In comments Wednesday, President Trump caused a substantial stir in
noting the Soviet Union’s collapse in the wake of their disastrous war
in Afghanistan. This caused a flurry of backlash in the media
questioning the historical accuracy of the statement.
Trump said that the Soviet Union was bankrupted by the Afghan War,
leading an official at the American Enterprise Institute claiming the
cost of the war was “an insignificant portion of the Soviet GDP.”
Of course, the Soviets didn’t literally declare bankruptcy at all, but
their decisive defeat in Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of
their attempts to heavily project power abroad. The not-inconsequential
inherent problems in Communism were also a clear factor, but Afghanistan
was an eye-opener, and sped up the inevitable collapse.
Reporters further faulted Trump for presenting the Soviet War in Afghanistan as being about terrorism.
This is primarily a semantics argument, as the Soviets were presenting
the war as supporting a neighboring Communist state, but involved
fighting Islamist militant groups that aren’t only ideologically similar
to what the US would call a “terrorist” group today, but in many cases
in Afghanistan are literally the exact same “terrorists” that the US has
been fighting in its own failed occupation of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has famously been called the ‘graveyard of empires,’ and
President Trump’s comments tied this sentiment to the fall of the Soviet
empire. And while a lot of the media were attacking him for “endorsing”
the Soviet occupation, the alternative history they’re presenting is
that an open-ended losing occupation is “insignificant” and sustainable.
Naturally they’re presenting this to keep the American War in
Afghanistan going, but it seems that narratively their real problem with
the Soviet occupation was that it ended.
Trump doing good work everyday! God Bless and keep him!
He does float interesting questions to the Empire that the Imperialist party doesn’t even want mentioned.
So now we get Romney who wants to restore the veil.
Romney isn’t POTUS, Late Idi Amin, he’s just a newly elected US Senator. Trump isn’t as stupid as many believe he is .. if he were, he’d have never been able to run Real Estate and Casino as their CEO.
As a freshman Senator, Mittens doesn’t hold enough clout to undermine Trump’s agenda .. Trump’s going to withdraw 7,000 US troops from Afghanistan, on top of withdrawing 2,000 from Syria, whether Mittens likes it or not.
Well, gotta admit, spanky knows bankruptcy.
Maybe write to your elected reps and revoke all bankruptcy rules and regulations?
I would, but bankruptcy is too important to the health insurance industry.
I loath the Cheeto Benito as much as anybody. He tells 20-30 lies a day but this isn’t one of them. This shouldn’t be news, war is expensive, our founders knew it. Is the phrase “graveyard of empires” new?
The warmongers scurry from their nests when anyone threatens their narrative about all those enemies and so few resources to stave them off.
Meanwhile the media willfully ignore that the US has WASTED over $6 trillion fighting the pointless and contrived “war on terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and god knows how many other supposedly sovereign nations.
You’ve got that right, David S. .. the media willfully ignores the fact the US has wasted over $6 trillion fighting the pointless and contrived “war on terror” in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Somalia, etc.
That $6 trillion wasted on those unending wars of aggression worldwide should’ve been used to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure and secure its southern border with Mexico, as well as bringing education levels to those of Japan and some other countries. That’s an awful lot of money to just waste like that.
“…their decisive defeat in Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of their attempts to heavily project power abroad.”
The Soviets were in Afghanistan with the full consent of the internationally recognized government of the country, much like Syria. Only Afghanistan was on the Soviet border and fighting was at risk of spilling over into Russia’s heavily Islamic southern republics. This doesn’t mean that everything the Soviets did was above the line (there was a rather nasty counter-coup), but it is hardly equivalent to “(attempting) to heavily project power abroad.” It was more like brutish though largely defensive upkeep, comparable to America’s equally morally and fiscally bankrupt war on the cartels in Mexico.
The Soviet Union was a menace but it was never an empire. The lion share of Soviet foreign policy was devoted to insuring that the Warsaw Pact remained an adequate buffer to NATO expansion, a brutal effort that proved to be macabrely understandable given NATO’s actions once the Pact disintegrated.