innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
- Messages
- 15,087
Helping murder the lawful president of another sovereign state and being "invited" to invade it seems like imperialism to me. But I'm a strict "sovereignist".
At least one mujahedin leader evolved to become a possible unifying and positive leader for afghanistan, who would surely have been far better than any of the foolish marxist afghans who destroyed the country trying to quickly modernize it by force. But he was murdered at a most convenient time.
To be fair I'm not sure that those marxist afghans deserve the adjective fools. With hindsight upon them rests the major portion of the responsibility for the destruction of the country, theirs was the choice of provoking a series of destructive internal and international conflicts that wiser men would have avoided. The worse thing is, they probably thought that they were just emulating the earlier chinese and russian revolutions. And they may have been right. Even the international situation seemed propitious to their intentions at the time: the USA still reeling from the defeat in Vietnam, India more closely aligned with the USSR, Iran hostile to the US, China neutral. The only wild card was Pakistan, and the Indians were pressuring them to such a point that they should have had more to worry about than Afghanistan. But it was that very pressure that threw them into the alliance and intervention that would unmake communist Afghanistan.
If the fight for power takes the form of a violent revolution, do the ends justify the means? That can be legitimately debated over, if one admits that there are always costs, always conflicts, even in not carrying out a revolution (meaning: inaction may be worse than action). But the means are certainly not justified when failure to achieve them is very likely. Afghanistan was one of those cases where a communist revolution (coup, really) became a complete disaster for the country and its population. How easily its authors should have predicted it, I don't know. But considering that most ended up dead I don't think they expected it to turn into a disaster.
At least one mujahedin leader evolved to become a possible unifying and positive leader for afghanistan, who would surely have been far better than any of the foolish marxist afghans who destroyed the country trying to quickly modernize it by force. But he was murdered at a most convenient time.
To be fair I'm not sure that those marxist afghans deserve the adjective fools. With hindsight upon them rests the major portion of the responsibility for the destruction of the country, theirs was the choice of provoking a series of destructive internal and international conflicts that wiser men would have avoided. The worse thing is, they probably thought that they were just emulating the earlier chinese and russian revolutions. And they may have been right. Even the international situation seemed propitious to their intentions at the time: the USA still reeling from the defeat in Vietnam, India more closely aligned with the USSR, Iran hostile to the US, China neutral. The only wild card was Pakistan, and the Indians were pressuring them to such a point that they should have had more to worry about than Afghanistan. But it was that very pressure that threw them into the alliance and intervention that would unmake communist Afghanistan.
If the fight for power takes the form of a violent revolution, do the ends justify the means? That can be legitimately debated over, if one admits that there are always costs, always conflicts, even in not carrying out a revolution (meaning: inaction may be worse than action). But the means are certainly not justified when failure to achieve them is very likely. Afghanistan was one of those cases where a communist revolution (coup, really) became a complete disaster for the country and its population. How easily its authors should have predicted it, I don't know. But considering that most ended up dead I don't think they expected it to turn into a disaster.