A fair point for historical accuracy. However, the point is not relevant to the point of my post.
Yes, that's all the issue is.
It's interesting to note the lack of interest generally in the history of the pre-Soviet regime, where our policies hurt the enemies of the Taliban for our own other agenda.
We had the government of Afghanistan fighting the Muslim fundamentalists, higher standard of living, more women's rights - and we didn't support them, but did the opposite.
There's not much interest in the causes of many wars.
What has really changed over the lessons of the false pretenses for the war in Vietnam - when the two later wars with Iraq had false pretenses as well?
Not 0.1 percent of the Afghanistan war discussion has anything about that history.
Not much of the discussion about Iran, for that matter, includes 1953 for most Americans, which led to the decades of the Shah. Imagine if Iran had installed a dictator here.
There was no President Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford of Carter - only the Shah of America serving Iran's agenda, and finally overthrown by our Christian right who installed the Moral Majority types to the permanent, unelected ruling of the nation, with a restored democracy with limited powers under them to this day.
For good measure, throw in Iran encouraging a decade-long war as soon as they left with our arch-enemy attacking us with chemical weapons causing millions of casualties. Oh, ya.
Oh, let's be fair to list both sides - a youth group did storm the Iranian embassy when they left, and held 55 or so hostages for a year, and then let them go unharmed.
The only event that actually matters, that Iran cites to this day when talking a new war.
Oh, and Iran has occupied Mexico since 2001, as the world's strongest nuclear power - we have no nukes - in part for the reason it gives them a good base for invading us at some point.
After watching them ignore any international law against aggressive invasion with the Mexico invasion, we might want our own nukes to deter them from invading. They say that's worth war.
We don't hear much about that with most Americans who discuss war with Iran.
And there's not much interest in learning from mistakes in the history of our role with the Afghan government that was trying to do many of the same things we are now.
Would the world - and would we - be better off with what we did in Afghanistan, or had we been friendly to the Afghan government then?
One could argue that the harm to the Soviet Union was worth the cost of the Taliban, perhaps of 9/11, of a decade of war in Afghanistan - but that's a pretty callous calculation.
Saying a country's suffering is 'expendable' as a pawn, or that a 'war against any communist regime is always justified' policy is demanded not to be questioned for any war.
As long as it was said it was against a communist regime that's the end of debate.
and we were totally being "nice" because we didn't drop the gator mines because we were asked not to by our allies. we also had afghan soldiers point guns at our troops for 12 hours because we are "nice." should of shot every afghan soldier in the fucking face involved in stopping our troops and pointing guns at them.
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