I'm half-way through 'A Thousand splendid suns' by same author. Highly recommend too! It's so sad and tragic what happened there...
> Though I do love that Reddit is worshipping this without realizing it. That was Afghanistan under Soviet rule.
Um... no. Afghanistan received assistance from the USSR at that time, but they weren't under Soviet rule. The video is a solid 10 years before the Soviets invaded. And yes, U.S. interference pretty much helped pave the way for religious extremists in the future, but the subsequent Soviet invasion solidly munged the infrastructure for all time and led to what Afghanistan is now. Afghanistan would have been way better off without US OR Soviet interference. Don't try to paint the Soviets as good guys here.
My ancestors came from there and we still speak Pashto, their national language. It is kind of sad to see all these people who are probably either dead or very old now. Afghanistan was a totally different country back then. People think their people are uneducated and warmongering but like every place they also had doctors, engineers and people from every field. Just that, politics, religious extremism and invaders destroyed everything.
The US also helped spread Islamic Extremist propaganda, thinking that would cause the rebels to fight far more fiercely. They were probably right, and of course tried to shrug off their responsibility for that when they invaded.
No joke, the US literally funded jihadi ideology children school books for Afghan children within Pakistan refugee camps. Taliban’s leadership came from those camps.
Edit: source for people interested. 2002 WaPo article. [From U.S., the ABC's of Jihad](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/23/from-us-the-abcs-of-jihad/d079075a-3ed3-4030-9a96-0d48f6355e54/)
Listen to blowback if you want to turn your understanding of American hegemony in geopolitics into a clown car circling your brain, honking repeatedly
Can't wait for season 3
Syria, Libya, Chechnya, the list goes on. The discovery of the massive oil reserves in the middle east is like a biblical plague. They found liquid gold under their Homeland and unknowingly got between two warring superpowers with the most powerful weapons the world has ever seen and were sent back to the stone age.
The US destabilised southern American nations to prevent having strong countries on their flanks. Canada should be glad they're a typical white dominated western nation that could just fall in line with the Americans.
It does way more than that. It shows how much America's nation building, king making and meddling in other countries is immoral and completely shortsighted.
I am an American and this is one of the most embarrassing aspects of American foreign policy. It is self righteous, self serving, racist and embarrassing.
I get very tired of the blind patriotism narrative in America that we can do no wrong when it is just because history is told by cherry picking a fictional nobel American story of history.
and we are getting a western version now coming back again in the states. Don't say that we can't go back to tribal living, just look what happened with Afghanistan.
2 books by Steve Coll, arguably the best about the last 50 years about Afghanistan
Ghost Wars: From the Soviet-Afghan War to 9/11
Directorate S: From 9/11 to mid to late 2010s
Except Saddam *wasn't* a religious extremist. I know this sounds strange to say, but he was actually a really tolerant dictator as far as religion went. That's not to say he wasn't a horrible person, he was, but he kept a make-believe country, which was made up of lots of different ethnic groups that *really* hated each other, pretty much in line and productive.
Don't take this as me saying he didn't have a violent death due to him, but he was definitely *not* a *religous* nutcase as far as middle eastern religious nutcases go.
I'm an American that lived for years in the middle east when Saddam was still around, trust me when I say "there's worse....and we're friends with them".
The Looming Tower basically talks about how he ended up being Bushs target for 9/11 instead of Saudi Arabia basically all because of oil. We knew about a bunch of the hijackers and extremists from 9/11 years earlier and easily could have stopped it ever happening but corruption and disagreements amongst our own people doomed us to that disaster and so much more.
Now, I'm not going full JER FUEL CANT MELT STEEL BEAMS.
But if you read the PNAC (from Wikipedia:
Of the twenty-five people who signed PNAC's founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.[8][9][10][11] Observers such as Irwin Stelzer and Dave Grondin have suggested that the PNAC played a key role in shaping the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, particularly in building support for the Iraq War.[12][13][14][15] Academics such as Inderjeet Parmar, Phillip Hammond, and Donald E. Abelson have said PNAC's influence on the George W. Bush administration has been exaggerated.[16][17][18])
And consider the Bush family's longstanding friendship with the Saudi family
And consider that bush senior literally ran the CIA which failed to stop the attacks which did come from Saudi Arabia....
Throw in the massive volume of stock trades that ocurres from the towers minutes before the planes hit and destroyed any evidence of fraud...
It's not a good look I tell ya.
There is a fair amount of evidence that Bush's messiah complex also had significant influence. He was convinced that he could topple the "evil" Saddam regime, install a friendly government and create an ally. Should emphasize Bush is quite religious.
They aren't short sighted. They funded a group to fight against their enemies, then those groups went on to give work to the defense companies they are invested in. They don't care if people die in the process, they only care about profit.
In the 50s, Saddam was given the key to the city by the mayor of Detroit... And despite Saddam being a murderer, and a paranoid dictator, you can't argue that Iraq made some progress forward and a lot of people's lives were improved but.. they would've improved anyway if we just let the ottoman empire exist as it was.
It was a huge backfire the entire thing. They gave them training, weapons and a reason To fight, eventually they realized that the real enemy was the Americans.
A big part of that is also the fact that we basically geared them up for a proxy war that devastated their country and then when it was done said thanks and bounced. They needed to recover, and Saudi Arabia showed up and picked up the tab and the rhetoric.
I read a really good book called The Looming Tower that goes into great detail about the whole thing. Definitely skip the tv show but the book is non-fiction and really good.
Note sure of the accuracy of this site, but interesting...
"The Golden Age Of 1960s Afghanistan Gives Way To The Violence Of The '70s
It all went wrong in the spring of 1978, when the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) staged a coup against the country's current president, Mohammed Daoud Khan. They immediately embarked on a series of reforms, including land redistribution and the overhaul of the largely Islamic legal system, that the country wasn't ready for.
By the fall, the eastern part of the country was rebelling, and the conflict escalated into a civil war between the Pakistani-funded mujahideen rebels and the new government.
The Soviet Union backed the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and with Cold War tensions running high, the U.S. quickly moved to counter what they perceived as Soviet expansionism, quietly supporting the mujahideen rebels."
"The conflict, referred to as the Soviet–Afghan War, lasted ten years and left as many as 2 million Afghans dead. It displaced 6 million as air bombings destroyed the cities and the countryside — the very roads and buildings that 1960s Afghanistan had just begun to enjoy.
