Three Afghanistan WIs:

MarioLuigi

Banned
1. What if the U.S. continues to aggressively help and fund the more moderate Mujihadin after the Soviets withdraw from Afghanistan?

2. What if the assassination attempt on Massoud fails?

3. What if the U.S. declines to send ground troops to Afghanistan and gradually withdraws its special forces after 2001? (as to not be perceived as occupiers.)
 
1. What if the U.S. continues to aggressively help and fund the more moderate Mujihadin after the Soviets withdraw from Afghanistan?

2. What if the assassination attempt on Massoud fails?

3. What if the U.S. declines to send ground troops to Afghanistan and gradually withdraws its special forces after 2001? (as to not be perceived as occupiers.)

Re #2: I started a thread on exactly this a long while back, which got some interesting ideas going. You might want to take a look at that.
 
I'll go in order of OP:

  • The US supporting "moderate" mujahedin is a bit ludicrous. If we cared about education, minority rights, especially women's rights, we would've supported the Najibullah regime the mujahedin fought but the were Communists and had to be brought down by any means necessary. Mohammed Shah Massoud was a lot less of an asshole compared to Hekmatyar, Dostum, and the other Northern Alliance warlords who thumb-wrestled for power after the Najibullah regime fell, merrily slaughtering and pillaging their way across the land enough for folks to think the Taliban were a better idea.
  • The big problem as Charlie Wilson's War illustrated, nobody in DC had any picture of the end game. Not the CIA, Congress, State Dept, DoD, the Presidents involved. It's a lot easier to vote money for sticking it to Ivan. It's a lot different to logroll for foreign aid/reconstruction funds in Afghanistan. Sure, it's a movie and oversimplified things considerably but it got that point across crystal clear.
  • IF MSM dodged the assassination attempt on 9/11, I sincerely doubt he'd be a tractable stooge for the West and be even more prickly to deal with than Karzai. Afghanistan would be better off in the sense they had a charismatic spokesman the West listened to with local street cred vs Hamid Karzai, our man in Kabul whom nobody respected for good reason. My take, somewhat better than OTL, but he could easily be assassinated later in 2001/2 by ISI agents.
  • As to the US staying strictly SF operators on the ground, IDK.
    The air campaign did pretty well, but was pretty sloppy and expensive to keep airmailing kaboom from carriers in the Arabian Gulf and Diego Garcia. Folks wanted more boots on the ground for all kinds of reasons, namely, they expected chaos once the Taliban were no longer fully in charge this time. Basically, I think they mixed up the plans for Iraq and Afghanistan but that's my two cents.
 
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