KitLily wrote:
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to remember in the Bill Clinton era, the Russians were trying to get rid of the Taliban but didn't have the support to do it.
Gosh.
I keep wrongly assuming that folks know the basics.
It was before Clinton, during the the George Herbert Walker Bush administration (daddy bush, not W.) that the US made its last move in the Cold War.
Funding the Mujahadeen ...the native afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The occupiers were trying to prop up a Soviet puppet government in Kabul. We gave them stinger missiles. We did it to stick it to the USSR and to pin them down into a quagmire (do Vietnam in reverse on them).
It worked. The Mujahadeen drove the Soviets out. It weaken the USSR. Became one of the thousand cuts that caused the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. Which ended around 1990.
By the time Clinton took over the cold war and the Soviet Union were both history.
The Taliban became the dominant faction of the Mujahadeen and took over. And their allies, the international Islamist force of Al Queda was allowed sanctuary in Afghanistan with Ben Laden as Al Queda's leader.
Then in 2001...Al Queda sent members to the US to fly planes into skyscrapers etc.
Thats why above I said that both Russia and the US had successive quagmires in Afghanistan. And why I ...fantasize about ISIS doing a 9-11 on China...so China can have the fun of occupying Afghanistan too!
Last edited by naturalplastic on 05 Dec 2023, 3:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.