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by balance_factor 3199 days ago
> Russia is said to be currently supplying arms to the taliban. Their goal there (to disrupt american efforts) would be the same as in NK.

And of course, the original supplier of arms to the people who formed the Taliban was the United States. The goal for the US was to arm and empower the Islamic extremists who had launched a jihad against the secular Afghan government, and to disrupt Russian efforts to support it.
3 comments
kharms 3199 days ago
I'm quite sure that the US goal was not to arm Islamic extremists and topple the Afghan government, but rather to arm the resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That they ended up being Islamic extremists was besides the point.
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skrebbel 3199 days ago
So "yeah we tried to arm the rebels but we didn't realize that they were extremist nutcases until they were swimming in rifles and rocket launchers"

You aren't really improving my confidence in American military strategy.

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jwhitlark 3199 days ago
Trading the Soviet Union for the Taliban was like trading stage 4 cancer for a bad cold. Even if one could perfectly foresee the results, it would have been criminally negligent to fail to do so. Trading an existential threat for a non-existential one is always a good deal.
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majewsky 3199 days ago
Wait, are we talking about the Taliban or ISIS?
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rgbrenner 3199 days ago
The US definitely interfered with Russia during that war.. but that is irrelevant to the question of NK. No one questions whether the US will intervene in the Korean conflict, and which side they'll be on.

The question is: would russia (who has mostly stayed out of the NK issue) intervene on NKs side. I'm saying they would for all of the reasons I listed. And their willingness to intervene in a conflict they have little geopolitical interested in (compared to NK), is an indication of their willingness to do so in other conflicts.

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thehardsphere 3199 days ago
The US did not arm the Taliban; the people who formed it were too young to fight in the Afghan war against the Soviets.
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rhino369 3199 days ago
Some of the Mujahideen armed by the US eventually joined the Taliban, but only after the Taliban became the main power in Afghanistan.

But large parts of the Mujahideen were actually part of the Northern Alliance that fought against the Taliban until liberation in 2002.

The CIA reactivated many of the same contacts from the Soviet war in 2001 to help them against the Taliban.

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guilhas 3199 days ago
Hillary Clinton says otherwise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqn0bm4E9yw

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