Fair cop. I hope you won’t be offended if I harbor grave reservations about the Soviet Union’s having fostered the revolutionaries, though.
You mean, you suspect Soviet agents instigated the revolution? It would be just like them – their duty, in fact, by their lights – but I’ve never encountered the theory before.
I certianly don’t have evidence for it. And most of this thinking is based heavily on what I recall from the time, not reading since then.
And I’m not trying to paint the Soviets as being unilaterally evil. Mistaken, yes. Eager to spread the Revolution, yes. Having done actions that were evil, or resulted in evil happening, sure. But not trying to create misery and deprivation.
At the time, it seemed to me to simply be a continuation of the proxy fights of the Cold War. For which there’s more than enough guilt to go around, no matter where you were.
Agreed. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan could also be compared to American intervention in Vietnam, to defend the South Vietnamese government from rebels at that government’s invitation. Vietnam was not important in itself, except as a battleground in the Cold War.
The American intervention in Iraq, OTOH, cannot be justified as a response to any real global geopolitical threat.
- The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan could also be compared to American intervention in Vietnam*
except that in many ways, things were never better in afghanistan than they were during the Soviet occcupation (certainly for women)–the collateral damage from the ongoing resistance aside…