I just watched this movie with Tom Hanks over the weekend.
Assuming that most of the movie is based on fact, I couldn’t help but be a little miffed that so much money was funneled into this under handedly.
I used to be somewhat aggravated by the U.S. intervention and meddling in the Middle East. I just couldn’t place it in a positive light whatsoever. But the movie suggests that Russia was just obliterating innocent Afghan civilians.
I think the U.S.'s move to arm these civilians to “fight our enemy for us” seems strategically brilliant. We stop the spread of a potentially dangerous superpower and prevent innocent lives from being lost.
What are your thoughts? Are there any angles to this that I haven’t considered?
What about the militarising an entire generation of Afghanis leaving them ripe for the picking by fundamentalists?
As a strategic move within the broad chess game that was the Cold War it was an unmitigated success, but as a long-term foreign policy it had disastrous consequences.
Not in the least, but there was clearly a significant breadown in relations between the Americans and the Mujahideen once the short-term objective of causing trouble for the Soviets had been achieved. The cynic might say that the Afghans have always been lawless and ungovernable, but if the best we can say is that we used them as pawns then we probably shouldn’t expect much in the way of thanks.
EDIT: Surely it can’t be a coincidence that where Americans intervened during the 1980s to support local groups within the Middle East are the places currently causing them the greatest headaches?