It may have been in hindsight a huge mistake to have awakened the Islamist Raison d’etre for it’s existence. Afghanistan was not the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union, communism was. Our problem was in perpetuating the mistake of supporting islamists in afghanistan and following that up with support for them in kosovo and bosnia. For the muslims it was an alliance of convenience. They would just as gladly have sided with the communists had those communists also been Muslims instead of atheists.
Agree we didn’t exactly pick our natural allies in Bosnia.
I am gonna try to read the book b/f the movie, sounds like a really interesting read.
Afghanistan wasn't the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it definitely helped it along.
The Soviet Union's sustained itself on ideology as much if not more than anything else.
Afghanistan was a serious blow to that ideology. It was a huge embarrassment to the Soviet Union that their powerful, modern military was turned aside by a bunch of loosely organized tribes bound together by their own ideology fought them off even though they were relatively poorly equipped and trained.
Afghanistan was a clash of ideologies as much as anything else, and the Communists suffered a huge moral defeat.
The Muslim tribes of Afghanistan did win a moral victory, and they turned out to be our enemies as well as the Soviets, but they made a useful ally of convenience, and leaving to their own devices against the Russians would have gained us nothing.
We did not create radical Islam, nor did we significantly empower them. We helped arm them with what were modern weapons at the time, but the more dangerous weapons were provided in limited quantities, and haven't been modern for quite some time.
We also didn't train them to be murderous terrorists, they did that on their own.