Strange Famous

I don't believe that there can be any nation in the world who's people have suffered more at the meddling hands of the two super powers than Afghanistan.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

Rekna

Afganastan is actually showing a lot of promise now days. The "meddeling" of the US definatly looks like has placed the Afgans in a better possition then they were prior to the US "meddeling". The potential for Afganastan is great.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,107291,00.html

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exer...292C56C095.htm

This is definatly better then life under the Taliban.

Strange Famous

True, but then again America supported the Taleban and helped de-stabilise a socialist regime in Afghanistan that was friendly to Russia.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

Mojo_PeiPei

We never supported the Taliban. We supported Pakistan/the Mujahdeen, but we never supported the Taliban. The Taliban came into power in 1996, at which point we refused to recognize them as a legitimate government.

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To win a war you must serve no master but your ambition.

Endymon32

America supported the taliban is another of those leftiest lies. We did no such thing.

Rekna

The communism/capitalism puppet wars of the past have always been unfortunate. They went on for many years and many people were hurt because of them. They however are not just the USAs fault but instead both the USSR and USAs fault (there are probably a lot more nations at fault also). I have never agreed with wars fought in the name of stopping communism.

But the whole US funding the Taliban is crap. When they were fighting the Soviets no one could have known the type of nation they would lead but at the time the US had one of 3 choices, stay out (unlikely because of the scare of communism), back the Soviets (even more unlikely) or back the Afganies. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". Tough times call for tough relationships and decisions. Churchill once made a comment saying he would ally with Satin in order to defeat Hitler.

Strange Famous

I completely agree that the state of Afghanistan should be blamed both on Russia and America. And the "enemy of my enemy" policy, gives you people like the Taleban (and Saddam Hussain)

Both Russia and America were playing politics with the fates of entire nations (just as the European colonialist state's did before them) and a lot of the world's problems today can be traced back to that.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

Endymon32

Why not? Did you agree with wars stoping nazism? Their body count was a pittance compared to communism. The nazis killed about 13 million people. The communists killed 125 million. If you agree that stopping Nazis was good, then how can you not agree that stopping communism was better?

Rekna

I agreed to stop Hitler. I can't say for sure if I would agree to stop Nazism because I'm not educated enough in what Nazism means, although i know it isn't simply Hitlerism. With that said communism does not condone killing it however is an unfortunate side effect of the past implimentations of communism.

I have problems with people forcing opinions of others onto them, now i'm not positive on the details of all the puppet wars of the past, but i know that many of them occured because the US wanted to stop a peaceful spread of communsim. I can see going in and defending a nation if they are being attacked but to go in just because a nation wants to be communism is silly. Let them do what they want with the nation and if they mess up either by human rights violations or other frowned upon activites then go in. Think of it this way you can tell a child to not do something over and over and they may or may not listen but in the end they need to learn for themselfs why something is bad.

kiwiman

It's a little different. Noone knew the death counts of communism back then, and essentially America went to war because they were afraid that communism might spread to their shores and take over the government. I'm sure if they had known the full atrocoties of the USSR, they would've done something, but they were just trying to stop communism as an ideal rather than the Soviet Union as a country.

Plus, noone knew the death count of the nazis either until their downfall.

SLM3

n/m

archer2371

Whoo. You actually made sense on that one. I agree with you there, at the time, stuff seems really great and then later on down the road, stuff gets really bad. While America never supported the Taliban, it did leave an environment for it to take over. We just simply didn't take responsibility (if we had started nation building back then, our job might be easier today). Yet, hindsight is 20/10, it would be great if we could look into a crystal ball and see if what we do now will screw something else up, but we can't. However, I do think that we are more wary of the actions that we take today than even we were 10 years ago.

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MSD

Nothing could have been done. Because of the nuclear arms race, the only time it would have been plausible to make an overt assault on the Soviet Unioin would have been before the first Soviet nuclear weapon.

We did covertly support the anti-Soviet Mujahadeen in Pakistan by going through Pakistan in the 1970's and 1980's (Charlie Wilson's War is a great book about this.)

madp

Really??!! Are you <i>sure</i> it was <i>really</i> socialist? If so, how could it possibly have failed?

(rhetorical question)

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