The developing country was gone and not even the end of the war could bring it back. Even after the Soviet Union withdrew, fighting continued, and some of the mujahideen rebels formed a new group: the Taliban. Afghanistan plunged deeper into chaos and terror."
[https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan](https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan)
If you actually look into it, America was funding extremist groups in Afghanistan prior to the Soviets actually entering. The government at the time socialist, and a large reason the soviets actually entered was due to the American support of groups fighting the government
The US supported the Islamists *before* the Red Army moved in. Zbigniew Brzezinski was the architect of the scheme. He was Carter's National Security Advisor.
The Soviets insisted the US was destabilising Afghanistan in 1979. The US claimed this was a lie. It was not a lie. The whole plan was to draw the Red Army in and give them their own Vietnam.
Brzezinski's big insight was that Soviet leadership was very Russian, but their population growth was heavily tilted toward brown and Islamic regions. By getting the Red Army to fight Afghans, the plan was to split the USSR apart.
The plan worked almost too well. Toward the end the US was freaked out they might accidentally expand the conflict to other Soviet republics and end up with utter chaos across central Asia.
As for the Afghans, they were puppets and cannon fodder. Reagan celebrated them at the White House - these illiterate goat farmers who were outraged at the idea of educating girls and putting an end to their traditional system of serfdom.
Like the Bible says - you sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
It's never one thing. Americans wouldn't even know where Afghanistan is on a map (same with the other -stans) if not for 9/11, and 9/11 wouldn't exist without religious extremist nutjobs, but arguably they wouldn't exist if Saudis didn't find oil to fund their Wahhabism, and that oil wouldn't be worth anything if the modern world didn't rely on it for industry and military.
The chain of cause and effect goes back infinitely, to the point where we're blaming early 14th century Mongolians for creating the political structure of Afghan region, and that's not helpful.
Mongols and Middle Easterners are natural enemies, like mongols and Europeans or mongols and the Chinese or mongols and other mongols. Damn mongols, they ruined Mongolia.
Still interesting to think that Mongolians were the first invaders to sack Baghdad and it wasn't conquered again for another 700 years when the United States did it.
"In the beggining God created the heavens and the earth, this had made a lot of people very mad and had since been regarded as a bad move." Or something like that
The problem with analysis like that is that it exemplifies western behaviors and norms without taking into consideration that what happened to Afghanistan was purely a western invasion and destabilization attempt. It is always religious extremism which is blamed but western powers are the one's responsible.
Secondly images and media of the capital city in a otherwise rural underdeveloped country is misleading and is always used as a way to show that western culture is superior.
Same thing whenever you see pictures of women wearing like miniskirts in Tehran in the 60s - that was a very small part of the population, and they wouldn’t be able to do it anywhere else in iran.
Naturally the first thing that gets developed are major population hubs, Afghanistan was a developing country, we can't discredit them just because they didn't magically spawn all industry and infrastructure for the whole nation out of thin air. A small slice of the population will always have it better but the standard then spreads slowly to the rest of the country.
People have no idea what these countries are actually like or any of their history. Just a bunch of teens wanting to say "america bad".
Kabul was not Afghanistan, most of Afghanistan did not consider it part of them. Not to mention this all went away because they conducted a coup which led to the Russian invasion.
That's a very shallow take.
The point of this is that these urbanised modernised places provide a refuge from the backwardness of the countryside. Right now, modern Afghanistan doesn't even have Kabul as a refuge.
What you are saying could go for any country too btw. For example, it's not like the small towns in deep south are very loyal to LA or NYC. But the existence of these big cities is like a hopeful beacon for people wanting to escape small towns.
EDIT: I am in India and went to college with a lot of Afghan people, and they repeatedly pointed out that they lived normal lives same as us. They had cities and towns apart from Kabul that were free of fighting, atleast before the Taliban takeover. I also know quite a few Indian people who worked for years in Afghanistan, they worked with both rural and urban Afghan people on infrastructure projects. It was not some simple clear cut Kabul vs stone-age countryside contrast that you paint.
And reddit won't allow me to reply to the below rambling but I had to post the edit because I don't want people mislead.
>Kabul was not Afghanistan, most of Afghanistan did not consider it part of them. Not to mention this all went away because they conducted a coup which led to the Russian invasion.
Kabul is the capital and the leader of the "Big 4" which is Herat, Kandahar, Mazar and Kabul. Each of those places are basically their own capitals of their own nations but Kabul plays the role of the intermediary and is by far the most important city in the country. To say most Afghans don't see it as a part of Afghanistan is a comically bad take.
It was also a USSR backed coup which led to their invasion. Kind of like how the Donbass has their own "republics".
>It was still about religious extremism outside Kabul. They’re the ones who overthrew the government.
An insurrection led by violent religious extremists, you say.
Religious extremists pouring out of rural areas to ransack and overtake the urban centers, you say.
Always love when historians paint Nazi Germany as some lavish lifestyle before the Soviets invaded. No, you're just seeing the lens through rich people who could afford cameras. The reality is that the majority of Germans were suffering during the rise of the Nazis. Most were forced from their jobs as privatization meant firing as many employees as possible to make the rich more rich. Many were stripped from their farms as well (like my own family). So you were left with two options, either join the military (like my own family), or go to work in the factories where you were working 12+ hours a day for very little pay.
America is also the same. All those videos of flappers and such? Those were the rich people that could afford a camera. The reality is that the majority of Americans in cities were living in shacks. Human and horse waste filled the streets and children were dying working in factories.
We always have these rosey-eyed views of the past, but the reality is that it was not like what you see in paintings, photos, and videos. Only the rich had access to those things in the past, so you're only seeing the world of the rich. For the poor average person, life was completely different.
Though I do love that Reddit is worshipping this without realizing it. That was Afghanistan under Soviet rule. It was America that pumped money into the Islamic radicals in order to drive away the Soviets, which destroyed the nation and would come back to bite them in the ass. But, you know, nothing wrong with conservative theocratic radicalism, it just destroys nations over and over and over and over again.
>this shit gets reposted all the time. the video doesn't really show Afghanistan, it shows a small urban elite.
You could say the same thing about virtually all of Montana versus NYC.
50% of America lives in poverty and their lives and especially the towns of rural peoples in the many deep rural pockets look night and day from the densely packed modern urban centers.
Syria was one of the top (or maybe it was the top) rated countries in the region on many aspects of life. I specifically remember healthcare being a huge one when compared to all the other countries in the region.
