It's certainly helpful but...
they were helpful in World War II as well. And we all know what that led to. Yeah, yeah, they're not Communists anymore. But Marxist-Leninism was never much more than a symptom. Lenin was just another Czar with a different religion. And now there's this Putin guy repressing freedom of the press and making alliances with China.
Well, they had a few years of democracy, plus a hideously perverted version of capitalism. Maybe it's influenced them a bit.
Scenario: American and Russian troops overrun Afghanistan from opposite sides and meet in the middle. There's a war crimes tribunal for bin Laden and his buddies, who get what coming to them, despite most of them insisting that they were only following orders. Then the two allies have a falling out. The Russian half of Afghanistan becomes a tributary, kept in poverty by systematic looting. The American half gets a Marshall Plan and the forced establishment of democracy and the rule of law. Fifty years later we're buying luxury cars from them.
Of course I'm ignoring so many differences between then and now that they defy enumeration. But what happens can't be entirely unlike the first time.
