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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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The soviets didn't even manage to secularize the chechens, so I am skeptical that they could secularize a foreign population.

I think that's pretty ahistorical. The Chechens were subject, as all historically Sunni societies were, to the vagaries of the global Islamist movement that affected every single Sunni society on earth from the 1980s onward, which also perfectly coincided with the slow collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, Soviet attempts at forcible secularization of Chechens were extremely limited; they were much more concerned with forcing children to learn Russian and protecting the interests of the Russian settlers in Chechnya (especially after 1958) than they were in closing mosques. The Islamization of Chechen nationalist movements was a distinct process that occurred through the 1990s, and is in some cases both distinct from and not dissimilar to Islamization that occurred in far-flung regions of the Islamic world as distant as Malaysia and the Maldives.

Soviet attempts at forcible secularization of Chechens were extremely limited

This is indeed my point. Here's a population that Russia has been fighting with since the 18th century, they're right on the border (or even part of the country), and the Russians still didn't manage to secularize them. What hope did they have of secularizing the Afghans in a matter of years, even if it weren't for those meddling yanks?

You can claim it's because they didn't try hard enough, but that seems to me to be, as you say, cope, especially when the implication is that they would have tried hard enough in Afghanistan.

There's also the point that the US wasn't the biggest funder of the Afghan resistance- the Muslim world was. The US brought the state-of-the-art stingers that negated Russian aviation, but in terms of raw money to pay/feed/supply troops in aggregate, the US was a modest part.

The US brought the state-of-the-art stingers that negated Russian aviation

And even then, don't people say that the Mujahideen simply traded the Stingers for simpler, cheaper weaponry?

I've no doubt that people say that, but there's probably a considerable amount of category confusion (do Mujahideen trading Stingers with other Mujahideen count as trading away Stingers?) and self-serving narrative biases (various interests in downplaying the relevance of US military aid support in favor of other actors/other types of aid/denying US significance) and the point that there were only so many (the CIA reportedly only gave around 1000 total), and that once they did their primary role- making the Soviets cautious rather than aggressive with their use of gunships- there wasn't much use for them.

Some weapon systems are more about shifting the opponent's behavior rather than being prevalent. Stingers were an example of that.

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