"Don Klipstein" wrote in message ...

One of those two defeated countries had its war-entering leader
committing suicide as that country was in its final weeks to days of being
on the losing end of conventional warfare, at face of US manufacturing
power - that USA ~3-4 decades afterwards started losing desire to
maintain.

It wasn’t lack of desire on the part of the U.S., it was that the rest of
the world was catching up to the enormous lead in mfg. the U.S. had after
WWII (at the end of that war over half of all the mfg. in the world was
happening in America).

The Taliban is what it is, and was since sometime in the early 1990's or
even 1980's, because USA supported it farther back around 1980. The
principle of "Cold War Era" was, "Enemy of our enemy is our friend".

The Taliban was not the principle group opposing the Soviets and the notion
that the U.S. supported the Taliban is overstated to put it mildly. The
Taliban were late-comers to the war against the Soviets and were concerned
largely with fighting other groups in Afghanistan for their own political
ends.

I think USA needs to get pickier about choosing other nations or major
political forces therein to be friends or enemies, especially in the
part of the globe east of Athens and much west of Nome or Pearl Harbor.

American foreign policy has always accommodated dictators who happen to
control valuable real estate or natural resources. But these days the
world's biggest dictatorship is also the No. 2 economy, and they are
developing an interest in expanding their horizons--it's going to get
interesting.