I was just interseted to know hwat peoples opinions were?
America armed to Viet Minh (essentially the Viet Cong) to fight the french in indo china
America armed the MujaHeddin to fight the russinas and this is where many of the talibans weapons come from.
America should stop trying to police the world by selling guns and missiles to countries in the middle of wars and revolts at the time just because it benifits them, and they should start looking into the future to the consequences of theitr actions
Foresight is easy with hindsight, You could use the same logic to say they never should have joined ww1 or ww2 which helped the world hugely. Its hard to pick when to police the world and when not to without hindsight.
The US will be isolationist again soon. The US will go through another Industrial Revolution. The US will enter another war. The US will fall, just like every great empire.
That is why we study history, as to keep this mistakes from happening.
No politician was aware of the extremist threat that the Mujahideen(read: Taliban) would pose in the future. At the time their main concern was to keep communist Russia from gaining any more power, Afghanistan which was at the time in the middle of a civil war was an easy target for communist ideals. Russians quickly put in a puppet government and prepared to systematically annihilate the Muhjahideen. As this was during the Cold War, the US couldn't risk direct intervention as the risk of a nuclear war was entirely to great, so they pulled another Bay of Pigs, except this time they succeed.
While now one can question all the merits of these decisions, you have to put yourself in the mindset of the period to see the reason for the decision.
On a more serious note, you don't know that the US will fall. - there are underlying reasons for every great fall as well. Considering this, you can then make a judgment.
@sprooschicken It is very easy to make these points now that time has passed. however, im going to assume most the facts that were made ont he first comment is something you learned from a book, website, or teacher. Those facts were probably not form the tongue of the gentlemen making these decisions at the time. Like I said in 2011 it is very easy to state what you did and put america at fault. however, you have no idea what the pros and cons were to each situation and you dont know what was at stake if we did or did not give weapons.
yeah i guess all of that is true but it just seems to me that even with these lessons that should have been learned form vietnam and afghanistan are still not being put into practice
