I wrote: That the USSR had its own less than admirable reasons for going in is absolutely true,
)))))))) Charles Brown: What were those less than admirable reasons ? Seemed like they were defending a government like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the Dos Santos government in Angola from US backed ,terrorist "contras", i.e. counter-revolutionaries. ===== Mark Jones has written somewhere about the Soviet Union's strategic desire for access to the Indian Ocean. As you might expect oil has something to do with the story. Unfortunately I can't locate the specific post where he said this, but I'm sure he can be prompted into elaborating on it. This does not mean that ALL the USSR's reasons were less than admirable, of course. But it is something to consider. And even if we can agree that the USSR's motives were spotless, there is another, finer point regarding the efforts of the Soviet military to impose Najibullah's regime upon the whole of Afghanistan, and how this could possibly work in practice. I don't see Najibullah's regime in the same way as, say, the Sandinistas, or even Dos Santos, but for different reasons in each case. Nevertheless I've tried to make clear that Najibullah's position was undermined by the US, which prompted the USSR to intervene in the first place. And I think that the vast majority of Afghans were better off under Najibullah than under the successive regimes that followed (hardly difficult to prove). More information regarding the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan and the nature of the Afghan "revolution" and corresponding counter-revolutionaries is required before I would feel comfortable with using such terminology. But there's no doubt in my mind about the crucial role of US imperialism in all of this, nor that Najibullah's regime was the one to support. Michael K.
