Lemon Drop wrote:
If anyone is interested in learning more about the tumultuous (and correct) history of Afghanistan, this is a very good timeline and high level overview:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/asia-jan-june11-timeline-afghanistan

rjmacs wrote:
[quote=Lemon Drop]
If anyone is interested in learning more about the tumultuous (and correct) history of Afghanistan, this is a very good timeline and high level overview:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/asia-jan-june11-timeline-afghanistan

Lemon Drop wrote:
If anyone is interested in learning more about the tumultuous (and correct) history of Afghanistan, this is a very good timeline and high level overview:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/asia-jan-june11-timeline-afghanistan

How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen ' Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76* INTERVIEWS | 15 NOVEMBER 2001
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs[From the Shadows], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion, this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the fateful decision, little noted at the time, that drew the US into its Afghanistan quagmire. If the current Afghan crisis can be said to have begun at any single moment, it was in the last week of 1979.

At dusk on Christmas Eve, following orders from President Leonid Brezhnev, units of the Soviet army crossed pontoon bridges over the Amu Darya river into Afghanistan. Brezhnev's decision was a catastrophic error that not only deeply damaged his country but also contributed to its extinction as a nation state. History is beginning to suggest, though, that decisions made in Washington during that week were just as tragically shortsighted.

One way for the US to have reacted to the Soviet invasion would have been to cheer the Soviets' stupidity and wait patiently for Afghan resistance fighters to do their duty to history. This would have been a prudent, restrained policy, one of limited ambition and risk. It would have kept the US out of a dangerous place where it had not previously been entangled and which it did not know well.

Instead the US chose the opposite path: hyperactive engagement. The CIA launched its biggest operation ever, pouring billions of dollars into the Afghan resistance, matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia. This operation contributed decisively to the Soviet defeat, culminating in the Red Army's retreat back across the Amu Darya in 1988.

America's decision to escalate this war also had other effects that only became clear later. It brought tens of thousands of foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. With them these outsiders brought harsh forms of Islamic fundamentalism that had been little known in Afghanistan. Their influence – Wahhabi fanaticism preached to Afghan resistance fighters in a war paid for by the US and Saudi Arabia – gave birth to the Taliban. Pakistan served as eager midwife and quickly turned the Taliban into its proxy force in Afghanistan. Once in power, the Taliban offered a safe haven to al-Qaida, which prepared the September 11 attacks there.

America's decision to plunge into Afghanistan 30 years ago also made the US an ally of Pakistan's reactionary military dictator, Muhammad Zia al-Haq. The CIA needed bases for its anti-Soviet army, and therefore required Zia's cooperation. No one seemed to care that he had recently hanged the elected prime minister he overthrew, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, or that his two transcendent goals for Pakistan were creating a "pure Islamic order" and building nuclear weapons.

Lemon Drop wrote:
max you could have saved yourself all that effort and needless drama if you'd read the concise, non-inflammatory comment I wrote 20 minutes before your reply, in response to rjmacs. Pretty sure I covered the same things you did, sans hysteria.