alt Hacker NewsThere's considerable evidence and reason to believe Washington invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to supercharge opium production (banned by Taliban) and flood/destabilize the region (China, Iran) as part of a deliberate, covert and asymmetric drug proliferation strategy.
Now, you could argue that the subsequent invasion of Iraq was counterproductive to that, but I don't see that argument having water.
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I'd argue that the invasion of Iraq benefited plenty of neoconservative aims:
1) eliminating a military threat to Saudi Arabia and Israel
2) placing hundreds of military outposts on Iran's doorstep
3) destabilizing Iran and Syria by empowering militant groups dormant under Saddam to re-arm and try to establish a Caliphate in Syria.
4) awarding trillions in no-bid contracts to Dick Cheney's Halliburton and a slew of arms manufacturers and private military contractors who could operate free of the burdensome rules of the Geneva Conventions. Halliburton received so much business that they moved their HQ to Dubai.
If that were true I wonder how much the emergence of fentanyl influenced the decision to pull out of Afghanistan
> There's considerable evidence and reason to believe Washington invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to supercharge opium production
There's a lot more evidence and reason to believe that the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 because the Bush Administration realized that, despite their initial inclinations, they couldn't sell a war on Iraq as a response to 9/11 without first making a visible effort that was more tangibly connected to the organization that actually carried out the attacks.