Had the US continued to support progressive Mujahideen leaders like this guy, Afghanistan would’ve been much better off .
Kabul was a peaceful, increasingly prosperous place when Russian troops were stationed there. After they left, the mujahideen factions that you're celebrating turned the city into something almost as bad as Hiroshima.
"Progressive mujahideen" is one of the craziest things heard yet. Massoud was a warlord with blood on his hands. Literally every single mujahideen leader was a warlord and a war criminal, doesn't matter if it's the Taliban, Massoud, or Hektmatyar.
“Most people in the west have been led to believe that intolerance, brutality, and severe oppression of women in Afgahnistan began with the Taliban regime. But this is a lie, more dust in the eyes of the world from the warlords who dominate the American-backed, so-called democratic government of Hamid Karzai. In truth, some of the worst atrocities in our recent past were committed during the civil war by the men who are now in power.”
During the blackest days of the Afghan civil war in 1992, a group of warlords seized Kabul razing much of it to the ground. “The militias of Dostum, Sayyaf, Massoud, Mazari, and Hekmatyar pillaged the city, robbing families and slaughtering and raping women. Eventually, anywhere from 65,000 to 80,000 innocent people were killed in Kabul alone, though there are no official figures for the staggering death toll. According to the United Nations, more than 90 percent of the city was destroyed. (Eventually) “the country was split up into fiefdoms, ruled by the whims of rival thugs and warlords.
And after the Taliban took over in 1996, Russia, Tajikistan and others had a repproachment with Massoud, and along with Iran they supported Massoud between 1996-2001 in fighting the Taliban.
https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/afghan/Afrepor0-01.htm
By mid-1998, the war in Afghanistan was well into its twentieth year. Following the withdrawal of the last Soviet troops in 1988, the fall of the government of Dr. Najibullah in 1992 by resistance forces marked the beginning of a bloody civil war among shifting alignments of the resistance forces.
The Taliban, a movement of religious students (talibs) from the Pashtun areas of eastern and southern Afghanistan who had been educated in traditional Islamic schools in Pakistan, emerged in 1994 in part as a reaction to the failure of the other Afghan factions to end the fighting and establish a government that could ensure some peace and stability in the country...
As the Taliban consolidated its hold over Kabul and the rest of the country, the alliance of opposition parties in the north remained riven by feuds among the various factions: the Tajik-dominated Jamiat-i Islami of Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud; the Uzbek-dominated Junbish of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum; and the predominantly Pashtun Hizb-i Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Battles for control of Kabul among these factions in 1993-1995 destroyed at least one-third of the city, killed thousands of civilians, and drove a half million refugees to Pakistan.