September 16, 2001

9:51 PM

The Cost of an Afghan 'Victory'an article from 1999 asks Did the founders of US policy in Afghanistan during the Carter Administration (1977-1981) realize that in spawning Islamic militancy with the primary aim of defeating the Soviet Union they were risking sowing the seeds of a phenomenon that was likely to acquire a life of its own, spread throughout the Muslim world and threaten US interests?
posted by LeLiLo (3 comments total)

Of course they didn't. Hindsight is always 20/20, particularly when you weren't the one of the ones that had to make the hard decisions in the first place. It's also quite a bit of a stretch to say that the Carter Administration "spawned Islamic militancy," as if it had never existed beforehand.
posted by aaron at 10:11 PM on September 16, 2001

They did intentionally increase "Islamic militancy", regardless of its prior state. For example, "Brzezinski's successors continued his intensive radio campaign (through Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe) to arouse and heighten Islamic consciousness and ethnic nationalism in Central Asia". (from 2nd page)
posted by skyline at 10:45 PM on September 16, 2001

We can't even tell what's going to happen in the next week in the world. We were supposed to predict 20 years in the future?
From a Cold War standpoint, Afghanistan was our one spectacularly effective front against the USSR. Since we're hypothesizing, isn't it possible that the USSR never would have fell without our intervention in Afghanistan? Afghanistan was a huge morass for them, and, since it bordered them, they couldn't realistically abandon it like we did with Vietnam.
Of course, all this really proves is that we don't know, that the world has no rewind button, and we have to go forward from here.
posted by boaz at 11:08 PM on September 16, 2001