Tony, I can only recommend again that you read Rashid's book. And other sources.

The U.S. did not "foment fundamentalism" in the 1970s or at any other time. (I wonder how they'd go about doing it in the first place: send in wahabist imams trained by the CIA?) Though the U.S. armed the anti-Soviet "mujahadin" of the 1980s, the extraordinarily radical Taliban emerged only in the mid '90s, years after the Soviets left.

And except in the pages of Pravda, the murderous Afghan revolutionary government of Hafizullah Amin certainly did not "request" Soviet troops: as soon as the Russians arrived, they executed Amin and as many of his party as they could find. Why? Because Amin, though a Communist, appeared to be moving toward alignment with China and was killing so many of his opponents that the Russians feared a full-scale Islamic revolt on their borders.

Within 24 hours the Soviets announced the "liberation" of Afghanistan and installed a dependable puppet regime. The UN General Assembly(hardly an arm of American policy) officially and overwhelmingly condemned the Soviet actions.

The ten-year Soviet war killed roughly 1.5 million Afghans, mostly civilians. In a slightly longer period, the current war seems to have killed about 15,000.