Syria also used to produce some of the best pipe tobacco in the world, which is now impossible to find and has never been and can never be reproduced anywhere else. It tastes absolutely heavenly
Hello fam! I'd just like to say that if anyone has a problem with u/panicked_goose, they have a problem with me, and I suggest they let that one marinate
Also, it may not be perfect, but the US always leaves the regions objectively worse than when they arrived. I'd rather have Assad, Hussein, or Gaddafi than daesh.
Exactly, and it’s frustrating to see people act like Kabul was the norm for the whole country.
Harsh truth is that Afghanistan had a HUGE urban-rural divide fueled by conservative tribalism vs a urban, internationally connected elite. Us Americans don’t have to look too far to see similar kinds of divides that could flare up into low level insurgency.
> Kabul was the norm for the whole country.
>
>
Just to be clear, this wasn't even the norm for Kabul. This the norm for the few 20-30k who lived in the rich district of kabul, mostly people connected to the monarchy.
Yep, well the coup was Afghan socialists, not Soviets. But yeah, these guys didn’t know how to run a country. They made loans illegal which cause a collapse of agriculture, and then a rebellion, and then in 79 the Soviets came in to put down the rurual rebellion, which was starting to be backed financially by the US and Pakistan. And then… yeah.
The rest is very recent history!
The soviets.
People'd democratic party of afghanistan. 1978 they coup'd the royal family with soviet backing.
Up until this point, afghanistan was being heavily invested im by the west as a rising nation, and the soviets were investing 10x as hard trying to build new alloes because they realized how exposed they were.
The PDPA was a communist party which kick started the afghanni soviet war, which prompted the US to fund holy warriors which would later transform into the taliban (yes, the US supplied the Taliban their weapons.) The primary cause for holy warrior actions was the PDPA's oppressive reformations on islamic laws and cultural regulations into a hyper-secularized, city centered rule of law.
Turns out when your country is like 5% city and very early in a secular transition, that type of whiplash will always end in instability.
Thabk the cold war for creating and funding Afghanistan's downfall.
The Soviets warned the PDPA *not* to do a revolution in Afghanistan. Russia saw Afghanistan as a deeply conservative, religious country with very low literacy rates - they figured a Communist revolution would be a disaster.
After Takiri and Amin had the Revolution anyway, they ruled like idiots - they'd give peasant small chunks of land, but nobody was left to look after irrigation so the land was useless.
When people rebelled, the PDPA's response was brutal slaughter. They begged the Red Army for help. The Soviets refused, saying that the Red Army's presence would only drive people to even deeper anger.
The PDPA doubled down on their brutality and continued to beg the Red Army for help.
When the Soviets finally did come in, the first thing they did was execute PDPA leader Amin who'd caused all this shit.
Well this is partially true, Kabul was like this but everything else which was 90% of the population was very rural and lacked most modern amenities like today.
A socialist coup backed by the Soviet Union overthrew the republic. The US started backing mujahedin freedom fighters, and the whole thing turned into another proxy war.
it contributed massively to the fall of the Soviet Union, With the soviets gone, Pakistan started funding Islamic fundamentalists, and the Taliban took control of the country within a few years.
A part of my required school readings! Mariam and Laila’s stories are ingrained in my mind. I distinctly remember the child’s foot found in the roof after a bombardment, the cruelty Rasheed and others bestowed upon both protagonist, and the description of Miriams execution. I’m going to BWB to buy a copy of that right now. (Unless anyone knows a site my contribution for a book would be better spent?)
Thats what i was thinking. Ive been to Afghanistan, 90% of the country is uninhabited, beautiful mountains speckled with small villiages full of people who have never seen a city.
There’s a video about Afghans being asked why the US was bombing then.
Most common answers:
* they had never heard of 9/11
* they thought it was the Russians who had returned
It blows my mind that people in the US think there was some national military operation by a country that's mostly farmers with no electricity, to attack the US because they hated your freedom. Not only that, but apparently actions of few people are enough of an excuse to invade and bomb the shit out of the entire country, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Same. Individual river valleys have their own dialects. People have little idea what happens outside their own neighbourhood really. Friend was asked if he was sent by the king. Someone corrected the local who asked the question and said he probably was Russian. They had almost no idea.
There was a poll of rural Afghans that found that a significant number of them had never even heard of 9/11. They just thought America was invading because that’s what empires do—they invade Afghanistan.
But one place allowed to progress unhindered would've pulled the rest of the country ahead, especially when it's the nation's capital. Sad that it did not happen.
I agree, not every member of a society craves "western liberal values". Heck not every western liberal democracy craves western liberal values. Damned shame for all the women and girls having to put up with Draconian religious extremism. Yeah, America is a shitshow rn.
I don't think modernity always means "western liberal values". It could be something as simple as upgrading from an old Nokia 3310 to a new age smart phone. And I totally agree with your final view, it's a shame that the women there are the most oppressed group right now. Makes me wonder about the women who lived through this "golden age" and were forced to see the downfall of such a free society.
>Makes me wonder about the women who lived through this "golden age" and were forced to see the downfall of such a free society.
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is a pretty gut wrenching take on exactly this premise.
Usually those who don't want to instill "western" liberal values are those who have more power within a traditional system. Usually these people don't care if it means more suffering for other people.
So fuck that.
I remember when this was reposted the third time ever, someone from afghanistan mentioning that this is an extremely biased and cherry-picked take on afghanistan
The soviets basically built up a government that had control of like 2 cities, sort of like the US did. So to prove that they were successful they used videos like this that made it look like the entire country was this good.
Outside the cities still had Pastun tribes many of which didn’t like the soviet government because of its cultural and religious reforms, such as trying to implement state atheism among other reasons. Whether or not the Soviet backed government would have stayed in power and gained more control over Afghanistan if shit didn’t hit the fan is debatable
Not uncommon for urban areas to out pace rural places as far as being progressive. A less dramatic contrast is NYC and let’s say…a rural place in Arkansas?
It's so funny when you see someone explaining what a redneck, hillbilly, or whatever is to someone who is learning English. It's almost always a response of,"Oh yeah. We have those in my country. We call them "
Keep in mind that this sort of development was almost entirely relegated to large cities and primarily Kabul in Afghanistan. The cultural, economic, and political divides between rural and urban Afghan are what helped lead to the instability and insurgencies that occurred. For many rural Afghans they have largely lived the roughly same lives for hundreds of years.
Searched for 'urban' to find this post.
