a comprehensive map of its mineral deposits was made.
A thorough investigation of 5 major mining corporations in Afghanistan revealed rampant corruption and tax-evasion, resulting in the national loss of about 50 million dollars annually.

Total value has nearly tripled in the 11 years since this was published

In the words of the NYTimes in 2010: "...deposits —including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium —are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe..An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the 'Saudi Arabia of lithium,”' a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops..."

A major natural gas pipeline that would pass through Afghanistan has been seriously considered since the 90s, called the TAPI Pipeline (Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India). This hypothetical pipeline would render useless a different projected pipeline that would preclude any US involvement: Straight from Iran to India via Pakistan.

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After his 2000 election, the Bush administration immediately explored rekindling relations with the Taliban, for the simple reason that the Taliban held out the most hope for stabilizing Afghanistan and enabling oil and gas pipelines to pass through the country. But by August 2001, the Taliban resisted some of the conditions laid down by the Bush administration for moving forward, causing Washington to threaten the Taliban militarily if they did not cooperate. Negotiations broke down when, after the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden. (Less known is the fact that the Taliban had sought proof that linked bin Laden to 9/11, and the Bush administration refused to supply it, and it is still missing to this day.) The TAPI deal was signed by all parties in 2008, and approved by the Afghani parliament in 2012. Construction on the Turkmenistan part began in 2015, followed by the Afghan in 2018. In 2020, the US hosted its first trilateral meeting with Afghanistan and Turkmenistan where the countries agreed to continue implementing projects like TAPI. In February of this year, the Taliban vowed to protect the pipeline project. All going according to plan...? (In my opinion, this is worth watching closely as the Taliban government establishes itself, it will give us a good indicator of what direction they will take the country, and to what degree they will be accepted/rejected by the ~~corporate oligarchs~~ international community.)
In 1986, the CIA helped Osama bin Laden create a Mujahideen training camp in Khost, Afghanistan to fight off the Soviets. The Taliban would later be composed of many fighters who came directly from the CIA-backed Mujahideen.
In 1992 the CIA, having backed Afghan rebel groups, withdrew its aid. The Russians also cut its funding. The pro-Russian government was overthrown, and Afghanistan was plunged into a bloody civil war, setting the stage for the Taliban to assume power four years later.
Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July of 2001 that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October 2001.
The US intervention began with the mass execution of over 2,000 Taliban prisoners who were suffocated or shot to death in shipping containers after surrendering to US special forces and their Northern Alliance proxies in late 2001.
Two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners were tortured to death by U.S. military personnel in December 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (also Bagram Collection Point or B.C.P.) in Bagram, Afghanistan and general treatment of prisoners. The two prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were repeatedly chained to the ceiling and beaten, resulting in their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners' deaths were homicides.
By 2015, there had been a total of at least 4,130 airstrikes conducted by the US government, killing at least 3,923 people, including 150 civilians and 36 children.
It is conservatively estimated that 175,000 civilians have been killed in the war.
In 2014, Wikileaks released this memo revealing a clandestine mass surveillance operation, used to carry out drone strikes, being performed on the entire country of Afghanistan:

The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the Washington Post and The Intercept...have censored the name of one of the victim states, which the latter publication refers to as country "X"...

An ongoing crime of mass espionage is being committed against the victim state and its population. By denying an entire population the knowledge of its own victimisation, this act of censorship denies each individual in that country the opportunity to seek an effective remedy, whether in international courts, or elsewhere. Pre-notification to the perpetrating authorities also permits the erasure of evidence which could be used in a successful criminal prosecution, civil claim, or other investigations.

We know from previous reporting that the National Security Agency's mass interception system is a key component in the United States' drone targeting program. The US drone targeting program has killed thousands of people and hundreds of women and children in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia in violation of international law. The censorship of a victim state's identity directly assists the killing of innocent people.

Although, for reasons of source protection we cannot disclose how, WikiLeaks has confirmed that the identity of victim state is Afghanistan. This can also be independently verified through forensic scrutiny of imperfectly applied censorship on related documents released to date and correlations with other NSA programs (see http://freesnowden.is)...

Consequently WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is Afghanistan.