Using right-wing logic (if there is such a thing), Ronald Reagan must have hated America since he loved the Taliban. Found at the blog The Immoral Minority.
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Using right-wing logic (if there is such a thing), Ronald Reagan must have hated America since he loved the Taliban. Found at the blog The Immoral Minority.
That link you provided didn't provide much other than a pic of Bristol Palin and some stories on the Tea Party stat breakdown. Perhaps you meant to be more specific on how this ties in to Reagan's support NOT of the Taliban per se (they didn't actually exist in the format of now) which btw was also a policy in this instance supported by the vast majority of Democrats at the time. It is with historical revisionism that it's now fashionable to proclaim Reagan built the "Taliban" up. The reality is that we didn't need to train what was then the Mujahadeen in their fight against some really gruesome imperial ambitions from the Soviets. There were at the time strategic and highly justifiable ideological reasons why it was better to support the Mujahadeen as a whole rather than the sadistic Najibullah puppet state the Soviets tried to install. Were some of these Muj types brutal? Yes. Were they on par with the USSR's use of bombs that looked like toys used to maim Afghan children. Ummm. NO sir.
ReplyDeleteAs liberals like to remind, us, SB, the world is a complex place of fine shades of distinction, and more than one lib at the time also felt (as I did) that the Reagan Docrine of support for certain kinds of home-grown insurgencies against Soviet adventurism was highly justified in these contexts.
I've met some of the Mujahadeen, and most of them in my opinion would not have been on par with Talibanic type belief systems. Some were, like a man named Gulbadin Kekmayer, but the main force didn't seem to be at the time, nor the leaders like Shah Massoud, who was very secular in most of his cultural appraisals of things.
A good and balanced primer on these events that shows the non-Talibanic character of many if not most of these insurgent groups can be found in an excellent book by noted journalist Edward Giradet, called simply Afganistan--the Soviet War.
It is an excellent read. Indeed, if memory serves, the very term "Taliban" does not even show up in his book, and was certainly not a significant group in those days. Should it have even existed. Which I'm not sure it did.
Way to confute things.