fair enough, i’d say he had a lot information back then, though.
we knew all about Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, what they were about. We knew the freedom fighters in Afghanistan weren’t exactly boy scouts. We knew about guys like Abdullah Azzam and Hekmatyar and the rest.
Back then the USSR was “the main enemy”. Reagan had a policy of supporting proxy wars to take them down. In Afghanistan, in Central America. In his view the end result of defeating the USSR was the main objective and if we had to get in bed with some folks, so be it. Just as in WW2 he had to throw in with the USSR against Germany.
I’m just saying I see some parallels here and I hope we learn from past mistakes.
Don’t forget that at the time, the Soviets were a expansionist superpower with thousands of nuclear weapons. (Yes, they were rotten at the core, but we didn’t know that.) It seems reasonable to believe that, assuming he had intel on bad they were, Reagan saw dealing with the Muj as the lesser of two evils.