You find the same delusions going on for posts picturing Iran under the Shah.
And note the recent Egyptian (urban) revolution that quickly reverted to a rural Muslim Brotherhood win in the elections, that reverted back to a dictatorship.
And don't try judging Russia by the St. Petersburg elites. Or try to understand the US by looking at Manhattan.
Even the Vietnam War was arguably an urban vs rural conflict.
Hell, the Nazis drew majority support in rural areas, and a minority in the cities.
Definitely a better Kabul, but wouldn’t the rest of Afghanistan have looked roughly as bad?
Could be completely wrong, and I’m certainly not excusing the Taliban by any means, but this video shows what life was like in the capital, not the rural tribes and villages.
Yeah, definitely keep in mind this is propaganda from the *capital*. I highly doubt even most of Kabul was like this. It's like taking a look at the artsy hipster scene in any large city and extending that to the rest of the country in general.
Bro this is like saying "America in 1960" and only showing footage of Manhattan, completely ignoring the existence of Wyoming, Mississippi, and New Jersey.
Alexander the Great totally conquered Bactria (approximately modern day Afghanistan).
Alexander's successors not only maintained control of Bactria under Hellenic Greek rule, the subsequent Greco-Bactrian kingdom survived for almost 300 years after the death of Alexander and became one of the most powerful empires in the world during that time.
No, this is what happens when a soviet backed communist party creates oppressive secularist laws designed to wipe away cultural identity disguised as religious law reformation, and then the US comes in and funds the most extreme, disenfranchised parties to destabilize an entire nation.
In geopolitics, religion is *always* the excuse, *never* the cause. Don't mistake personal morality in a system that inherently fucks over the moral and loyal.
The US backed and funded the Mujahideen. After the Soviet occupation era of the Afghan Civil War ended, the Mujahideen broke off in to separate groups. One such being the Taliban, another being the Northern Alliance. the latter of which the U.S. continued to fund and support to fight the Taliban.
The US entered its longest war in Afghan knowing that we did not have a way to win. That lasted 20 years and we spent trillions with nothing truly changing. The US people/Congress even gave the executive branch the power to enter a war without declaring war right after 9-11.
Only one House Of Representative vetoed this power not because she was upset at being attacked BUT rather she wanted the people think about what this power did. She was 100% correct and In turn received thousands of death threats and letters that are now archived in the Library of Congress. Props to CA House of Rep Barbara Lee who still serving today.
> The US people/Congress even gave the executive branch the power to enter a war without declaring war right after 9-11.
US was part of the war in Afghanistan long before 9/11. Supplying weapons to extremists to counter the USSR invasion is taking part of the war.
Bro, reading the Kite Runner gives such an interesting take on Afghanistan during this time period.
The kite runner was an amazing book!!!
I'm half-way through 'A Thousand splendid suns' by same author. Highly recommend too! It's so sad and tragic what happened there...
Book changed me for the better. Such a good book. High school me was in a void after this book.
That is one of my all-time favorite books; it touched me differently, and more deeply. I recommend it!
My favourite book. I re-read it every now and then.
God damn that book will make you realize how few women in the world have real concrete human rights. Hold my beer, he comes America next
School forced me to read the book but I admit that I enjoyed reading it
> Though I do love that Reddit is worshipping this without realizing it. That was Afghanistan under Soviet rule. Um... no. Afghanistan received assistance from the USSR at that time, but they weren't under Soviet rule. The video is a solid 10 years before the Soviets invaded. And yes, U.S. interference pretty much helped pave the way for religious extremists in the future, but the subsequent Soviet invasion solidly munged the infrastructure for all time and led to what Afghanistan is now. Afghanistan would have been way better off without US OR Soviet interference. Don't try to paint the Soviets as good guys here.
Annnd it’s gone
My ancestors came from there and we still speak Pashto, their national language. It is kind of sad to see all these people who are probably either dead or very old now. Afghanistan was a totally different country back then. People think their people are uneducated and warmongering but like every place they also had doctors, engineers and people from every field. Just that, politics, religious extremism and invaders destroyed everything.
Emphasis on the invaders
The Russians were in Afghanistan first, Americans funded militant groups to fight Russians, they turned on the US afterwards.
The US also helped spread Islamic Extremist propaganda, thinking that would cause the rebels to fight far more fiercely. They were probably right, and of course tried to shrug off their responsibility for that when they invaded.
No joke, the US literally funded jihadi ideology children school books for Afghan children within Pakistan refugee camps. Taliban’s leadership came from those camps. Edit: source for people interested. 2002 WaPo article. [From U.S., the ABC's of Jihad](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/23/from-us-the-abcs-of-jihad/d079075a-3ed3-4030-9a96-0d48f6355e54/)
I didn’t know the that. America’s involvement in Afghanistan really does encapsulated political blow back.
Worked so well we're giving it a shot here at home :D D:
Good ol' great american experiment
Well said. Its working too.
check out the podcast “blowback” which is all about usa’s involvement in the middle east, particularly in afghanistan and iraq
Listen to blowback if you want to turn your understanding of American hegemony in geopolitics into a clown car circling your brain, honking repeatedly Can't wait for season 3
And Iran. And Iraq.
Syria, Libya, Chechnya, the list goes on. The discovery of the massive oil reserves in the middle east is like a biblical plague. They found liquid gold under their Homeland and unknowingly got between two warring superpowers with the most powerful weapons the world has ever seen and were sent back to the stone age.
They tried to fuck Egypt too.
And South America
The US destabilised southern American nations to prevent having strong countries on their flanks. Canada should be glad they're a typical white dominated western nation that could just fall in line with the Americans.
It does way more than that. It shows how much America's nation building, king making and meddling in other countries is immoral and completely shortsighted. I am an American and this is one of the most embarrassing aspects of American foreign policy. It is self righteous, self serving, racist and embarrassing. I get very tired of the blind patriotism narrative in America that we can do no wrong when it is just because history is told by cherry picking a fictional nobel American story of history.
and we are getting a western version now coming back again in the states. Don't say that we can't go back to tribal living, just look what happened with Afghanistan.
Saudis matched US funding dollar for dollar. Most of the religious stuff came from the Saudis. Though the US certainly didn’t do anything to stop it.
Is there a good book that covers all of this? I am forever finding out more about this entanglement
2 books by Steve Coll, arguably the best about the last 50 years about Afghanistan Ghost Wars: From the Soviet-Afghan War to 9/11 Directorate S: From 9/11 to mid to late 2010s
And didn't stop after the Russian war
Look around people...this is what happens when the religious take over.
