>>The Soviets did not fight the Taliban. It was a war of imperialism and the Taliban came about after the end of the conflict. The warlords that the Soviets fought lost to the Taliban. The warlords can now go back to the way that they lived before, supplying opium to the world.
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>>The Soviet army was made up of conscripts who only wanted to go home. Much like Vietnam, eh?
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>And a big reason the Soviets got beat up as bad as they did ( not all their army were conscripts though as you point out that was a real problem ) was that we had guys like Milt Bearden making sure they ran into some kinds of nasty that were not indigenous to the region.
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>The conventional wisdom prior to October 2001 was that the terrain of Afghanistan and the incapability of a modern military to adapt to the kind of warfare that had been practiced in the region for hundreds of years would lead to the inevitable defeat of a US invasion of Afghanistan. The word 'quagmire' was a favorite. The warnings were dire. No less a military authority than Jeanine Garafalo predicted tens of thousands of body bags.
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>The old KGB vets told Cofer Black we would get beat up bad. (Read Woodward's book for some great quotes from Black on the subject <g>)
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>There very people who warned of the horrible casualty rate we would suffer in both Afghanistan and Iraq before the fact belittled the accomplishment after the fact and said, "Well, yeah, sure it was just [ the Taliban, Saddam Hussein ] ) There seems to be little objectivity in evaluating two very impressive military accompishments. (and I mean from the go to the fall of the regime. I don't defend any of what happened afterward) It is a political thing. I guess there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that it has about as much value as my opining that the Red Sox won because everybody knew all along the other teams were just little leaguers. <s>
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Yeah, the locals really had no use for the Taliban (didn't we help put them in a position to gain power? Did we really care about them until Al Quaeda(sp?)?). I didn't think we'd have much problem routing those guys. We were more like liberators there. But when the bluster turned to 'getting' bin Laden was when I started laughing. I mean these guys couldn't find a trailer trash abortion clinic bomber hiding in the mountains of North Carolina...how were these white boys in shiny black shoes going to find someone hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan?