Stratigicon

James Cheatham Former MSgt at U.S. Air Force (1990–2012)1y

Well if you look at their history, it would be the Afghani’s themselves. You go back to the early 1900’s they had a king, mostly progressive married to a progressive woman. He was the one who tried to bring Afghanistan into the modern world, bringing education to the masses (including women, which seems to be a red line for them), roads and so on. He was traveling the world with his wife when he was essentially told to not bother coming home. A general took over from there in the 30’s till he was killed and his son took over. That lasted till the ‘60’s when a democratic government was created. In the ‘70’s a coup occurred, the king was removed and a President declared. Late ‘70’s communists took over invited the Soviets in. Soviets supported the communist government and invaded when it looked like they were going to lose. (They had their version of the domino theory.) Country was pretty much destroyed during that time. Naturally we helped the side that didn’t like the Soviets. Once the Soviets were chased out and communism defeated. Everyone shook hands at a job “well done”. Now there was a power vacuum, the country was in shambles. A few of the factions turned to their friends, the Americans asking for some help, naturally having given them all the freedom they needed we told them “good luck” and happily went along our way, knowing they could take care of themselves. Meantime warlords were fighting amongst themselves for control, and the people turned to a group of Muslim Scholars who were the only ones who were organized enough to actually get things under something resembling control (the Taliban). They in turn, turned to their rich friend Osama Bin Laden for help who helped them build roads, schools and so on. He in turn got a nice base of operations and, well, you know the rest of the story. Don’t get me wrong, we could have helped them out and probably prevented a lot of the later stuff from happening, (Amazing how quickly we want to help out when it involves blowing things up, but not when it comes to building things) but ultimately it was the Afghani’s themselves who chose the routes to where we are today. Heck, they could have saved a lot of the problems over the last 20 years just by handing over bin Laden.