I read that and it specifically says: <Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by many countries (especially the US), waged a fierce resistance against the invasion.[141] The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets' Vietnam".>
What that means is that the USA supported Osama and co against the USSR and that included against Gorby. It would have been more sensible for Carter to NOT encourage a USSR invasion of Afghanistan by supporting Osama's Islamic Jihad ideology.
Osama was a fellow supporter of the anti-Soviet Afghans, channeling aid from SA to them through Pakistan. He wasn't a US puppet and wasn't even in Afghanistan then much less leading the anti-Soviet campaign.
<To restructure the Soviet economy, Gorbachev announced an agenda of reform, called perestroika. Within two years, however, Gorbachev came to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary.[147] Gorbachev redirected the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector.[147] Many US Soviet experts and administration officials doubted that Gorbachev was serious about winding down the arms race,[148] but the new Soviet leader eventually proved more concerned about reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic condition than fighting the arms race with the West.[66] >
It showed how wrong the USA could be about the most simple things to watch this process. They couldn't even figure out that Gorby wasn't just the same as Stalin and Trotsky and Brezhnev etc.
Gorby realized he couldn't win an arms race with the US. Reagan's willingness to wage an arms race was a necessary component of him reaching that realization.
Support should have gone to Gorby, not Osama. That's pretty obvious, I'd have thought. Making Afghanistan safe for the Taleban against Gorby wasn't the greatest achievement in history.
No, we shouldn't have supported a communist Afghanistan. The Taliban didn't take over immediately after the Soviet withdrawal either. Note that the Taliban wasn't even formed till 1995 and Osama didn't show up there till 1996.
1995 Newly formed Islamic militia, the Taliban, rises to power on promises of peace.
pbs.org
Kuwait was not a country going back a bit. Have a look at the population at the beginning of the 20th century.
The size of the population is irrelevant. It signed a treaty with Britain decades before oil was discovered and before the end of the Ottoman empire.
If Iraq had owned it, it would have made a lot more sense.
Gee, you British empire types really like the idea of redrawing national boundaries. In the case of Iraq, its your guys who drew the boundary after the Ottoman empire dissolved. They didn't include Kuwait in the new nation of Iraq because of the fore-mentioned facts.
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