Does anyone actually remember how a group of thugs like the Taliban came into power?

They were better than the thugs the US was supporting. Thats how they did it.

http://media.www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2001/10/25/Opinion/Northern.Alliance.No.Better.Than.Taliban-504645.shtml

Northern Alliance no better than Taliban

You are with us, or you are with the terrorists. U.S. leaders have chosen this as their rallying cry despite one fact: It's a blatant lie. Supporting the United States means supporting terrorists as well, now that we have sunken into the Faustian pact of using killers to track down killers.

While the Taliban may be the most infamous slaughterer in Afghanistan, the chief U.S. ally in the area, the Northern Alliance, is nearly as despicable. Despite being portrayed as a benevolent and courageous group of freedom fighters, the Alliance has a long history of murder and repression that rivals their Taliban adversaries. Once Afghanistan's ruling party, the Northern Alliance is now merely a fractured group dogged by infighting and corruption. The Sept. 9 assassination of military leader Ahmed Shah Masood has left the Northern Alliance scrambling for guidance.

Many are looking to Abdul Rashid Dustum to take the reins of the rebellion in Masood's stead. It was only a few years ago that Dustum led his followers through the suburbs of Kabul, raping, pillaging, and slaughtering civilians, all while being wooed by leaders from the Taliban, the Alliance and prominent area gangsters. Dustum frolicked through the country on rampages with all three groups before settling on the Alliance.

Brutal and subhuman tactics are not limited to Dustum however. A number of other Northern Alliance leaders were recently condemned by the Human Rights Watch for a variety of horrifying crimes. The report claims group leaders tortured civilians and enslaved women to serve as their concubines.

The HRW also delves into the group's sordid military history. The recent air attacks have gutted Taliban defenses, leaving the capital city of Kabul relatively undefended. The Alliance bowed to international pressure and did not advance on the city, largely due to memories of their last visit there. When the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul in 1994, their presence sparked a firefight that illuminated the night sky. By the time the fighting ended and the army began to depart, some 25,000 civilians departed with them, in body bags. While occupying neighboring cities, the Northern Alliance targeted and bombed largely civilian areas, killing hundreds more.

During the Reagan years

the Soviets. When the Soviets pulled out, they left chaos in their wake. The Taliban got hold out of that. In a way, if you really try, you can trace 911 back to the Cold War. If not for our getting involved in Afghanistan because of the Soviet incursions there, we would not be part of the whole mess that allowed for the disorder and chaos that allowed Al Qaeda an area in which to hide out.

in would have been better for the US and the Afghanis if the Soviets had continued their occupation and been successful. Who would have thunk?

it was ignoring Afghanistan and those that resisted the Soviets that did the harm. They did what the US wanted them to do, they helped to bring the USSR to its knees and then we pulled out and didn't do a damn thing to help rebuild the infrastructure and/or the less dangerous of the factions gain power. Top that off with Reagan claiming the glory for the collapse of the USSR and it is understandable why some factions became radical factions that hate the USA.

book and the movie). Regardless of what you thought of the effort, the truth was that a major part of US foreign policy was being run out of a back room somewhere with no real oversight. The movie made it seem as if everything was OK until the money stopped when it came time to re-build Afghanistan. The book made it clear that "our guys" in Afghanistan were just plain evil. What they did to Russian POWs boggles the mind.

The road to 9/11 and its continued bloody aftermath began in earnest at the tail end of the Carter administration when the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI decided it would be a good idea to train and fund a coalition of groups of mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan to give the Soviet backed government of President Mohammed Najibullah more problems than it could handle. For the Pakistani military, the strategy was to provide itself with more reach and influence. For the United States, it was to create a Vietnam type of quagmire for the Soviet Union and its success began when the USSR invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979. Ironically, this Soviet quagmire that ultimately led to the implosion of the USSR now threatens us with the same fate.

Post cold war imperial ambitions of the U.S. have pushed the Middle East and Central Asia into intolerable peril for these regions the U.S. desires to control for unmatched hegemony. Benazir Bhutto knowing the true nature of the mujahideen coalition even down to each leader of each group and what they were capable of, warned George H.W. Bush in June of 1989, “Mr. President, I fear we have created a Frankenstein that will come back to haunt us” according to her book. The United States, blinded by the Wolfowitz doctrine, has not seen the warning signs until too late. It did not see bin Laden’s rebellion among its jihad network. It did not see the intransigence of the Taliban government concerning the price it wanted to extract for the Unocal oil pipeline through Afghanistan or the refusal to hand over bin Laden. Washington then had to become allied to Iran and Russia’s friends, the Northern Alliance, to topple what it created. Afterward, with former Unocal representative Hamid Karzai in charge in Kabul, the U.S. has underestimated the staying power and resurgence of its old creation, the Taliban and al Qaeda. Unfortunately also, Washington did not properly read the stability status of its friend Musharraf and the military dictatorship, the imbalance of funding the military, and the social imbalance that resulted. It did not see or want to see the still close relationships or ties the resurgent Taliban has with some in Pakistan’s military dictatorship as well with many in the population of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Now with the province in increasing Taliban control and the provincial capital of Peshawar in the crosshairs, the Bush administration’s pretense of protecting us from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Islamic militants seems even more absurd. The United States was going to counter this situation by having Benazir Bhutto step back into the political process, but given the confluence of Pakistan’s U.S. backed military dictatorship with its old rebellious tools of a resurgent Taliban and mujahideen groups, her life and the plan were struck short. The plan of having her back in power whereby U.S. military assets would be allowed in the provincial area to remove the threat are gone. That leaves the U.S. with the destabilizing option of military strikes without Pakistani approval and yet another U.S. attack on a nation’s sovereignty. In the midst of this clear and present danger, the Bush administration along with its allies in both parties of Congress and Israel, are pushing for the destabilization of Iran with the possibility of air strikes in order to continue the Milton Friedman utopia dream for the Persian Gulf States, and in spite of the fact Iran has not attacked another country directly in the modern era of history.





http://journals.democraticunderground.com/mmonk/39

Pakistani intelligence is all you need to know. Follow the money.

Jimmy Carter signed the document that granted aid to what would become the taliban in July, 1979. Yes, that's six months before the soviets invaded, and it was done as provocation. When that got out of hand, the Northern Alliance was funded to try to keep a lid on the extremists of the Taliban. Bin Laden's organization was named and funded by the CIA for 'wet work', or assassinations.

If the US insists on these games, the blowback shouldn't surprise anyone.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/091701a.html

Yessirree Bob. Nothing like the laws of unintended consequences.

I believe this was covered in "Charlie Wilson's War" -- but having been a news junkie even back then, if memory serves -- the US helped the Taliban.

Hekate