Rambo Would be Shocked

Rambo Would Be Shocked

So an old history teacher and student of the Cold War has to lecture one more time!!!

President Trump rewrote history this week with a rambling public dissertation on the fall of the Soviet Union.  He placed the virtual bankrupting and collapse of the Communist empire on the war in Afghanistan, a war the President said was justified by terrorist attacks from Afghanistan on the Soviets.  It fit in perfectly with current Russian propaganda, and gives Trump an excuse for withdrawing from our seventeen-year war in the region.  The problem is: it’s not true.

Before we enter the alternative past that the President has created let’s get one thing clear:  finding our way out of Afghanistan is a good idea. We are on our second generation of Americans fighting and dying there, and are battling for a vague and distant goal. We went there for two reasons: destroy Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda for 9-11, and punish the ruling Taliban tribe for allowing him to stay there.  It took a while, but both of those goals have been achieved, and while we are now propping up our allies in the current government, we need an exit strategy (not to be confused with a tweet saying we are leaving.)   

But let’s get a few items of history clear.  One of the long-term strategies of the United States in the conflict between “the free world” and “communism” called the Cold War was a plan of encirclement.  The US wanted to contain the Soviet Union by surrounding it with nations allied with the US in one way or another.  It was an alphabet soup of alliances: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO.)   It stretched from Norway’s Artic border, through Eastern Europe (the old “Iron Curtain”) into Turkey, and central Asia, then on into the Pacific.  

It denied warm water ports to the Soviet Union, allowing only a base in the Crimea on the Black Sea (the same base the Russians took from Ukraine), the Artic port at Archangel, the Baltic port at Kaliningrad and the Pacific port at Vladivostok.  The Premier of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, was constantly searching for ways to expand Soviet influence and break out of the “noose around the Soviet neck.”  In 1978, a Soviet backed Afghan group took control of the country.  There were opposed by multiple other tribes, including fundamentalist Islamic groups that saw the Communist changes as violating Koranic law. When the Soviet picked Afghan President was killed in 1979, the Soviet Army invaded.   

It was an ugly war of oppression, with the Soviet Army using the most advanced weapons against the “Mujahideen,” the guerilla fighters, often on horseback.  Over the next ten years the Soviets discovered what many other occupying armies in Afghanistan already knew (and the United States would find out):  that controlling the rugged mountainous regions of the country is near impossible.  It also is near impossible to create stable alliances within the country, with varying tribal interests and traditional rivalries taking precedence.  And, of course, US aid and weapons to the Mujahideen, brought over the passes from Pakistan, helped keep the fight alive.

Americans will remember this war from the “Rambo III” movie, where Rambo was sent into Afghanistan to rescue his mentor.  The Mujahideen were portrayed as heroic, a far cry from how these same fighters would be seen thirty years later.

An estimated 20,000 Soviet troops were killed with another 50,000 wounded in the ten year struggle.  Mujahideen losses were more than triple those numbers.  After ten years with little gained, the Soviets finally withdrew, leaving their puppet government to quickly fall.

But they didn’t leave because the war broke them economically.  It was another strategy of the Western Alliances that achieved that, the Ronald Reagan arms race.  Reagan pressed advanced weapons technology, from stealth aircraft and submarines, to the “Star Wars” space defense system (that never worked.)  The US was spending trillions of dollars on weapons, and the Soviet Union was forced to try to match it.  At the height of this Cold War expansion, the US was spending 6.8% of our GDP (gross domestic product.)  To try to keep up, the Soviet Union was spending as much as 20% of GDP, an unsustainable amount.

The resulting economic disaster forced Soviet leaders to withdraw from not only Afghanistan, but also Eastern Europe.  The Berlin Wall came down in 1989:  the Red Banner of the Soviet Union came down for the final time in Moscow on Christmas Day 1991.

This revisionist view of history President Trump shared is accepted by no one except the current occupants of the Kremlin (and I’m sure Mr. Putin was pleased to hear it.)   While the Soviet War in Afghanistan was ugly, the Soviets did not intervene to stop terrorists, and the War did not destroy the Soviet Empire.  But Trump’s revision certainly does fit with the Putin’s overall plan for regaining their former Soviet glory, and should lead Americans to question:  what side is President Trump on?  The answer might shock even Rambo.