Somewhere in the blizzard of messages here, I think you mentioned a PBS frontline which apparently questioned what has become the conventional wisdom; that the US-CIA trained bin Laden and the mujahedin, supplied the weaponry, guided the conflict against the Russians--and then abandoned Afghanistan, leaving it ultimately to the Taliban and the mess we are in today.
Well, that's the nice, neat simplistic explanation, too simplistic. But it fits the today's fashionable "blowback" thesis, which accuses the US in hindsight for screwing up every US/CIA action abroad from overturning Iran's woolly-headed Mousadek (sp?} in 1953 to today's events.
There's another view on what happened in Afghanistan during those years. But it doesn't fit well with the masochist American the far left who, repeating it over and over again, seem to have imprinted their views as the only truth of what went wrong.
Another interesting view is that the we didn't take as active a part in the conflict as we should have. We did supply considerable weaponry, some of it Russian or Czech, but we left it to Saudi Araiba to finance it heavily and to Pakistan (with an assist from Saudi Arabia) to run it.
So, the argument goes that had we played a stronger, more direct role, things might have turned out differently. But we didn't want to get deeply involved; for one thing, many of our people thought the Russians would actually win.
In any event, I have a hard time buying the conventional wisdom. I've seen too much of it turn out flat wrong. |