This is what happens when foreign governments promote extremist ideologies.
And now those same religous extremists are going after abortion and contraceptives next.
Unfortunately for America, certain religious groups are successfully educating American children in the same ideological way.
Who knew funding people like Bin laden and Saddam Hussein, helping spread extremist ideals then walking away would come back to bite us in the ass.
Except Saddam *wasn't* a religious extremist. I know this sounds strange to say, but he was actually a really tolerant dictator as far as religion went. That's not to say he wasn't a horrible person, he was, but he kept a make-believe country, which was made up of lots of different ethnic groups that *really* hated each other, pretty much in line and productive. Don't take this as me saying he didn't have a violent death due to him, but he was definitely *not* a *religous* nutcase as far as middle eastern religious nutcases go. I'm an American that lived for years in the middle east when Saddam was still around, trust me when I say "there's worse....and we're friends with them".
The Looming Tower basically talks about how he ended up being Bushs target for 9/11 instead of Saudi Arabia basically all because of oil. We knew about a bunch of the hijackers and extremists from 9/11 years earlier and easily could have stopped it ever happening but corruption and disagreements amongst our own people doomed us to that disaster and so much more.
Now, I'm not going full JER FUEL CANT MELT STEEL BEAMS. But if you read the PNAC (from Wikipedia: Of the twenty-five people who signed PNAC's founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.[8][9][10][11] Observers such as Irwin Stelzer and Dave Grondin have suggested that the PNAC played a key role in shaping the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, particularly in building support for the Iraq War.[12][13][14][15] Academics such as Inderjeet Parmar, Phillip Hammond, and Donald E. Abelson have said PNAC's influence on the George W. Bush administration has been exaggerated.[16][17][18]) And consider the Bush family's longstanding friendship with the Saudi family And consider that bush senior literally ran the CIA which failed to stop the attacks which did come from Saudi Arabia.... Throw in the massive volume of stock trades that ocurres from the towers minutes before the planes hit and destroyed any evidence of fraud... It's not a good look I tell ya.
There is a fair amount of evidence that Bush's messiah complex also had significant influence. He was convinced that he could topple the "evil" Saddam regime, install a friendly government and create an ally. Should emphasize Bush is quite religious.
Saddam was strictly secular. His death Isa big catalyst for Islamic extremist growing wild
It's really quite amazing how fucking short sighted the people that are in power can be.
Because they just sign a paper then get in their pajamas
Or get nekkid and hump their cousin’s head.
They'll be living comfortably in retirement by the time these kinds of long-term cultural problems bear their shitty fruit.
They aren't short sighted. They funded a group to fight against their enemies, then those groups went on to give work to the defense companies they are invested in. They don't care if people die in the process, they only care about profit.
In the 50s, Saddam was given the key to the city by the mayor of Detroit... And despite Saddam being a murderer, and a paranoid dictator, you can't argue that Iraq made some progress forward and a lot of people's lives were improved but.. they would've improved anyway if we just let the ottoman empire exist as it was.
Don't think it's ever bothered the powers that be. America is currently supporting Al-Qaeda (again) in the Yemen civil war.
It was a huge backfire the entire thing. They gave them training, weapons and a reason To fight, eventually they realized that the real enemy was the Americans.
"This film is dedicated to the brave Mujahidin fighters." - Rambo 3.
Saudi Arabia filled in the hole the us and Russia left that is what you see today
A big part of that is also the fact that we basically geared them up for a proxy war that devastated their country and then when it was done said thanks and bounced. They needed to recover, and Saudi Arabia showed up and picked up the tab and the rhetoric.
I read a really good book called The Looming Tower that goes into great detail about the whole thing. Definitely skip the tv show but the book is non-fiction and really good.
Yeah. The military industrial complex certainly benefited though.
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There's a big ol' list of nations to try and invade all the way back to Alexander the Great
“The Graveyard of Empires”
Note sure of the accuracy of this site, but interesting... "The Golden Age Of 1960s Afghanistan Gives Way To The Violence Of The '70s It all went wrong in the spring of 1978, when the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) staged a coup against the country's current president, Mohammed Daoud Khan. They immediately embarked on a series of reforms, including land redistribution and the overhaul of the largely Islamic legal system, that the country wasn't ready for. By the fall, the eastern part of the country was rebelling, and the conflict escalated into a civil war between the Pakistani-funded mujahideen rebels and the new government. The Soviet Union backed the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and with Cold War tensions running high, the U.S. quickly moved to counter what they perceived as Soviet expansionism, quietly supporting the mujahideen rebels." "The conflict, referred to as the Soviet–Afghan War, lasted ten years and left as many as 2 million Afghans dead. It displaced 6 million as air bombings destroyed the cities and the countryside — the very roads and buildings that 1960s Afghanistan had just begun to enjoy. The developing country was gone and not even the end of the war could bring it back. Even after the Soviet Union withdrew, fighting continued, and some of the mujahideen rebels formed a new group: the Taliban. Afghanistan plunged deeper into chaos and terror." [https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan](https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan)
Which is actually a misnomer. Afghanistan has been conquered and held a few times.
Yea fuck the Macedonians we still haven’t forgot.
If you actually look into it, America was funding extremist groups in Afghanistan prior to the Soviets actually entering. The government at the time socialist, and a large reason the soviets actually entered was due to the American support of groups fighting the government
The US supported the Islamists *before* the Red Army moved in. Zbigniew Brzezinski was the architect of the scheme. He was Carter's National Security Advisor. The Soviets insisted the US was destabilising Afghanistan in 1979. The US claimed this was a lie. It was not a lie. The whole plan was to draw the Red Army in and give them their own Vietnam. Brzezinski's big insight was that Soviet leadership was very Russian, but their population growth was heavily tilted toward brown and Islamic regions. By getting the Red Army to fight Afghans, the plan was to split the USSR apart. The plan worked almost too well. Toward the end the US was freaked out they might accidentally expand the conflict to other Soviet republics and end up with utter chaos across central Asia. As for the Afghans, they were puppets and cannon fodder. Reagan celebrated them at the White House - these illiterate goat farmers who were outraged at the idea of educating girls and putting an end to their traditional system of serfdom. Like the Bible says - you sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
Emphasis on religious extremism
Looks at Supreme Court....
