Question forJeffrey Goldfarb.

When has the US government, asked to make a choice between maintaining an economic advantage on the one hand and a defense of of democratic values in a foreign country on the other, chosen the moral course? I could ask the same for other countries, but since power corrupts and we have power, lets keep it simple.
Our support for Solidarity was based entirely on cold war politics. Do a search for articles from the period about domestic labor policy and you will see the double standard applied at the time, and articles on the subject of that double standard.

"Wheras I understood the American operation in Afghanistan as fundamentally a liberation..."
It was 'fundamentally' revenge. The fact that the Taliban, with whom we would have otherwise been happy to work, were despised by the majority meant that the interests of the people dovetailed briefly with ours. I'd call it luck on our part. And luck is running out.