In hindsight, did Reagan err in backing the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 80s?

[jeltz25]

With all the recent talk about the rebels in Syria being affiliated with AQ, I got to thinking about the "rebels" against the Russians back in the 80s.

Now, AQ didn't exist back then, but they were clearly the forerunners of AQ and many of them grew into AQ and other terrorist movements. If you look back many of the folks the CIA backed back then(working hand in hand with the Wahabbis in Saudi and the ISI in Pakistan) were not exactly the salt of the earth.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but just wondering how folks feel about that now. You could argue that beating the USSR was the bigger issue(although you could also say Iran is the bigger issue here).

The situations seem pretty similar to me in many respects.

[RginTN]

President Reagan’s biggest blunder was letting the spending triple during his 8 years without vetoes.

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If he had Republicans in the house and senate helping him instead of being mush he could have gotten real spending cuts.

[Vendome]

Hezbollah dies or atrophies without the patronage of Iran.

I could support going after Iran but, dear leader hung them guys out and they won’t be agitating again until they get an American President they trust.

[ansel12]

By the way”assessment” meant my personal opinion, my personal “assessment”, nobody was hiring me or paying me to be an expert in the mid and late 1970s.

I used to read like Tom Clancy and was obsessed with that material, I was not surprised during the mid 1980s to learn that I knew a lot and was right, it even raised some suspicious eyebrows on some of the people in the MI Battalion that my unit worked for.

I think Clancy ran into the same problem, “where are you getting this information”?

[RC one]

No, but the US erred in the aftermath of the soviet withdraw from Afghanistan.

[D Rider]

No he did not. It was the disengagement that lead to the rise of the Taliban.

[ConorMacNessa]

And if he erred?

Are we to hold the feet of our greatest President to the fire for an error when the monstrous evil, chicanery and treason of the "present" occupant of 1600 Pa Ave. goes ignored?

I say it's time to stop taking it on the chin from the left-wing apparatchiks in government, academia and the media - take our Nation back from these bastards!

By any means necessary!!

America demands Justice for the Fallen of Benghazi!

Genuflectimus non ad principem sed ad Principem Pacis!

Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. (Isaiah 49:1 KJV)

[ansel12]

Send me back in a time machine and I would tell Reagan to keep it up, I thought it turned out beautifully.

By the way, does anyone remember how many men we used to lose a year during the 1980s?

This is just the active duty.

U.S. Active Duty Military Deaths 1980-2006

1980 .... 2,392
1981 .... 2,380
1982 .... 2,319
1983 .... 2,465
1984 .... 1,999
1985 .... 2,252

[doorgunner69]

I think Clancy ran into the same problem, “where are you getting this information”?

Funny, remember reading years ago on FR about Clancy's "Sum of all Fears" and that a Freeper had corrected some of his blatant errors on nuke design. With a passing knowledge of the designs, I spotted the glitches, but ya never know. Before my time on FR so I missed the thread.

There is a lot out there in open source and not hard to make connections if you are inclined. Some years ago when I had access to classified briefings, it was amusing to see the same or similar info elsewhere (AvWk cough cough).

As time goes on, I do have to be careful to separate what I remember as to where it came from. Some is so outdated it certainly no longer matters, but these days, ya never know who is listening.

Schultz mode on:
I know nothing, nothing!
/Schultz

[entropy12]

What you say is true, but I would have preferred many more spending bill vetoes by the gipper.

[ansel12]

and that a Freeper had corrected some of his blatant errors on nuke design.

That sounds like technical, and I don't know if he bent the info for a novel, but Clancy was investigated, is what I read.

My interest was in grasping the global movement, strategic effects, vast reading and scouring for information about trends, sensing when something was fading, or asserting, who was bluffing, who was panicking, sensing the changes in focus and emphasis.

Remember SDI? Well I don't know anything about that science, but the Soviets did, my interest was in watching them and their reaction to it, they hated it, feared it, despised it.

In War and Peace, when Kutuzov is trying to gauge the battle progress, he isn't interested in the words reported by his lieutenants, but their demeanor.

Kutuzov was trying to read through them, not to hear their words, but to see through their eyes, to see the truth of what they felt was really happening, so that he could sense the waves of the battle, not be fed words.

[Cyropaedia]

You're right, the factions that we tried to support were more nationalist than jihadist.

Massoud was taken out by AQ right before 9/11.

[Mount Athos]

You know it didn’t start with Ronald Reagan right?

Support for the islamist rebels began with Zbignew Brazinsky, under Jimmy Carter admin.

[Hieronymus]

I really like Clancy, and the only places that I spot glitches is when he gets too deeply into religion and economics—which happen to be two fields where I hold degrees. Your observations confirm my sense that he talks a good enough technical game to awe the layman, but, in the end, doesn’t quite know what he is talking about.

[Hieronymus]

I would hold that President Reagan’s biggest blunder was Bush.

[John Valentine]

It started with Carter and Carter’s man Zbignew Brzezinski , not Reagan.

It was all part of the dummass strategy of sending muslim proxies against the Soviet Union’s weakest area, its southern border areas. Worked out better than anyone could have hoped for, right?

[Sherman Logan]

The people we supported, mainly, were the Northern Alliance and other warlords.

The Taliban actually grew out of a popular revolt against their oppression after we left.

The threat posed by Islamists is really pretty minimal, if compared to that by a nuclear-armed USSR. We can squash the Islamists like a bug whenever we’re willing to do so, without any serious military price to pay.

All-out war with USSR: hundreds of millions of permanently dead Americans and possibly the end of civilization or even human life.

All-out war with Islamists or even the Muslim world as a whole: temporarily higher energy prices and economic dislocation.

Gee, which is the greater threat?

The biggest problem of the Afghanistan situation is that it gave the Islamists the delusion that they had defeated the USSR and that US would be next. In actual fact, their sole military asset is our unwillingness to do what it would take to squash them. Which if they become too big an annoyance just might disappear.

[ansel12]

I would hold that President Reagan’s biggest blunder was Bush.

It is for sure the biggest horror to come out of the Reagan legacy, but it is way over my head to know if it was a blunder.

Ronald Reagan was no shoo in, his winning the presidency was itself one of the biggest political events of modern history, something that we never talk about, or deeply analyze, but if he felt that he had to choose Bush, then who knows.

Reagan was an expert politician, he knew things that put a right winger into the White House at a time when the left was in unchallenged power and control of all information, and he destroyed one of the great empires of history, was he right on needing Bush? Who knows.

[Sherman Logan]

Worked out better than anyone could have hoped for, right?

You bet it did.

In 1980 if you had said that in 10 years the USSR would have collapsed and the Cold War would end with effectively zero bloodshed, people would have laughed hysterically. The meme at the time was that we would lose the Cold War or that it would end only with a nuclear exchange.

Comparing the relative risk to US of USSR vs. Islamists: USSR = death. Islamists = sprained ankle.

[21twelve]

“The meme at the time was that we would lose the Cold War or that it would end only with a nuclear exchange.”

I have told my kids more than once how unbelievable it is that there is not the constant threat of all-out nuclear war today. It was just a given growing up. Not to say that Obama might pick at that scab over Syria however.

[Sherman Logan]

There was a non-trivial chance of the USSR taking over the world, or that its attempts to do so would end only in WWIII. Doesn’t anybody remember the claims that only our disarmament could avert Armageddon?

I seriously doubt Russia or China will launch a nuclear exchange out of pique that Syria gets cruise missiled.

I also think it is stupid for us to constantly be poking our nose into ME affairs. Doing so has led to the situation today in Egypt where ALL sides despise us. And for good reason.