I suppose you think if someone had killed Hitler in his artist phase we could have avoided WWII, too.
The 'US military equipment' you might have a point on, that was totally us, but a handful of obsolete Stingers aren't exactly turning the tide in the Afghan occupation. The Muhajadeen would have experience in fighting well-armed mechanized armies no matter what, because there was a well-armed mechanized army on their front door, and had the Soviet army not pulled out in 1988, they'd have done so a year or two later as their whole country disintegrated, leaving the exact same power vacuum and destroyed infrastructure. Had we worked to make Afghanistan a Soviet client state rather than a local threat to Soviet security and forestalled the invasion entire, as we can see in all the other former Soviet client states, they wouldn't have had a whole lot softer fall and would have been just as ripe for Islamic warlord theocracy in a marginally less squalid hellpit. Maybe the commies wouldn't have left quite so many rusty T55s around for the warlords to play with had they been capable of an orderly withdrawal, though given what happened in most of the former WP I doubt it, maybe there'd be more schools left standing in Kandahar for the warlords to blow up instead of the Russians.
Most of the real powers in al Qaeda weren't purely Afghanistan-based anyway, like Osama himself they were adventurers who shopped around all the theaters of conflict between the Arab world and everybody else in the seventies and eighties, learning to fight Americans, Soviets, Israelis, Europeans, and each other alike. Basically we're talking about a scenario where the exact same timeline of Afghan history with cosmetically different players who would have done all the same things, at most a year or two later than they actually did. You have to dial back pretty much the entire Cold War and our support of Israel, too, to find a point where something we did directly lead to the state of Afghanistan.
no subject
The 'US military equipment' you might have a point on, that was totally us, but a handful of obsolete Stingers aren't exactly turning the tide in the Afghan occupation. The Muhajadeen would have experience in fighting well-armed mechanized armies no matter what, because there was a well-armed mechanized army on their front door, and had the Soviet army not pulled out in 1988, they'd have done so a year or two later as their whole country disintegrated, leaving the exact same power vacuum and destroyed infrastructure. Had we worked to make Afghanistan a Soviet client state rather than a local threat to Soviet security and forestalled the invasion entire, as we can see in all the other former Soviet client states, they wouldn't have had a whole lot softer fall and would have been just as ripe for Islamic warlord theocracy in a marginally less squalid hellpit. Maybe the commies wouldn't have left quite so many rusty T55s around for the warlords to play with had they been capable of an orderly withdrawal, though given what happened in most of the former WP I doubt it, maybe there'd be more schools left standing in Kandahar for the warlords to blow up instead of the Russians.
Most of the real powers in al Qaeda weren't purely Afghanistan-based anyway, like Osama himself they were adventurers who shopped around all the theaters of conflict between the Arab world and everybody else in the seventies and eighties, learning to fight Americans, Soviets, Israelis, Europeans, and each other alike. Basically we're talking about a scenario where the exact same timeline of Afghan history with cosmetically different players who would have done all the same things, at most a year or two later than they actually did. You have to dial back pretty much the entire Cold War and our support of Israel, too, to find a point where something we did directly lead to the state of Afghanistan.