Should we have supported the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan in 1980?

[RagAss]

Nothing beats 20/20 hindsight I guess. But the question is begged by the decades of headaches this drug infested, religious Nutfarm has given us.

[JI7]

1. if not support at least not actively opposed it

[Motown_Johnny]

13. agreed. Maybe arming Osama Bin Laden and his followers was a bad thing

maybe











:sarcasm:

[brooklynite]

2. Unrec'd

Why would this have a good idea under any circumstances? Afghanistan before the Soviets was, if unenlighted, at least locally stable. The Soviet invasion destabilized the already limited governing structure and militarized the Islamist opposition.

[Canuckistanian]

10. I would describe pre-Soviet Afghanistan as a 'peaceful backwater'

Highly de-centralized, with a mostly benevolent and ineffective monarchy.

Probably in most rural areas, they didn't even consider themselves part of a single, unified country.

Most of all, they wanted to be left alone.

[Distant Observer]

21. How long, how long, will we keep doing the same shit -- promote conflicts that destroy societies

While always finding ways to justify it and always downplaying the ways we poison other people's
lands and cultures.

[benld74]

3. Would NOT have made a difference,,,,,

[robcon]

4. We were right to oppose: they put up a puppet govt. to expand their control.

n/t

[RagAss]

5. Control of what? They crashed as the USSR a few years later.

A win there for them would have made them the target of terror.

[robcon]

7. The USSR was trying to expand its empire; Afghanistan exposed some of its weaknesses.

n/t

[Fumesucker]

9. Ever heard of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Reza_Pahlavi

[BobbyBoring]

24. Yeah!

He was the guy we installed in Iran after we helped them get rid of Prime Minister Mosaddegh, the democratically elected PM.

That worked out really swell too!

[bluestateguy]

6. I'm sure that would have been a winning strategy for President Carter in 1980

Yes that was sarcasm.

[TheKentuckian]

8. What makes you pose the question?

[RagAss]

11. OH...I don't know ........9/11 maybe?....A senseless 10 year war maybe?

[TheKentuckian]

12. We didn't have to train or prop up the opposition or engage in a ten year senseless war.

We created our own problems on both accounts that had little to do with the Soviets.

We could have opposed the invasion in very different ways. We did it to ourselves because we wanted to break the Soviets so that capitalism would be unopposed and the they could cease coddling workers and paying lip service to issues that cut into profits.

We chose to support authoritarian extremists like the Taliban and train theocrats like bin Laden and this is what happens when coupled with more reactionary shit decisions down the line. It isn't the opposition but how we elected to oppose exacerbated by past and latter dimwitted policy.

To answer the question, we shouldn't have opposed because we ended up opposing the kind of culture that can evolve and backed powerful, regressive factions.

I was just curious of where you were coming from. Like I said opposition was wrongheaded but we could have opposed without handling things as poorly as we did.

[BOG PERSON]

14. no, land reform and womens rights are antithetical to our values

unless we are the ones imposing those things in taiwan, southern korea or japan. ends never justify the means, unless they happen to be our ends.

[SOS]

15. The US should have ignored it

Today Afghanistan would be a former Soviet Republic like Tajikistan or Uzbekistan.
The place would be in much better shape and we wouldn't be there now.

But anti-Soviet hysteria was not confined to Republicans in those days.

[AlabamaLibrul]

28. Bingo.

[MadHound]

16. No, actualy we should have supported the Afghani rebuilding effort

After they defeated the Soviets.

A couple of million to rebuild schools and other such infrastructure. Would have gone a long way to creating a great deal of good will. In fact bin Laden admitted in an interview that he was a fan of the US up until the point where we closed our pocketbooks on the rebuilding effort.

[Distant Observer]

19. Where the hell did you get that history from?? HELP!

Bin Laden said declared war because of :
1. US Infidel in sacred lands of Islam -- Saudi Arabia, Mecca, Medina ..
2. US support of Muslim oppression and injustice via Israel

At least that is the story I heard.

US money was insignificant factor. The money was form Gulf oil kingdoms, US provided weapons -- our specialty.

[BobbyBoring]

23. US $$ was very significant!

Charlie Wilsons War is a great flick that tells the untold story. We helped the freedom fighters defeat the Soviets by supplying them with weapons, intel, and$$$$. They were fighting a proxy war for us as many nations have in the past.

After the Soviets left, Wilson asked Congress for a measly million to start building schools, but noooooooooooooooooooo. Fuck em. They served our purpose so let them wallow in their war torn country.

As usual, our meddling comes back to haunt us!

[MadHound]

26. Umm, I've got a great memory, I lived through the times,

And there are records of our turning down money, a few piddling million, for rebuilding Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out.

As far as bin Laden's turn against the US, it was in one of his interviews during the nineties that he made the statement about turning against the US after our government refused to appropriate any money for rebuilding Afghanistan.

[Enrique]

17. we should not have intervened before the Soviet invasion

we should not have made Afghanistan part of the Cold War, it has devastated them for all these decades in so many ways.

And now, we should think carefully about what countries we decide to devastate for our terror war.

[bemildred]

18. Zbig was always a self-important fool, like Kissinger. nt

[Skidmore]

20. We were in the Cold War then, and the

mindset that surrounds power in the world now did not exist then. There was no way under the sun we were going to support the Soviets in any endeavor whatsoever then. The Taleban came into existence because we were using them to weaken the Soviets. We helped them flounder in the Graveyard of Empires.

