Without our billions of dollars of military aid for the mujahideen, the Soviets would have crushed the Afghan rebels, meaning no mujahideen victory and no Taliban (whose luminaries, including Mullah Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, were drawn from various mujahideen factions). Would we be better off today if we had stood by and let the Soviets wipe out the Islamists in Afghanistan*, thereby turning Afghanistan into yet another Islam-suppressing Central Asian republic? I happen to think so. We might even be better off if we had let the Soviets overrun Pakistan jointly with India.
The Soviet Union collapsed because it spent between 15 to 17 per cent of national output on defense, not because the Soviets got tired of fighting in Afghanistan and left. Having them ensnared in a poor and populous country like Pakistan would have made their problems worse. It was bad enough having to subsidize Cuba's 10m people, but to subsidize 85m Pakistani religious nuts would have been catastrophic.
* Note that Afghanistan has been a wasteland since antiquity, which is why the Macedonians and Mongols wiped out the defenders who barred their route of march, but did not stick around, choosing to move on to the richer lands of Hindustan (now India and Pakistan). While it was satisfying to have a proxy army inflict tens of thousands of casualties on the Soviets - especially after they did the same to us in Korea and Vietnam - in retrospect, it was a mistake to invigorate Islamists worldwide with a Afghan victory that they then appropriated to claim that Muslims caused the fall of the Soviet Union. Hindsight is 20-20, and Reagan can't really be blamed for aiding devout Muslims he may have regarded (and are in fact) as cousins, given the fact that Islam is basically a Christian heresy.
However, a post-mortem does provide practical lessons for the future. Why aid Islamists who will soon be on the march, as their native lands and economic ideology (socialism) prove unequal to the challenge of feeding them? Why provide close air support to the kind of people who provided material support and manpower to al Qaeda and cheered when the World Trade Towers came down? Pakistan's population in 1980 was 85m. Today, it is 170m. Egypt's population was 16m in 1939. It is 80m today. Each of these societies is growing more Islamist every day, and we want to enable these populations by having them put Hamas clones in power? No, thanks.
The truth is that no one knows what would have happened if the USA had failed to confront Soviet expansionism in South Asia, just like nobody really knows what will happen if the Kadhafi regime falls. Most likely the conflict will only intensify along tribal lines.
The Soviet Union only went broke fighting the Cold War because the United States of America confronted it in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The USA lost over a hundred thousand men fighting proxy wars against the EVIL EMPIRE in the Twentieth Century. Ronald Reagan made Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's Viet Nam. Their failure did not just cost them billions, it also demoralized them. They lost the will to fight.
You suggest that a Soviet victory may have even hastened their collapse. If you are correct then you must also acknowledge that a Soviet victory would not necessarily have prevented the rise of the Taliban in the nineties. For all we know we could have ended up with an even bigger Taliban controlling not only Afghanistan but Pakistan's nukes as well.
US intervention against the Soviets in Afghanistan did NOT lead to the 9-11 attacks on the USA. Osama bin Laden attacked the USA because we sent troops to Arabia to attack Iraq in 1991, and instead of finishing off the enemy, we left him in power to plan and plot his revenge against us, and we left our troops in Arabia to be "the world's policeman."
Allowing Kadhafi to remain in power now would be just as big a mistake as letting Saddam Hussein stay in power after Desert Storm. It would just be plain stupid. We would just have to clean this mess up sooner or later like we had to in Iraq.
If the rebels hate us then we will just kill them too once they are no longer useful to us, just like we are killing them in Afghanistan and Pakistan today. We already have the CIA on the ground to make sure our own agents and assets will be the ones who take over Libya while determining which "rebels" need a bullet in the head. Our intelligence forces must be allowed to infiltrate and subvert such movements in order to make them serve our own purposes. We shall divide, conquer, and divide again.
Thanks to Ronald Reagan, and GOD, there is no longer any Soviet Union around to save Kadhafi from us. We are now knocking off the Kremlin's islamofascist proxies one by one as we take the initiative and advance into our enemy's former sphere of influence. Not even Obama can stop us. As any fool can plainly see, he is clearly not in charge here.
I'm a believer in the McDonald's / Golden Arches theory. There is a reason why Europe has enjoyed it's longest and greatest era of prosperity and peace. Some Muslim nations “have” proven that it is possible to have a more liberal Arab/Muslim (In the traditional sense of the word, not the American perverted meaning) society, i.e. Qatar.
There is no stuffing the genie back into the bottle. They are here, their population is growing, all these issues are intertwined and interconnected even though some try to compartmentalize these issues so they can pretend like as in the Cold War some did that Grenada, Vietnam, Korea, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Cuba, Honduras, the Lit Path in Peru.... are all separate events in time and space. They weren't, obviously.
In a post Cold War era you have less physical restrictions to movement, we live in the day of the cell phone and Internet, global trade and economic dependencies like never before. Our societies are becoming more heterogeneous, technology is always getting cheaper and more available...... Capabilities only available to a hand full years ago today are being mastered by Iran, Pakistan, Libya was a while back making chem weapons and long range missiles........
What you talk about is disengagement, and that's not a feasible alternative. The moochers and side line bystanders who ride under our wings do that, but it's not really an option. It's only an option for them because someone else if forced to take action.