<p><a href="/en/afganistan/kabul" class="glossify-link">KABUL</a> in 1979, saying the move was aimed at preventing terrorists from entering the former superpower.</p>
<p>In televised comments after a cabinet meeting, Donald Trump asserted the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to battle terrorists -- a position that the United States has never owned.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union went bankrupt because of its long-term involvement in Afghanistan, Trump claimed. But his statement was spurned as inaccurate by The Washington Post and Washington Times.</p>
<p>He remarked Russia used to be the Soviet Union but Afghanistan made it Russia because they went bankrupt fighting there. Russia was justified in occupying Afghanistan, he insisted.</p>
<p>According to Insider, Trump failed to name the terrorists who prompted the Soviets to invade Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a communist regime that did not enjoy popular support among the overwhelmingly Muslim Afghans.</p>
<p>In the latter half of the 20th century, Washington did all it could to curb the spread of communism across the <a href="/en/world" class="glossify-link">world</a> fighting against the Soviets.</p>
<p>“Trump, who has assured us he is the foremost expert on many topics for which he has no formal <a href="/en/education" class="glossify-link">education</a> or training, gave his own version of why the USSR collapsed. And to be clear, it is his own version,” commented the Washington Post.</p>
<p>The newspaper said the overlap between the fall of the Soviet Union and its foray into Afghanistan was obvious. “But correlation is not causation. And Trump — who was using that anecdote to argue that the United States should pull out of Afghanistan and Syria — is really straining for causation here.”</p>
<p>The Post also took issue with Trump’s use of the term bankrupt, arguing the Soviet economy did collapse, but bankruptcy entailed the dissolution of debts and Russia assumed responsibility for most of the Soviet obligations after 1991.</p>
<p>"I think most scholars would agree that Afghanistan was a contributing factor in the Soviet collapse, but I don’t think anyone would go so far as to pin sole blame for the collapse on Afghanistan or to say that the Soviets went ‘bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan,’ ” historian Sarah Cameron told the daily.</p>
<p>Many political experts questioned Trump’s assertion that Russia was "right" to invade Afghanistan, something that pit the USSR against the US. "I'm old enough to remember when GOP presidents didn't think the USSR was right to invade Afghanistan," Jonah Goldberg, a political analyst, tweeted.</p>
<p><a href="/en/pan" class="glossify-link">PAN</a> Monitor/mud</p>
