Who would you support in the Soviet-Afghan War?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don't think wars are like football matches.

But anyway, the situation was incredibly messy. There were multiple factions in the PDPA - the war started in earnest when the Soviets decided to (literally) kill off one faction in favour of the other - and that was even truer of the Mujahideen. Soviet tactics were also considerably more brutal than is sometimes remembered (i.e. a common opinion amongst ex-Mujahideen in 2001 and after was that the US/NATO were a bunch of softies in comparison) and contributed considerably to the wrecking of Afghan society and what happened as a consequence.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Taliban could not have existed without the refugee camps over the border in Pakistan and they came into existence because... oh.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course, the Soviets killed off that faction because that faction was verging on going full Pol Pot.

Well yes: the PDPA was an entirely awful organisation full of very very scary people like pretty much all Asian Communist parties.

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Rubbish.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

An interesting feature of the war, of course, were the blatantly racist arguments made by some people on the far left who were trying to either defend the USSR's actions or were trying to downplay their significance.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, it is when someone expresses a racist view and does not bother to hide the fact that the view expressed is, indeed, racist.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This. People forget there was no Soviet "invasion".

Oh for God's sake.

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Well firstly the PDPA government was not exactly anyones idea of 'legitimate' (not in a traditional Afghan way, not in a Western Democratic way, etc) and was as blatant a Soviet puppet government as could have ever been wished for (particularly after the Soviets helped the one faction kill off the other). Secondly, to describe the Mujahideen as 'armed reactionaries' is to place crude propaganda other accuracy. They were an incredibly diverse bunch of people united - and it is a bit of a stretch to use that word - by a desire to rid their country of foreign occupation. Mostly they were just ordinary Afghans.

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Racist drivel.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Moreover, did Afghan society even remotely mirror a Marxist class divide?

Well no. Even Kabul didn't. The class base of the PDPA was the usual one for insane Asian Communist Parties (i.e. intellectuals).

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Feudal is the wrong word entirely, but a traditional society based around subsistence agriculture and regional commerce would be accurate, yes. Attempts from the 1950s onwards to 'modernise' Afghanistan's economy and society were notably ineffectual. These days of course most of Afghan society is better described as 'completely fycked up', something that is very much a legacy of the Soviet invasion.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You don't know what you're talking about. Radical Islamism is patently worse for every sector of society then Stalinist Communism could ever be.

North Korea > ISIL.

I'm not sure why one form of mass death is preferable to another (is it better if you die horribly because of extremist idiocy if said extremist idiocy waves a red flag? I don't see the logic there comrade) and I'm not sure if you have much of an understanding of this particular phase of Afghanistan's tragedy if you think that 'Radical Islam' was a major factor. All of the people who fought against the Soviet military and its puppet government were Muslim (of course) and almost all of them fairly 'conservative' (also of course), but hardly any were particularly political beyond that. There were Islamist political parties but they were basically clubs of intellectuals and lacked a genuine mass following even if their call to revolt was eagerly seized on: i.e. Ahmad Shah Massoud was popular because he became an overnight folk hero due to military exploits and a vague sense of Tajik pride not because he was associated with the Jamiat-e Islami (which was about as radical as weak tea, but thats besides the point). And while its true that a lot of money ended up (via the CIA-ISI link and the Zia regime in Pakistan) heading towards the undeniable nutter Hekmatyar and his friends, those guys were an absolute joke in military terms for all their western hardware and never won a single significant fight with Soviet forces.

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No... it really isn't.

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Pretty sure that the right thing to do was to not get involved in the first place.

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Dude, there was no social progress made by the PDPA. If you mean all that footage of a slightly more 'Western' looking Kabul before the war etc, that was a result of the policies of Zahir Shah and Daoud Khan. All the Commies did was to propose a bunch of idiotic and dogmatic policies which they tried to implement in a manner that is fair to call heinous. This resulted in popular revolt and the civil war that continues (in many guises) to this day. I don't call permanent civil war progress.

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Thing is, as a racist you aren't much good at working out what is an isn't racist are you?

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Yes that's true. The Taliban emerged out of the refugee camps in Pakistan. Those camps existed because of the Soviet invasion. The Taliban were able to take over the country with horrifying speed because Afghan society had been destroyed by the invasion and the civil war. Had the Soviet Union not invaded Afghanistan then there would be no Taliban.