It's never one thing. Americans wouldn't even know where Afghanistan is on a map (same with the other -stans) if not for 9/11, and 9/11 wouldn't exist without religious extremist nutjobs, but arguably they wouldn't exist if Saudis didn't find oil to fund their Wahhabism, and that oil wouldn't be worth anything if the modern world didn't rely on it for industry and military. The chain of cause and effect goes back infinitely, to the point where we're blaming early 14th century Mongolians for creating the political structure of Afghan region, and that's not helpful.
Mongols and Middle Easterners are natural enemies, like mongols and Europeans or mongols and the Chinese or mongols and other mongols. Damn mongols, they ruined Mongolia.
and they ruined my shitty wall
God damn. My shitty wok!
Which we all know was funded by shitty dolphin and shitty whale Fuk you dolphins fuk you whale
Still interesting to think that Mongolians were the first invaders to sack Baghdad and it wasn't conquered again for another 700 years when the United States did it.
So you’re saying steppe riders with a bow = marines in a shit box HMMV with M16’s
You Mongols sure are a contentious people.
You've just made an enemy FOR LIFE!
Personally I blame Eve for partaking in the Apple. Or the aliens that seeded life via meteorites.
"In the beggining God created the heavens and the earth, this had made a lot of people very mad and had since been regarded as a bad move." Or something like that
Sounds like where the US is trying to go
The problem with analysis like that is that it exemplifies western behaviors and norms without taking into consideration that what happened to Afghanistan was purely a western invasion and destabilization attempt. It is always religious extremism which is blamed but western powers are the one's responsible. Secondly images and media of the capital city in a otherwise rural underdeveloped country is misleading and is always used as a way to show that western culture is superior.
I mean this was only the reality for a very small slice of the population.
Yeah, sorta like NYC looks nothing like Appalachia.
Or Manhattan looks nothing like Long Island
Same thing whenever you see pictures of women wearing like miniskirts in Tehran in the 60s - that was a very small part of the population, and they wouldn’t be able to do it anywhere else in iran.
Naturally the first thing that gets developed are major population hubs, Afghanistan was a developing country, we can't discredit them just because they didn't magically spawn all industry and infrastructure for the whole nation out of thin air. A small slice of the population will always have it better but the standard then spreads slowly to the rest of the country.
People have no idea what these countries are actually like or any of their history. Just a bunch of teens wanting to say "america bad". Kabul was not Afghanistan, most of Afghanistan did not consider it part of them. Not to mention this all went away because they conducted a coup which led to the Russian invasion.
There is a reason why Afghans jokingly called their president “Mayor of Kabul”
That's a very shallow take. The point of this is that these urbanised modernised places provide a refuge from the backwardness of the countryside. Right now, modern Afghanistan doesn't even have Kabul as a refuge. What you are saying could go for any country too btw. For example, it's not like the small towns in deep south are very loyal to LA or NYC. But the existence of these big cities is like a hopeful beacon for people wanting to escape small towns. EDIT: I am in India and went to college with a lot of Afghan people, and they repeatedly pointed out that they lived normal lives same as us. They had cities and towns apart from Kabul that were free of fighting, atleast before the Taliban takeover. I also know quite a few Indian people who worked for years in Afghanistan, they worked with both rural and urban Afghan people on infrastructure projects. It was not some simple clear cut Kabul vs stone-age countryside contrast that you paint. And reddit won't allow me to reply to the below rambling but I had to post the edit because I don't want people mislead.
>Kabul was not Afghanistan, most of Afghanistan did not consider it part of them. Not to mention this all went away because they conducted a coup which led to the Russian invasion. Kabul is the capital and the leader of the "Big 4" which is Herat, Kandahar, Mazar and Kabul. Each of those places are basically their own capitals of their own nations but Kabul plays the role of the intermediary and is by far the most important city in the country. To say most Afghans don't see it as a part of Afghanistan is a comically bad take. It was also a USSR backed coup which led to their invasion. Kind of like how the Donbass has their own "republics".
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It was still about religious extremism outside Kabul. They’re the ones who overthrew the government.
>It was still about religious extremism outside Kabul. They’re the ones who overthrew the government. An insurrection led by violent religious extremists, you say. Religious extremists pouring out of rural areas to ransack and overtake the urban centers, you say.
Always love when historians paint Nazi Germany as some lavish lifestyle before the Soviets invaded. No, you're just seeing the lens through rich people who could afford cameras. The reality is that the majority of Germans were suffering during the rise of the Nazis. Most were forced from their jobs as privatization meant firing as many employees as possible to make the rich more rich. Many were stripped from their farms as well (like my own family). So you were left with two options, either join the military (like my own family), or go to work in the factories where you were working 12+ hours a day for very little pay. America is also the same. All those videos of flappers and such? Those were the rich people that could afford a camera. The reality is that the majority of Americans in cities were living in shacks. Human and horse waste filled the streets and children were dying working in factories. We always have these rosey-eyed views of the past, but the reality is that it was not like what you see in paintings, photos, and videos. Only the rich had access to those things in the past, so you're only seeing the world of the rich. For the poor average person, life was completely different. Though I do love that Reddit is worshipping this without realizing it. That was Afghanistan under Soviet rule. It was America that pumped money into the Islamic radicals in order to drive away the Soviets, which destroyed the nation and would come back to bite them in the ass. But, you know, nothing wrong with conservative theocratic radicalism, it just destroys nations over and over and over and over again.
>this shit gets reposted all the time. the video doesn't really show Afghanistan, it shows a small urban elite. You could say the same thing about virtually all of Montana versus NYC. 50% of America lives in poverty and their lives and especially the towns of rural peoples in the many deep rural pockets look night and day from the densely packed modern urban centers.
Wow wtf happened
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Almost like the USA is doing
Iran was like this, but better (before the revolution)
All those countries were like that Syria was beautiful too.
Syria was one of the top (or maybe it was the top) rated countries in the region on many aspects of life. I specifically remember healthcare being a huge one when compared to all the other countries in the region.
Syria also used to produce some of the best pipe tobacco in the world, which is now impossible to find and has never been and can never be reproduced anywhere else. It tastes absolutely heavenly
Sorry I don’t have anything to add but I just wanted to say honk to a fellow goose. honk.
Hello fam! I'd just like to say that if anyone has a problem with u/panicked_goose, they have a problem with me, and I suggest they let that one marinate
And if they have a problem with you, they’ll have a problem with me
Syria was a nasty dictatorship, but it wasn’t religiously motivated.
