This is in response to this post about how short-sighted 1980s anti-Soviet policy built Al Qaeda. I liked my answer enough to want to repost it here:
In his book The Main Enemy, Milt Bearden talks about his time working with the Mujahadin against the Soviets. Though most of this is couched as a very positive experience -- he's almost gleeful about the destruction they caused in Soviet military units -- he also mentions how he was a little unsettled by the religious extremists. They were the ones who got things done, though, so the support went to them.
American foreign policy has been marked by many instances of dangerously short-term thinking and unrealistic assessment. Afghanistan is a pretty good example of this. The approach taken by Reagan was one of "any means necessary" to damage the Soviets without directly causing a war. To that end, inducing military and political attrition in Afghanistan seems to make sense.
However, the resource and political burden of Afghanistan was always dwarfed by the resource and political burden of simply facing down the United States. Even though we didn't necessarily know we were bleeding the Soviets to death just by forcing them to maintain an unrealistically large standing military (given the Soviet economy), we could calculate the relative costs they had to be incurring from Afghanistan versus their normal standing military. Based on this perspective, it isn't worth it to fund people who area /already/ killing Americans just to cause problems for the Soviets.
Of course, I think there was an extra motivation here, along the lines of "We had our Vietnam, now you fuckers get to have one, too." That, and the frustration of direct military action against the Soviets being unrealistic.
Ported comment:
Bleeding to death...
[info]pqbon
2005-08-04 09:30 pm UTC (link) DeleteFreezeScreen Select
Just remember that while the Soviets were bleeding to death so were we. It took many many years and a economic buble (which popped but didn't yet send as as bad as it was). Remember the recession we had? Remember that it coincided with the end of the cold war and reganomics (even though he is dead I can't bring myself to capitolize his name)? There are more then a few economists who have noted in retrospect how close we came.
The funnything is that it is happening again. Uncontrolled republican spending on everything but social well being, to combat a "war". The problem this time is we can't win by outspending. Hell, if it was that simple we would have already won. This is just going to grind on, and on and start to eat our economy.