Quote Originally Posted by Gawain of Orkeny
Were not only supporting dictatorships. Were recruiting and training terorists it looks like to me. It looks like the old saying "The more you practice to decieve the deeper is the trap you weave " or something to that effect. How can we Attack AQ in Afghanistan yet back it in Kosovo and Bosnia? It seems to me we have picked a very strange and unpredictable ally here. Its all very confusing. Its no wonder theres conspiracy theories about.
We also seem to have had a role in facilitating the very existence of the Taliban as well. Most of it came from our "ally" Saudi Arabia. IMO, we went north to invade Iraq, when we might have done better to go south!


The executives of American oil giant UNOCAL had already began collaborating with Saudi Arabia to construct a giant gas and oil pipeline from Central Asia, through Afghanistan to Pakistan when Taliban victory seemed imminent. Since the pipeline construction would also isolate American rival, Iran, by directing supplies east to Pakistan instead of to the Middle Eastern country, the US government was supportive enabling the company to serve at times as a makeshift diplomatic liaison between Afghanistan and the US.

In the 1980s, madrasas in Afghanistan and Pakistan were allegedly boosted by an increase in financial support from the United States, European governments, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom reportedly viewed these schools as recruiting grounds for the anti-Soviet Mujahedin fighters. In the early 1990s, the Taliban movement was formed by Afghani Islamic clerics and students (talib means “student” in Arabic), many of whom were former Mujahedin who had studied and trained in madrasas and who advocated a strict form of Islam similar to the Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia.

Sudden, unexpected developments in early 1995 profoundly changed the situation. A new political/military force, the Taliban, sprang into existence. This movement, identified with religious students was centered among the Durrani Pushtuns who had been politically passive during the previous fifteen years of war and tumult. The movement took control of Kandahar in November, 1994. By February it was challenging the Rabbani government from Kabul to Herat. The Taliban were students or recent graduates of a network of traditional madrasas in southern Afghanistan and adjacent areas of Pakistan. The origin of the movement itself remains obscure, but once again a religious cause that offered political purification and an end to Afghanistan's suffering won widespread support.