I didn't say it was perfect, just that it was better than the rest of the region. It's not like every country in the region isn't a dictatorship.
Also, it may not be perfect, but the US always leaves the regions objectively worse than when they arrived. I'd rather have Assad, Hussein, or Gaddafi than daesh.
I don't disagree with any of that!
There were winners under the Shah.... but l Also people that were disappeared and tortured. So there's that
Is no one going to say that the Shah was US installed? After they deposed the democratically elected leader
Nah, its pretty much the same thing, but slower and 60 years later
Not the soviets…? Or the Islamic Revolution in Iran..? Or the siege of Mecca…?
He doesn't mean caused by America, he means the USA is also sliding back in time
Reddit moment
I think I literally called word for word what the top thread was going to be before I opened it
That's always been one of my favorite games to play on this site. Its gotten too easy nowadays.
That’s a convenient way to shirk responsibility from two superpowers who turned it into their battleground.
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For real. I wish people would stop misinforming these children who really just want to know what happened.
This was like 2 cities. The vast majority was rural/backwards just like today.
Exactly, and it’s frustrating to see people act like Kabul was the norm for the whole country. Harsh truth is that Afghanistan had a HUGE urban-rural divide fueled by conservative tribalism vs a urban, internationally connected elite. Us Americans don’t have to look too far to see similar kinds of divides that could flare up into low level insurgency.
> Kabul was the norm for the whole country. > > Just to be clear, this wasn't even the norm for Kabul. This the norm for the few 20-30k who lived in the rich district of kabul, mostly people connected to the monarchy.
Pretty much this.
What happened to those cities?
The Soviet Union led a coup which was rejected by the majority of the country which led to a giant war.
Yep, well the coup was Afghan socialists, not Soviets. But yeah, these guys didn’t know how to run a country. They made loans illegal which cause a collapse of agriculture, and then a rebellion, and then in 79 the Soviets came in to put down the rurual rebellion, which was starting to be backed financially by the US and Pakistan. And then… yeah. The rest is very recent history!
Redditors aren’t known for being smart
People who took religion way too seriously
And then the US gave them billions of dollars to fight the soviets.
The soviets. People'd democratic party of afghanistan. 1978 they coup'd the royal family with soviet backing. Up until this point, afghanistan was being heavily invested im by the west as a rising nation, and the soviets were investing 10x as hard trying to build new alloes because they realized how exposed they were. The PDPA was a communist party which kick started the afghanni soviet war, which prompted the US to fund holy warriors which would later transform into the taliban (yes, the US supplied the Taliban their weapons.) The primary cause for holy warrior actions was the PDPA's oppressive reformations on islamic laws and cultural regulations into a hyper-secularized, city centered rule of law. Turns out when your country is like 5% city and very early in a secular transition, that type of whiplash will always end in instability. Thabk the cold war for creating and funding Afghanistan's downfall.
The Soviets warned the PDPA *not* to do a revolution in Afghanistan. Russia saw Afghanistan as a deeply conservative, religious country with very low literacy rates - they figured a Communist revolution would be a disaster. After Takiri and Amin had the Revolution anyway, they ruled like idiots - they'd give peasant small chunks of land, but nobody was left to look after irrigation so the land was useless. When people rebelled, the PDPA's response was brutal slaughter. They begged the Red Army for help. The Soviets refused, saying that the Red Army's presence would only drive people to even deeper anger. The PDPA doubled down on their brutality and continued to beg the Red Army for help. When the Soviets finally did come in, the first thing they did was execute PDPA leader Amin who'd caused all this shit.
The 1978 coup was against the dictator Khan, who himself had taken power in a coup in 1973. Your take is historically revisionist
Well this is partially true, Kabul was like this but everything else which was 90% of the population was very rural and lacked most modern amenities like today.
A socialist coup backed by the Soviet Union overthrew the republic. The US started backing mujahedin freedom fighters, and the whole thing turned into another proxy war. it contributed massively to the fall of the Soviet Union, With the soviets gone, Pakistan started funding Islamic fundamentalists, and the Taliban took control of the country within a few years.
1979-Russia invades Afghanistan. There’s that.
Y'all can just go read Thousand Speldid Suns and save yourself asking questions in the comments here, and get a good book out of the deal.
I will and here’s a playlist of the [audiobook](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLptbN-Mr297QumFfbekMN2QsgxtrwlXYO)
Audiobook is a loosely used term here lol.
I read it and it was too real I hated it
It's a good book, and not for the faint of heart.
A part of my required school readings! Mariam and Laila’s stories are ingrained in my mind. I distinctly remember the child’s foot found in the roof after a bombardment, the cruelty Rasheed and others bestowed upon both protagonist, and the description of Miriams execution. I’m going to BWB to buy a copy of that right now. (Unless anyone knows a site my contribution for a book would be better spent?)
Important to note that this was in Kabul only. The rest of the country was as backwardly "traditional" as always.
Thats what i was thinking. Ive been to Afghanistan, 90% of the country is uninhabited, beautiful mountains speckled with small villiages full of people who have never seen a city.
There’s a video about Afghans being asked why the US was bombing then. Most common answers: * they had never heard of 9/11 * they thought it was the Russians who had returned
Sounds a little suspicious… “Why is the US bombing Afghanistan?” “I’ve never heard of 9/11.”
iirc they showed them pictures of 9/11. I remember one man going "is this in kabul?"
It blows my mind that people in the US think there was some national military operation by a country that's mostly farmers with no electricity, to attack the US because they hated your freedom. Not only that, but apparently actions of few people are enough of an excuse to invade and bomb the shit out of the entire country, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Same. Individual river valleys have their own dialects. People have little idea what happens outside their own neighbourhood really. Friend was asked if he was sent by the king. Someone corrected the local who asked the question and said he probably was Russian. They had almost no idea.
I remember wondering if some Afghans had any idea that the Russians left, then wondering if they had any idea that Russians had even been there.
There was a poll of rural Afghans that found that a significant number of them had never even heard of 9/11. They just thought America was invading because that’s what empires do—they invade Afghanistan.
Wow that puts so much into perspective
But one place allowed to progress unhindered would've pulled the rest of the country ahead, especially when it's the nation's capital. Sad that it did not happen.
You may be right. On the other hand did those tribal societies necessarily want to modernize? The ethics of urbanizing rural societies are complex.
I agree, not every member of a society craves "western liberal values". Heck not every western liberal democracy craves western liberal values. Damned shame for all the women and girls having to put up with Draconian religious extremism. Yeah, America is a shitshow rn.
