The Soviet Union Was Right!

The film seems a hack of many US Vietnam films but the comments show why I hate Americans when they open their mouths to say anything, and do almost anything for the sake of stupidty. As they Americans most often deal with the devil to pay Peter and Paul, then have their stock brokers rob Peter and Paul to pay the devil, by talking all too cleverly while eating the cake they then greedily want to keep as that cake also.

By saying "Back in the 1980's, when U.S. troops who would later die fighting in Afghanistan were just innocent little babies, the U.S.S.R. was fighting radical Islamists - *** I believe things would be ten times better for the U.S.A. because I have no doubt the beast that was the Soviet Union would have easily run over Afghanistan if the U.S. did not send the Afghans modern weapons." you just prove that American are brainless or brainwashed trash that believes almost any thing without any sense of complication that involves real principles.

Frankly if the Russians destroyed Afganistan and the Americans did not help Islamic extremists Americans would not have died in vain doing it for them, for frankly Afghanistan would have been better as Soviet which thirty years later could have been selling western tourists shish-a-barbi rather than being corrupted by western politicians in support of the great western military industrial complex.

Who is to say that the CCCP would not have reformed itself, and needed the US, as the US can't reform itself in the gridlock it exists for god's and life's but sows the seeds of the dragons of dissent to live in another thousand years in war which can be avoided.

Andrew Stergiou
Altoona, Pa 16602
*beep*
©opyright 2011 Andrew Stergiou

Dear OP, no one asked for USSR's *help*. They had a puppet Afghan leader installed and wanted Afghanistan for its natural resources. How would you like it if a Muslim country decided to attack and rule America simply because they dont like the way you are living? Wouldnt you fight back???

Please dont spread lies and hate about a country and its religion.

No, I simply disagree with your assertion.

The former Soviet Union may have indeed wanted to upgrade civilization in Afghanistan, but the means to an end, which would have been to serve as a subject puppet nation, of the Soviet empire.

America has never wanted to permanently occupy Afghanistan. We kept making that clear to the Afghan people since 2002. America hoped to give the Afghans an excellent opportunity to upgrade and improve their country, post-Taliban, to a country modernized with infrastructure, health, better food, human rights, and equal rights for women. But clearly to this American, me, in this year 2012, despite American motivations, Afghans see Americans as just another white-skinned group of invaders speaking a foreign language, trying to impose their will upon them. It is tragic. It is a cause for sorrow because Americans truly wanted the best for Afghanistan and its people. Yes, I admit that had this experiment succeeded, a modernized Afghanistan would be friendly, it was hoped, to the West and America. But if Afghans prefer a life resembling that of their Golden Age, the year, 1000 AD, and to be ruled by despots, that women should remain disposable property, then there is little else we Americans can do at this point but to make Afghans happy by evacuating their country asap. In the short term, this will reign in chaos and destruction. But it is something that the long history of Afghanistan has conditioned their people to adapt to and eventually some kind of order will come out of it, but on Afghan terms, not American and not the United Nations.

The only lessons I see here are that Russia and the United States did not understand the lessons of history at all. We didn't even read the lessons of British history in Afghanistan which would have shown Russians and Americans what to do. I won't go into detail, but the lesson out of the three, Anglo-Afghan Wars is to go in strong, armed to the teeth, organized, coordinated, fast; kick butt, destroy the Afghan military, destroy any militia sent out against you, and then as quickly evacuate the country. With the wisdom of hindsight, Americans should have evacuated Afghanistan after completely routing the Taliban. If done that way, a warlord would be running most of the country now, but instead, the prolonged American presence has encouraged the return of the Taliban.

The Mujahideen war wasn't actually about religion. It's true that it was led by fundamentalists, but the root cause of the war was the class struggle. Afghanistan's communist government was nationalizing the country's resources and redistributing land from the big landlords to the peasantry. This infuriated the landlord class, naturally. The rural clergy was intimately tied to the class structure of the Afghan countryside, and so defined the struggle in religious terms (they couldn't very well just say "oh hey guys, the big bad commies want you to have your own land, whereas we want to own all the land for ourselves, so you need to fight for us so we can own all of your land"). Religion was used for rallying purposes but the root causes of the war were material.

It should also be noted that the Afghan communists weren't necessarily anti-Islam, and they were supported by many Muslims.

The US didn't actually shoot itself in the foot in Afghanistan. It did exactly what it wanted to do, attacking a socialist state that represented a threat to US economic, political and military hegemony over the globe. The defeat of Afghanistan's socialist revolution opened the door for American companies to profit from Afghanistan's resources. And since the USSR ended up disappearing too (not because of the war, but nevertheless), it also opened the way to the oil fields of Soviet Central Asia. Plus this so-called "war on terror" gives the US the perfect excuse to wage permanent, ceaseless, never-ending war in country after country, making enormous profits for the American capitalist oligarchy that benefits from wars and their aftermath. No, the US got exactly what it wanted out of Afghanistan. And the Afghan people lost everything.

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Former username Kawada_Shogo

They both sucked and still to this day.Both are ideologies of tyranny. Islam has spread by the sword since the days of Mo. It's who they are and what they do. Communism is an equally barbaric and murderous ideology, having murdered around 100 million people worldwide in the last century. There's probably no counting the victims of islamist warmongers in the 1400 years of their march of savagery. from across the middle east to the Hindu Kush and beyond. Africa and southern Europe even to the Balkans invaded and pillaged,their populations given a simple choice to convert or die never to leave under pain of death.