Who would you support in the Soviet-Afghan War?

[The Free North]

As an outside observer?

[The Free North]

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.

Blatant racism?

[The Free North]

The PDPA under Taraki was both ruthless and stupid.


Did he think that imposing state atheism on a conservative muslim country was going to go over smoothly? Perhaps that may have worked with a western society, but Socialism, without significant modifications, was never going to work in the Muslim world regardless of how many Soviet tanks drove through Kabul.


Perhaps a flexible implementation of socialist policies and broad realization of the established ideologies of the people of Afghanistan could have avoided some of the chaos that eventually ensued? 

[The Free North]

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

Afghanistan was and still remains, in some parts, essentially feudal. Obviously the Soviet Union was fairly rural in 1917 with only a small urban proletariat and still managed to produce a revolution many thought would occur in Germany or a similar country. But it seems like the people of Afghanistan would have little inspire them to a workers revolution with such high levels of religiosity and decentralization.

[The Free North]

ITT: Leftists trying to justify invading and occupying Afghanistan while they called the US imperialists for the same exact action 10 years ago.

To be fair, there are tangible differences between Soviet Imperialism and Western Imperialism, at least in theory.