Jstar
i find it laughable and hypocritic that you could ever tell me to use logic....plz go away, the big kids are talking...The point is access, spots to set up missile bases, control over the area, a different front to launch from in case the SHTF, etc. Don't talk like people would just "let" Montana be invaded and be fine with it. That's ridiculous and you know it.
point taken
We wouldn't have had one in Afghanistan anyway. The point of the whole shebang was to keep Russia from placing theirs, while also bleeding them financially. The Afghan government wanted the Soviets to root out its rebels and were already showing no resistance of their own to the reds. I'm sure we all needed another Soviet nation to deal with.
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Belarus
Ukraine
Georgia
Bosnia
Croatia
Serbia
Afganistan
Korea
Vietnam
and this list goes on. All those nations were war zones during the cold war. All those nations suffered because they were used as pawns. You are right, the name of the game was missiles but we were trying to set up our own just like they were. Just cockblocking them isn't enough to declare victory especially since most of those areas are still fighting now. That is my point. The Cold War had no real winner but it certainly has a bunch of losers. You could say we won because the USSR broke up but really that had more to do with the way the soviets treated their "allies" than anything we really did and even after the break up we are still fighting in some of those countries, cleaning up a mess we help make 50 years ago.
So we have millions of lives lost and no official ground gained by either side. In retrospect, knowing that Soviet policy would eventually spur internal revolution and conflict it probably would have been best to let them take those countries, have them waste billions trying to control them and millions of soldiers trying to tame them. The collapse was an inevitable response to a gov't that had stretched itself over too large an area without gaining allies in those areas. Even if they officially captured all those above nations those people wouldn't just be rolling over and donning Soviet outfits, they'd be locked in war, a wasteful costly war to control alot of nothing so that they can place missile silos that they'll never use because even if they did launch one its called "Assured Mutual Destruction" for a reason. They could put missile silos all over the world but it wouldn't change the fact that we have enough missiles to blow up the world multiple times over.
Russia still being shit means we did something right. The fact they aren't the Soviet Union anymore means we did something right. It's funny how basically the year following Russia's withdrawal from Afghanistan the wall came down, isn't it? The Vietnam and Korean wars are unrelated to the middle east entirely. As for Osama, it could have been anyone who started al-Qaeda. And really, the whole goal of al-Qaeda is the complete destruction of anything not Muslim, not just the US. If it wasn't formed because of the US it would have been formed because of Russia's occupation.
Vietnam and Korea are unrelated to the middle east but they are still Cold War conflicts and our involvement in them was to keep the USSR from gaining allies. Not only did we fail miserably but those countries never became russian allies anyway. Just more dick waving. You are right, it could've been anyone but that doesn't mean that we have to help them. No good comes out of helping a terrorist organization. It doesn't work, we've been doing it for hundreds of years. You can't give away nations to terrorist, thats how the Cuban missile crisis came about, the time we really really came close to something happening was because WE gave castro power. Its a system that has repeatedly failed us in the long term, and not just fail but had some serious consequences, why keep doing it.
It's not controlled by terrorists. We have troops there now working with the Afghan government to get rid of what's left of them. Cleaning up the mess maybe? As for Russia being in control, if they had been left alone we would probably still be at each other's necks like we were 20+ years ago. The only nation we have intentionally "brought freedom" to is Iraq, and you can thank Dubya for that. You could also say though that there may not be a South Korea to defend today without our hands in things either.
You talk to any credible military official and he'll tell you that that Afgan is worse than Iraq. We've been fighting a losing battle their for awhile now gaining little ground and losing alot of troops even with the assistance of NATO. The nation is occupied and fortified very heavily by the Taliban and the situation has not gotten better.
And IMO that's as far as it needs to go.
And IMO that's a quick way to destroy everything except the US and the USSR. The whole world is getting shittier and shittier and you can trace most of it back to the Cold War era. We could've done something besides just trying to make things a shitty as possible.
