I remind people that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was very smooth, and the Kabul government they left behind survived for over THREE more years! It survived even after Russian aid stopped. In fact the Afghan government in Kabul survived for nine months even after the Soviet Union itself collapsed!
The Afghan government the Soviets left behind survived despite the fact that the U.S. continued giving military aid to the fanatic Mujahadin “freedom fighter” jihadists — who were an earlier warlord incarnation of the Talaban jihadists.
Besides being arrogant and stupid, most Americans are shamefully ill-informed about this earlier period: Much of the Soviet “invasion” force was made up of soldiers from Afghanistan’s bordering Muslim Central Asian Soviet Republics. They at least understood the culture of Afghanistan, spoke many of its dialects. Their own grandmothers had been much like Muslim country folk, wearing the veil, etc. They helped Afghans build far more roads, schools, hospitals, and educate far more women … than we ever did.
The Soviets, brutal though they could be in war, bureaucratically structured as they were, still helped build up a far stronger, broader, and more secular armed forces than we ever did in Afghanistan. Those Afghans fought hard because they believed in what they were fighting for — even in the provinces. Had the U.S. (under Carter & Reagan) never intervened, the Soviets (under Gorbachev) would never have pulled the plug in Afghanistan. The result would likely have been a big defeat of worldwide Islamic fundamentalism, a tolerable moderate Afghan state, and a situation far better than the horrible one the U.S. brought to Afghanistan in the early 1990s.
Of course the U.S. narrative was all a lie in those days. We ignore our despicable role then. That was all before our Saudi “ally“ Bin Laden (who worked with our CIA in Afghanistan) turned on us and brought us 9/11. Before we commenced our own corrupt MIC version of “nation building.” Let us not forget those earlier days when we were in the “nation destroying” game to satisfy our Cold War obsession to “teach the Russians a lesson” and give them “their own Vietnam.”
Had the Russians or Chinese given the Talaban the billions of dollars and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles we gave the Mujahadin, the U.S. would never have lasted more than a year or two in Afghanistan. We brought our own defeat … on ourselves,