Reply #4: Your analysis has some problems

[RZM]

We didn't 'stop Russia from invading Afghanistan' as the Soviets did invade and spent almost a decade there. Also, to claim that the the Soviets were 'rooting out the fundamentalists' is only partially true and misses the larger point. Soviet troops entered to shore up the brutal Afghan Communist regime and also to resolve a nasty internal dispute at the top, which they achieved in a commando raid on the presidential palace in December 1979, killing just about everybody inside, including the President.

The resistance did have a fundamentalist character, but not entirely -- the Afghan Communist government was hated for a lot of reasons by a lot of people, not all of them having to do with religion. It is true that US aid often ended up in the hands of the most fundamentalist Mujahideen group (there were seven main ones), mainly because it was funneled through Pakistan, who cultivated the most fundamentalist group as their proxies/pets, a game they continued to play long after the war ended and are still playing today. You almost seem to be making the argument that the Soviets were 'fighting the good fight' in Afghanistan, which is pretty far from the truth, as the Soviet campaign was widely acknowledged as precipitating a human rights disaster - I've forgotten the exact number, but at times in the 1980s, Afghans constituted a large percentage of the world's raw total of 'displaced persons.'