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.
Reagan did the right thing. By defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan (the Stinger missiles turned the tide), he helped really speed up the fall of the Soviet Union.
However, an unexpected result was the unemployment of thousands of Islamic fanatics, who then went to work for whoever paid them, including Bin Laden and his affiliated terrorist groups in other countries.
We may find out that some Arab countries also paid the fanatics to stay away from them, by siccing them on Somalia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, etc.
In Hindsight, did Nixon err in going to China?
It turned out to be a key move in ending the Soviet Union.
No
No. Totally different situation. Russian imperialism was a threat to the United States. That was a fight for survival in the face of an existential danger - a fight that was won.
Obama is consciously abetting terrorism, a variety of which directly threatens this country. It would be like Carter bombing the Shah out of power in favor of the mullahs (which really isn’t too far from what he did, come to think of it).
It didnt start with reagan, It started with Carter
Reagan did do more, undeniably, but it started with Carter
NO!!! Reagan was dismantling the USSR....Afghanistan was merely the vehicle.
No thought necessary. The Soviets were advancing everywhere (Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Afghanistan, Grenada, et al in 1970's alone) and significant communist guerrilla movements were being trained, funded and equipped by the Soviets in Colombia, El Salvador and various other countries around the globe, merely waiting for a moment of weakness to administer the coup de grace. The Soviets caused us 100K dead in Korea and Vietnam, and were responsible for the Communist victory in China that led to those wars. Payback was a long time in coming and nowhere near what they inflicted on us. Every single time I hear of a Muslim terror attack in Russia, I smile, because of the butcher's bill they made us, and the countries they converted to Communism, pay - death tolls that amounted to tens of millions dead. I suspect animus regarding what the Russians did during the Cold War informs the kinds of decisions older GOP pols are making about Syria - the thinking here is that these evil and bloodthirsty scumbags don't get to have a say.