US Support for Afghan Mujahideen During the Soviet War

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.