Rock wrote:
Also, my personal pet peeve around the subject is to flatten all the Mujahideen into a singular entity and ignore the fact that they were a diverse group of factions who fought it out in a bloody civil war after the end of the Soviet Invasion. Especially annoying is how this is then used to delegitimizate support for Ukraine, ignoring all the other factors that led to the Taliban’s rise.
It's noteworthy, for sure. The U.S. props up the Mujahadeen against the USSR and then they become the Taliban. The US props up Saddam against Iran (who shouted "Death to America" in 1979 after finally throwing out the Shahs that the US had propped up for almost half a century), then the US "unitary executive" pulls what Molly Ivins called The Two Great Lies: Saddam's nonexistent WMDs and Saddam's nonexistent support for 9/11. the US "de–Baathifies" Iraq and fires the Iraqi military, and the soldiers become ISIS.
I met a Vietnamese American today whose parents had to flee Saigon for their lives after the US abandoned them. Oh that reminds me, lest we forget, the US supported the genocidal Khmer Rouge, simply because they were enemies of the Vietnamese government that sent us packing.
Speaking of which, I had a Hmong classmate once. The Hmong never got to form a militia. They just got fucked all the way to hell.
I don't see an equivalence, though. Ukraine is a first–world nation (or geopolitical entity, if you prefer) with a robust economy, extremely high literacy rate, liberal democratic government, a modern standing army, freedom of movement and self–determination for its citizens (all citizens, not just the ones born with dicks), etc., none of which makes a person't life more or less valuable than another's, but supporting Ukraine's resistance is not the same as arming local Afghan warlords (and let's face it, ignorant–ass woman–beating Sharia rednecks) in the practically un–governable mountainous regions of a territory that's effectively a state in name only. The Russian (funny, I almost typed "Soviet invasion," I guess because those two words just go so well together)... The Russian invasion of Ukraine is egregious by any standards, and though the world has no shortage of murderous totalitarian regimes, no small number of which are in bed with the US (Saudi Arabia, for example), what makes this war different is how all signals suggest Putin has no intention of stopping there. He's playing old–fashioned "winner takes all" military expansionism. By contrast, nobody is worried that the Myannmar Junta will spread to dominate East Asia, or that the Sudanese government will go on to oppress all of North Africa or the Mediterranean, or even that the Saudis have any such expansionist ambitions. But Putin seems very willing and capable of continuing a campaign to retake all former USSR territory, the vast majority of whom have made it very clear they didn't like Russian rule the first time and don't want it again.