For instance, I have an aunt who is definitely MAGA, and is flirting with Q-Anon ideas. However, she has pretty good views on the environment and animal rights. For instance, after travelling to Ecuador, she donates to some Ecuadorian land trust run by locals. However, if you start talking to her about the border or gender, she goes full Orbán.
but he still thinks the Soviets, for all their faults, could have won Afghanistan if they tried harder.
This is also the position of the book Socialism Betrayed, which is about the collapse of the USSR. Their main arguments are that analysts predicted that the Soviets would win soon and are not in a stalemate, but Gorbachev abandoned Afghanistan in order to get better relations with the West, without getting something in return. I don’t know about the first part or the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in general, but the second one is a massive goof so it wouldn’t surprise me if the USSR could win after all.
I think that if Russia had never stopped supporting the DRA and if Dostum hadn’t been a traitor, they would have ended up entering into a peace process with most of the Mujahideen and then we would never have had a Taliban takeover. If you look at the Battle of Jalalabad, the Afghan army really seemed capable of continuing to fight and defending the major cities from the Mujahideen. I think India could have supported the DRA better, since they had the same enemy, Pakistan.
