nobody said leftists don't want to maintain their grip on power. take a peep at basically every revolutionary left-wing government ever and you'll see leftists killing other slightly different leftists for complete control of their ideological project. guys like stalin, mao, and pol pot didn't kill homosexuals because they thought sucking cocks was dumb and gay, they killed them because they fucked with the productivity and stability of the state, their state. angsty rabble-rousers and competing power factions aren't useful to a busy dictator so they get killed off so the wheels of progress can march onward. trotsky didn't get icepicked for being a murderous, degenerate psychopath, it was because he was stalin's rival.  the soviet's backed their afghan communist clients over their competing tribal and islamist rivals for the rulership of afghanistan. the cia didn't have any particular love for austere religious scholars, but would throw money at anyone tipping dominoes out of the soviet sphere. it was nothing like a grand moral struggle, just two heavily-centralized, political bureaucracies kicking sand at each other in a central asian sandbox.
United States