[JackRiddler]

22. If the USG had not intervened to destabilize the Afghan state prior to the Soviet invasion...

maybe it wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Once the Soviets had occupied Kabul, the CIA idea of getting together with the theocratic oil kingdoms to recruit and finance an international Arab jihadi force to intervene in Afghanistan wasn't very bright from the perspective of today, but it was profitable business and Cold-War geopolitical crack to Casey and the other geniuses who put the policy together.

Allying with heroin warlords like the fundamentalist Hekmatyar (Osama's in-country sponsor) also wasn't exactly something forced on the American spooks by the Evil Empire.

Here's one book (of several) everyone who cares to have an opinion on Afghanistan should read:



Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story

(2009, City Lights, SF), 392 p.

Definitely create a scorecard as you go along to keep track of the 1000 people involved. The authors are nothing if not comprehensive. I can imagine a whole bunch of kneejerk objections the latter parts of this narrative might raise around here. Their skepticism about all things 9/11 is evident, but eclectic, mercurial and muted, and they are no friends to the Taliban or the (US-financed) Pakistani security forces that gave birth to them. But I recommend highly if you want to understand developments from the original Great Game to today.

To call it a game is a demented term for mass murder; typical gung-ho Imperialist euphemism. The usual British practice was known as "the forward strategy," which was to stay the fuck out of Pashtun hinterlands but make periodic sudden incursions to massacre people basically at random before retreating again to their fortresses. A high-tech variant on guerilla warfare, I suppose.

It started 170 years ago with Britain and Russia contesting the final piece on the map along their respective claims to frontiers, as well as the mystical heart of power-crazed ideologies and the crux of geopolitical land-power hooey, erm, theory. By the early 20th century they were joined by imperial newcomers like Germany and Ours Truly.

In a familiar story, the imperialists drew borders - in this case the unsustainable Durand line between Afghanistan and Pakistan - that make little sense, separate peoples, make states dependent, and generate conflict.

I like how the authors (who struck me as good people when I met them for lunch once) never hesitate to go into big history, so to speak, covering enough of developments all around the world (plenty of US history here, including long sections on the origins of the Cold War and the later "Team B") to give a view of why the hell all these invaders keep showing up in a dirt-poor country of mountains and deserts -- never mind all the propaganda about its riches -- about which the only widely known fact is that its peoples are impossible to pacify.

Having at this point read a half-dozen or more histories of contemporary Afghanistan or works in which it is a central subject, I'm not at all feeling expert, but qualified enough to say this is the one to read first if you're willing to handle the at-times dense storytelling.

But let's have them speak for themselves.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould wrote in 2009, in a guest op-ed for Juan Cole's blog:

Fitzgerald & Gould: Afghanistan, a New Beginning

SNIP

President Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke denies that the U.S. seeks to sideline Afghanistan’s elected president, Hamid Karzai. But the handwriting is on the wall. After floundering around for 7 years, the U.S. and the west appear to be falling back on a failed Clinton-era plan to embrace the Taliban’s legitimacy. But if fixing Afghanistan – a country so recently believed to be open to a western democratic embrace – has proven too taxing for the west’s leadership – what can the Obama administration do to right the situation before the same old misinformed policy habits issue in a new wave of Islamic extremism?

The first major mistake, according to one well placed Afghan/American was Washington’s total deference to American companies whose control of the reconstruction process assured that the financial benefits accrued exclusively to foreign developers, contractors, and suppliers while leaving the local population and their leadership out of the development loop.

SNIP

Aside from squandering its military advantage by turning away from Afghanistan to Iraq, the situation was turned from bad to worse when the Bush administration insisted on putting the “hated” warlords back into the new centralized government to compensate for its under-manned mission.

SNIP

Appearing on the scene as if by miracle in 1992, the Taliban’s purported mission of clearing the countryside of warlords and drug dealers was received warmly by Washington’s K street lobbyists. Painted by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) as an indigenous Afghan tribal force, the Taliban were actually a thinly disguised ISI strike-force paid for by a consortium of business interests. The CIA’s former chief of the Near-East South-Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations, Charles Cogan today refers to them as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the ISI.” But former ISI Director General Hamid Gul claims his ISI also received help from Britain’s former High Commissioner to Pakistan, Sir Nicholas Barrington who “inducted both former royalists and erstwhile communists into the Taliban movement.”

SNIP

http://www.juancole.com/2009/04/fitzgerald-gould-afghanistan-new.html

[blindpig]

25. The Soviets did not invade, they were invited by the socialist...

government of Afghanistan. The Soviets were reluctant to get involved.

The government needed help because some tribal groups were revolting against the modernizing reforms that socialist do, imposing upon the medieval power structure, equal rights and education for women really pissed them off too. For a few years Afghanistan was striving to become a modern nation but the US destroyed that. And US involvement began before the Soviets entered the fray.

[JackRiddler]

27. In a sense no more so than Saudi Arabia invaded Bahrain -- with tacit US support.

The story was more complicated than you have it. A hardline faction had overthrown a much more effective and moderate Communist party government some months earlier. As I remember it, but check before you quote me, the Soviets were not happy about that and indeed felt forced to stabilize Afghanistan, fearing an Islamist surge. Which the CIA and Arab oil kingdoms then gave them. Certainly there is no comparison between the Communists' harsh rule or even the Soviet occupation period and what followed under the US-backed and funded fundamentalist heroin warlord butchers and the ISI-created Taliban fanatics.