Trump: Afghan Invasion Bankrupted the Soviet Union Comments lead to media questioning war's well-documented history
by Jason Ditz
January 2, 2019
In comments Wednesday, President Trump caused a substantial stir in noting the Soviet Unions collapse in the wake of their disastrous war in Afghanistan. This caused a flurry of backlash in the media questioning the historical accuracy of the statement.
Trump said that the Soviet Union was bankrupted by the Afghan War, leading an official at the American Enterprise Institute claiming the cost of the war was an insignificant portion of the Soviet GDP.
Of course, the Soviets didnt literally declare bankruptcy at all, but their decisive defeat in Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of their attempts to heavily project power abroad. The not-inconsequential inherent problems in Communism were also a clear factor, but Afghanistan was an eye-opener, and sped up the inevitable collapse.
Reporters further faulted Trump for presenting the Soviet War in Afghanistan as being about terrorism. This is primarily a semantics argument, as the Soviets were presenting the war as supporting a neighboring Communist state, but involved fighting Islamist militant groups that arent only ideologically similar to what the US would call a terrorist group today, but in many cases in Afghanistan are literally the exact same terrorists that the US has been fighting in its own failed occupation of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has famously been called the graveyard of empires, and President Trumps comments tied this sentiment to the fall of the Soviet empire. And while a lot of the media were attacking him for endorsing the Soviet occupation, the alternative history theyre presenting is that an open-ended losing occupation is insignificant and sustainable. Naturally theyre presenting this to keep the American War in Afghanistan going, but it seems that narratively their real problem with the Soviet occupation was that it ended.
Poster Comment:
You must take it at face value.