<<We have already tried allowing them to kill each other without our help.
<<That was working pretty well , but Osama Bin Laden made use of the situation to rent himself a country and build himself a suicidal army.
<<So we had no choice but to become involved , and once we broke it we had bought it.>>
It's another one of plane's "history lessons," always short and sweet, always showing how good and reasonable the Americans have been, and always almost totally fictitious. Well done, plane!
In the first place, the "without our help" is totally disingenuous. When a Marxist Afghan government invited the Red Army into the country to help them put down a "rebellion" by a bunch of 14th Century anti-Soviet religious fanatics, you gave plenty of help to the fanatics, including the shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles which neutralized Soviet air-power and ultimately enabled them to drive out the Red Army, overthrow the Afghan Communist government and torture its last leader to death. The end result of your meddling in another country's internal affairs was to enslave the Afghan people and particularly the women of Aghanistan, to the most backward and ignorant segment of the local population. So much for the "without your help" bullshit.
The Afghan government then made the mistake of allowing OBL to launch an attack from its territory on the continental United States, killing just under three thousand Americans, a terrible slaughter of innocent civilians to be sure, but nowhere near the number of innocent Muslim civilians killed by that time by forces armed and enabled by the U.S.A., particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the number of child victims alone had probably run into the hundreds, if not thousands. Nevertheless, the U.S.A. was certainly entitled, and well within its rights in so doing, to launch a punitive strike against Afghanistan for harbouring the attackers and refusing to give them up for trial in the criminal courts of the U.S.A. Probably at that point, even to invade Afghanistan in pursuit of the attackers.
<<Once we broke it, we bought it>> is doubly misleading - - first, you did not "break" Afghanistan, you invaded it. A country, of course, can't be "broken" the way a doll or a plate is broken, and all you did in the real world was to destroy the authority of the clique of individuals constituting the "government" of the day. Left to their own devices, the Afghan people would have found other individuals to govern the country, some more effectively than others, and probably none with undisputed authority, but then again, that was more or less how Afghanistan was being governed before the American and Soviet invasions anyway.
Secondly, there is no such principle in international law as "You broke it, you bought it." It's not even a principle of domestic American law, which would probably say, "You broke it, you pay the owners of it (the Afghan people in this case) enough money to replace whatever it was that was broken, or to fix the damage caused by the breaking," or some such measure, but in any event, you are generally made to pay damages to anyone whose property was broken. Effectively, you illegally used the attack on Sept. 11 to justify an invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and to force down the throats of the Afghan people, at gunpoint, a form of government which you think they should have, whether they want it or not.
Furthermore, "we had no choice" is a lame and pathetic argument that has been used at one time or another by every fucking criminal and criminal regime on this planet, from Adolf Hitler to George W. Bush. Every time a crime is committed, big or small, the criminal of course does have a choice: to commit or not to commit the crime. In the case of the criminal George W. Bush regime, there were plenty of choices: to mount a short, sharp, punitive strike on Afghanistan, probably by an intensive bombing raid on Afghan government or military bases, with a warning that more will follow if more attacks are made on America; to bring the Afghan government before the World Court for harbouring criminals before and after the September 11 attacks; to stop provoking revenge attacks on America by ending the financial support and enabling of the ongoing Jewish efforts to ethnically cleanse the West Bank and to illegally settle Muslim lands there; etc. There were plenty of choices.
