In the wake of the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, reflection has turned to America’s role in the Soviet-Afghan war, which lasted from 1979 to 1989. The widespread story about this war is that the CIA provided arms and other forms of support to anti-Communist jihadist rebels fighting the Soviets and their Afghan allies—and thereby drawing the Kremlin into a costly protracted conflict it couldn’t win. According to this version of events, the U.S.-backed Afghan mujahidin were an earlier form of the Taliban, who would—in a supposed tragic irony—go on to attack America and engage Washington in a costly, protracted conflict of its own. Though satisfying to a certain kind of anti-imperialist, writes Emran Feroz, this story gets much wrong:

[This] analysis suggests that the CIA funded the mujahidin, synonymous with al-Qaeda, and thereby made 9/11 possible. The Afghan freedom fighters who resisted the Soviets are uniformly either Taliban or al-Qaeda, two labels used interchangeably, ignoring . . . the distinction between the two groups. [In reality, the rebels] were far from united and followed different ideologies across the Islamic spectrum. None had any connection to al-Qaeda, which was formed much later by what was a radical splinter group of the so-called Afghan Arabs. These Afghan Arabs were followers of Palestinian Islamist leader and ideologue Abdullah Azzam.

The U.S. Stinger missiles [provided to the mujahidin] were just a small part of the larger Afghan tale, but they became crucial in saving lives. For some, it might come as a surprise that Soviet helicopters, which destroyed whole villages, irrigation canals, and acres of arable land and waged mass destruction on thousands of Afghans, could not be defeated through peaceful protests or sheer political activism.

Indeed, [the] popular narrative of American blundering also tends to cover up the reasons for the Soviet invasion, its brutality, and the murderous nature of the regime it was intended to prop up; . . . tens of thousands of innocent Afghans were imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the [Afghan Communist] regime. . . . Even students, peasants, and laborers were not safe. A lot of those who succumbed to their ghastly fates at the hands of the Communists were targeted simply because they prayed five times a day, betrayed any sign of religiosity, were people of some standing and influence, or criticized the mass-murdering regime that was in power.

The [Afghan Communist government] and its Soviet backers claimed they were upholding women’s rights and secularism, even as they were using rape as a weapon of war in Afghan villages and in the regime’s torture dungeons—much the same way as the Assad regime is doing in Syria now.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.