It would have made more sense to stabilize Afghanistan then by backing USSR and Gorby to help ease up.
Cannot agree with this. The Soviets at that time were still in a very dangerous, expansionist mode.
Stalin and Hitler were worth each other, but during WWII we helped Stalin, even though we knew that a victorious USSR would be a pain in the butt to deal with after the war. By the same token, it was the right thing to support the anti-Soviet Afghans.
Besides, all this modern surge in Islamic fundamentalism was still in diapers. If you recall, the main objection against the existence of Israel by people like Nasser and others, all the way into the 1980's, was that Israel was a... Beachhead of European colonialism in the region. A movement like the Muslim Brotherhood was still little more than a fringe radical bunch, capable of occasional attacks, like killing Sadat, but little more.
Gorbachev... yes, in comparison to his predecessors the guy was a breath of fresh air. But he was a committed Communist, and he was never, for one minute, in favor of dissolving the criminal regime in Moscow. For years, he threatened to invade Poland, and later Lithuania, and if he could, he would. He could not do it. He was stretched in Afghanistan, and could not afford another bloodbath in Europe.
Interestingly, if you recall, later there was a coup in Moscow, and some hard liner old timers managed to arrest Gorby and take power. The reason the coup failed was because a group of Special Forces soldiers disobeyed direct orders to kill Yeltsin - along with a long list of pro-reform members of the Parliament. The rest is history - Yeltsin lived, USSR was over. |
