For the record, though I opposed it at the time, I currently think the whole Afghan thing was the only positive use of the US military since WWII. It sure made Central Asia a lot safer place to be. I was working monitoring the news wires in 2000-2001 and there were accounts of armed skirmishes between Taliban and border guards on the Tajik border every goddamn day. Everybody from Central Asia I talked too thought the US going in was a great idea ("The US wants to kill Taliban? Allllright!!!! Go USA!")
Also for the record, here's the source on the Soviet Afghan claim, the relevant fascinating thread in the archives to P. Lavelle's excellent Russia list: http://groups.google.com/group/Russia-Profile-Experts-Discussion-Group/browse_thread/thread/9b27b22238194716/72beee25e30c9cb4?q=Afghanistan&rnum=1#72beee25e30c9cb4
--- Travis Fast <tfast at yorku.ca> wrote:
> I am sure, but my response was tongue-in-cheek. The
> point is that there
> are many reasons one may support a group even if one
> does not like its
> politics or even detests those politics. I suspect
> any lefty that does
> support the afgan "resistance" does so because they
> feel it is more
> important that US foreign policy fail then
> coeducation succeed in
> Afghanistan. Not a particularly nice trade-off but
> it is symptomatic of
> a type of calculation that gets made in an imperfect
> world. Similar such
> calculations are being made about Iraq as well I
> suspect. Now I am sure
> there are some whaky groups who really believe that
> any force aligned
> against the US is necessarily good but that just
> speaks to simplistic
> sense of politics which is not cornered by the left,
> centre or right.
>
> Travis
>
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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