Historical Context of US Involvement in Afghanistan

Let's remember here,

the people we are fighting today, we funded 20

years ago,

and we did it because we were locked in this struggle with the

Soviet Union.

They invaded Afghanistan, and we did not wanna see

them control Central Asia,

and we

went to work, and it was President Reagan in partnership with

the

Congress, um, led by Democrats who said, "You know what?

Sounds like a pretty good idea. Let's deal with the ISI and the

Pakistani military, and let's go recruit these mujahideen,

and that's

great. Let's get some to come from Saudi Arabia

and other places, importing

their Wahhabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet

Union." And w- guess what? They retreated.

They lost billions of dollars, and it led to the collapse of the Soviet

Union. So there's a, a very strong argument, which is,

wasn't a bad

investment to end the Soviet Union, but let's be careful what we

sow because we will harvest.

So we then left Pakistan. We said, "Okay, fine.

You deal with the Stingers that we've left all over your country.

You deal with the mines that are along the border.

And by the way, we don't wanna have anything to do with

you.

In fact, we're sanctioning you." We're building a

relationship that

just did not exist. I said in our last trip when you

were with me that we

had a huge trust deficit, in part because United States had...

To be, to be fair, we had helped to create the problem we're

now fighting.

How?

Because when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, we had this

brilliant idea that we were gonna come to Pakistan and create

a force of mujahideen, equip them with Stinger missiles

and everything

else to go after the Soviets inside Afghanistan, and

we were successful. The Soviets left Afghanistan,

and then we said, "Great.

Goodbye," leaving these trained people who

were fanatical in Afghanistan and

Pakistan, leaving them well-armed, creating a

mess, frankly, that, uh, at the time, we didn't really

recognize. We were just so happy to see the Soviet

Union fall, and we thought,

"Okay, fine. We're, we're okay now.

Everything's gonna be so much better." Now you look back, the people

we're fighting today, we were supporting in the fight against the

Soviets.