A look back: Soviets leave Afghanistan - February 15, 1989

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[pfitz59]

1. Charlie Wilson's War

We created the Frankenstein. The monster lives.

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2. +1

Unoco's Zalmay Khalilzad made an appearance too, you'll notice.

The top Afghani figure in PNAC (of "new Pearl Harbor" fame), he thought Dubya would install him as president.

But like the late Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi fraudster who thought he'd be installed as president after Saddam's ouster, he thought wrong.

[Rhiannon12866]

3. And I still remember Jimmy Carter's 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott to protest the Soviet invasion...

Which our allies joined...

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4. Ah, yes. Like with so many other problems, there were no good answers for Carter.

It was a little before my time - but I understand it was a topic of hot debate.

One one hand, it was sad for the Olympians who had trained for years.

But on the other, what Brezhnev did was an atrocity - similar to Bush's Iraq invasion.

As president, Carter couldn't just pretend it wasn't happening.

Politically, perhaps he should have - but that's how he governed: without that Karl Rovian obsession with opinion polls that certain future presidents had.

[Rhiannon12866]

7. This sticks in my mind since I visited the USSR in the late 80s

I went with my grandmother and her peace group, she invited me to make up the numbers when her group made the initial trip to their "sister town" in the USSR. They were big on commemorative pins and my friend asked him to bring him one from that Olympics. They were still available, no big surprise.

At that point, Reagan was still in office and he was not a popular figure there, but they thought a lot of President Carter. Under Gorbachev, there was such hope there, but Reagan's policies triggered the hard-liners there which caused them to clamp down on Gorbachev's policies of Perestroika and Glasnost (openness and transparency). *sigh*

[dalton99a]

5. Same scheming asshole:

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6. Good ole Zalmay

The top - and probably only - Afghani in the PNAC (of "new Pearl Harbor" fame).

One wonders how many millions that one pocketed from this 20-year "nation-building experiment."

Enough to build a small nation, I suspect.

Thanks for digging that up, Dalton. There's so much we'll no doubt never know about all this.