stockstradr: You’ve trotted out Brzezinski’s claims before. Unfortunately, he’s at odds with some of the facts, especially concerning his “foresight” in “trapping” the Soviets in a Vietnam-style debacle in Afghanistan.

The Soviet “invasion” in September 1979 was a fait accompli. They were responding to their “friendship treaty” of the previous year with Afghanistan. The treaty allowed for Soviet intervention if the Afghans asked, and they did following the internal strife that had accompanied the PDPA takeover in 1978.

The PDPA were Marxists and pro-Soviet and there were 400 Soviet advisers in-country well in advance of the Soviet invasion. The PDPA were in the midst of instituting Soviet-style reforms when what became the Mujahideen rose up in protest.

The US did recognize the opportunity to attack the Soviets by proxy and enlisted the help of the Saudis (among others) to raise money for weapons and training. The book “Charlie Wilson’s War” does an excellent job of explaining the ocnflict and the chronology (an area where Brzezinski’s memory gets a little cloudy). Many of Brzezinski’s claims are rebutted or contradicted by Cyrus Vance, Carter’s Secretary of State at the time.

What is beyond dispute is that we did indeed arm and train the Mujahideen against the Soviets and we did abandon them following the Soviet exit in 1988, much as we abandoned the Kurds in 1991 and left them to Saddam’s tender mercies.

The claim that the Soviets collapsed due to falling oil prices is also risible on the face of it, and in direct contradiction of the facts. The Soviets were bankrupted by decades of a staggeringly expensive arms race with the US and the West, along with an endemically corrupt series of regimes. Perhaps falling oil prices were the final nail in the coffin, but they certainly were not the motive factor.