Once you've compromised on morals and principles, it's over.
It seems unfair to judge his actions in hindsight. A more appropriate question would be whether, given the information he had in the situation he faced, backing the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 80’s was a good decision.
Well, I always thought it was a mistake for Nixon to go to Red China. There is a side of me where I think Reagan did make a mistake in backing the Mujahideen too. I guess we go to remember, the world was different then and we had to act on the information we have and/or play our cards as best as we can. Still looking back, I do wonder if both were a mistake.
Once you've compromised on morals and principles, it's over.
Communists were the bigger enemy so we sided with their enemy. Not too different than siding with Stalin against Hitler.
The US has always been supporting jihadist sunnis. Reagan Presidency was no exception.
No, and even if someone wants to paint a worse case view of it, which won’t be that bad, nothing can compare to the near end of life as we know it, in the 1980s.
By 1979 my personal take was that the mid 80s was the big deadline for the USSR, that was when they had to make their attack on the West, or lose a window that could cost them a decade or two to regain.
During my military service which I started again in 1983, to join in Reagan’s global war against the Soviet Union, my serving on the outer fringes of Military Intelligence led me to believe that I had been right in my 1979 assessment that Soviet power, and American weakness, would reach a sweet spot for the Soviets around 1984/85 it was a window where the Soviets had to either jump, or else Reagan’s build up would have time to take hold and fill the hole, costing the Soviets another decade or two.
Nobody anticipated Reagan actually taking them out during his decade.
Nobody was predicting the end of the Soviet Union, instead, they were seen as winning, expanding, and our media was groveling at their feet, even allowing them to influence and veto Hollywood projects.
The mujadideen were fighting the Soviets. It was a case of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
Maybe we should have wiped out the opium poppies that helped fund them afterwards, but that was politically incorrect...
No. It was the right thing to do at the time and we had a clandestine army highly motivated to kill and oust the Soviets , who wanted to build a pipeline from Moscow to Tehran.
We couldn’t foresee the creation of AQ and Crapgahnistan becoming a safe haven.
Then again, safe haven was found for them in Pakistan.
They operate worldwide under the emotions of their cult.
They are all over Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, etc.
It was the right thing to do.
That said, how likely was it the Russians could have crushed the muzzies on their own? True, they were not being PC in waging war on the basturds, but they were not having an easy go of it before we gave the muz Stingers.
A reading of contemporary Russian literature on their war would be interesting if it were not too stultifying.
President Reagan’s biggest blunder was letting the spending triple during his 8 years without vetoes.
Anytime that a Western nation backs islamists is a bad decision just as it was in Kosovo and what is happening right now.
The greatest blunder the West has committed is to allow muslim immigration.
Well, yeah, but he didn’t have a crystal ball.
During the Soviet-Afghan War, all our support went to the local Afghan guerilla movements who were for the most part more nationalist than Islamist, such as Ahmed Shah Massoud. Bin Laden and his fellow foreigners had to rely on Saudi and other Gulf Arab money for their support. In fact, bin Laden admitted to Robert Fisk in a interview that he never received any American support.
No, but the US erred in the aftermath of the soviet withdraw from Afghanistan.
No he did not. It was the disengagement that lead to the rise of the Taliban.
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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
You know it didn’t start with Ronald Reagan right?
Support for the islamist rebels began with Zbignew Brazinsky, under Jimmy Carter admin.
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?