Excellent article on Afghanistan

[Snipey]

In the Leningrad Case I was referring to the Road of Life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_of_Life If the Red Army could have done that, over treacherous ice, under severe Nazi bombardment, than why are you telling me that they couldn't do the same for Kabul? Mass starvation took place in Leningrad, before the Road of Life was built, not afterwards. Preventing further mass starvation was the whole point of the Road of Life, and the plan succeeded.

Also, you're talking about the USSR not being able to overproduce Afghanistan? I'm sorry, but that's just plain silly. In addition, if your building projects are being harassed, then simply set up ambushes, coordinate, bombard, use the Rocket Corps, etc. Give the native Afghanis jobs in building the roads. Stop building, duke it out with the local forces, and continue. You can use tanks to escort convoys. You can have have scouts patrol the roads. And if you're the USSR, you can surely commit more than 118,000 men.

What allies? Offer a training program to third world militaries, where you get elite SpetzNatz training, but your unit has to serve a year in Afghanistan. How many do you think would sign up for that? Even if half of the unit survives, and it would have been much more than half, you would have elite units in countries like Angola. A win-win for both countries. Yet nothing like that was even offered.

It was a tough war, no one denies that. But the main losing factors must be considered, if one is to understand how the war was lost. And the main factors were the Brezhnev and Gorbachev Governments. If the leader you are supporting is unpopular, you simply switch support. Again, that order lay with Gorbachev, not with the Red Army.

If the Red Army can hold Kursk against the Wehrmacht onslaught, surely they can hold any ground against the Taliban.

Actually the USSR had a nice system of mass transit, so a car didn't qualify for a basic good. In addition, if one was willing to look, substitutes for basic goods were readily available. It's not like there was mass starvation. The low crime rate enabled people to grow their own crops in the gardens, which, until the 1990's, no one stole.

They were fed up about it? Oh puh lease. It's not like there was a massive revolutionary feeling in the USSR. The Internet could have made it worst, or could have made it better, cause honestly we don't know. People might have found out not only about owning a car, but also about things like traffic, car insurance, unemployment, health insurance, massive divorce rate, the public school system in the US, the lack of Sanatoriums for a low price, ethnic warfare, (which was unknown in the USSR) etc. Either way, that was a choice to be made by the people, and the Internet would have given the people that choice. Gorbachev rushed through, completely unprepared. The result was mass chaos.

And you can say that hindsight is 20/20, but can you name a single country that successfully transformed into a Capitalist economy without mass chaos? And if you cannot, doesn't chaos usually bring about ethnic warfare? Like Chechnya? Like Ossetia? Like Nagorno-Karabakh? If everyone gets a car, but there isn't a road expansion, doesn't that lead to traffic? If everyone has a car, won't there be more accidents and a need for car insurance? In a Capitalist system, like the US, which Gorbachev was modeling from, is healthcare granted to every citizen? All that stuff could have been easily predictable, had Gorbachev not been so headstrong and impulsive, saying "my way or the high way". Sound familiar?