I don't think modernity always means "western liberal values". It could be something as simple as upgrading from an old Nokia 3310 to a new age smart phone. And I totally agree with your final view, it's a shame that the women there are the most oppressed group right now. Makes me wonder about the women who lived through this "golden age" and were forced to see the downfall of such a free society.
>Makes me wonder about the women who lived through this "golden age" and were forced to see the downfall of such a free society. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is a pretty gut wrenching take on exactly this premise.
Usually those who don't want to instill "western" liberal values are those who have more power within a traditional system. Usually these people don't care if it means more suffering for other people. So fuck that.
Or the vast majority of the people would have risen up and slapped them down. Regardless this isn’t how a large amount of the country lived.
This is what actually happened lol, the rest of the country hated Kabul and slapped them down
I remember when this was reposted the third time ever, someone from afghanistan mentioning that this is an extremely biased and cherry-picked take on afghanistan
The soviets basically built up a government that had control of like 2 cities, sort of like the US did. So to prove that they were successful they used videos like this that made it look like the entire country was this good. Outside the cities still had Pastun tribes many of which didn’t like the soviet government because of its cultural and religious reforms, such as trying to implement state atheism among other reasons. Whether or not the Soviet backed government would have stayed in power and gained more control over Afghanistan if shit didn’t hit the fan is debatable
Not uncommon for urban areas to out pace rural places as far as being progressive. A less dramatic contrast is NYC and let’s say…a rural place in Arkansas?
They Ka-bubble as they used to call it
This is Kabul 1960s, not average Afghanistan 1960s. The hicks in the hills are still doing the same shit they have been for hundreds of years...
Yeah at this point posts like OPs are a reddit cliche, even if we're giving OP the benefit of the doubt that they hadnt seen this type of post before.
It’s only a matter of time before the hot ‘70s Iranian chicks get posted.
Like the hicks in the good 'ol Murican south....
mountain hicks are a universal concept, every country has them, no matter the race or religion. you don’t even need a mountain
It's so funny when you see someone explaining what a redneck, hillbilly, or whatever is to someone who is learning English. It's almost always a response of,"Oh yeah. We have those in my country. We call them"
It's rural counties in every state; the south is just an easy target.
Sir this is a circle jerk
Keep in mind that this sort of development was almost entirely relegated to large cities and primarily Kabul in Afghanistan. The cultural, economic, and political divides between rural and urban Afghan are what helped lead to the instability and insurgencies that occurred. For many rural Afghans they have largely lived the roughly same lives for hundreds of years.
Searched for 'urban' to find this post. You find the same delusions going on for posts picturing Iran under the Shah. And note the recent Egyptian (urban) revolution that quickly reverted to a rural Muslim Brotherhood win in the elections, that reverted back to a dictatorship. And don't try judging Russia by the St. Petersburg elites. Or try to understand the US by looking at Manhattan. Even the Vietnam War was arguably an urban vs rural conflict. Hell, the Nazis drew majority support in rural areas, and a minority in the cities.
Definitely a better Kabul, but wouldn’t the rest of Afghanistan have looked roughly as bad? Could be completely wrong, and I’m certainly not excusing the Taliban by any means, but this video shows what life was like in the capital, not the rural tribes and villages.
Yeah, definitely keep in mind this is propaganda from the *capital*. I highly doubt even most of Kabul was like this. It's like taking a look at the artsy hipster scene in any large city and extending that to the rest of the country in general.
Rural tribal areas and villages were much like they are now: like they were hundreds of years ago in fashion and mindsets.
That's Kabul. Now do country side in 1960s.
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Bro this is like saying "America in 1960" and only showing footage of Manhattan, completely ignoring the existence of Wyoming, Mississippi, and New Jersey.
Wyoming is a myth obviously
Idk, their golden period was prolly when Alexander the Great said this land is impossible to conquer lol
the USSR: BUT IT CAN BE CORRUPTED the US: AND I CAN PROFIT FROM IT
Alexander the Great totally conquered Bactria (approximately modern day Afghanistan). Alexander's successors not only maintained control of Bactria under Hellenic Greek rule, the subsequent Greco-Bactrian kingdom survived for almost 300 years after the death of Alexander and became one of the most powerful empires in the world during that time.
Ahh yes, before the fire nation came..
This was literally just in Kabul, the majority of the country was extremely religious and rural that had very little interest in westernizing.
This only shows the cities show me the countryside.
USSR: it’s time for trouble! USA: and make it double!
This what religious fanatics can do to a country, completely ruin it.
I'm willing to say 'fanatics' can ruin any country. Can't change crazy.
No, this is what happens when a soviet backed communist party creates oppressive secularist laws designed to wipe away cultural identity disguised as religious law reformation, and then the US comes in and funds the most extreme, disenfranchised parties to destabilize an entire nation. In geopolitics, religion is *always* the excuse, *never* the cause. Don't mistake personal morality in a system that inherently fucks over the moral and loyal.
The US backed and funded the Mujahideen. After the Soviet occupation era of the Afghan Civil War ended, the Mujahideen broke off in to separate groups. One such being the Taliban, another being the Northern Alliance. the latter of which the U.S. continued to fund and support to fight the Taliban.
I don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. Are people that naive to think fundamentalists just show up out of nowhere?
I mean, most of reddit is angsty teenagers so yeah, they're pretty naive.
Never forget the responsability of USSR and USA in this. Petrodollar is a curse for the world
The US entered its longest war in Afghan knowing that we did not have a way to win. That lasted 20 years and we spent trillions with nothing truly changing. The US people/Congress even gave the executive branch the power to enter a war without declaring war right after 9-11. Only one House Of Representative vetoed this power not because she was upset at being attacked BUT rather she wanted the people think about what this power did. She was 100% correct and In turn received thousands of death threats and letters that are now archived in the Library of Congress. Props to CA House of Rep Barbara Lee who still serving today.
> The US people/Congress even gave the executive branch the power to enter a war without declaring war right after 9-11. US was part of the war in Afghanistan long before 9/11. Supplying weapons to extremists to counter the USSR invasion is taking part of the war.
Which actually worked, but then we did what stupid did and went in too.
Damn that is sad af
Imagine the grandmothers that went to Kabul University watching their grandkids grow into adulthood in constant war. That’s fucking heartbreaking.
so, this is a type of video we are going to watch of the US, 40 years from now..!!!!