From: Monte Davis 

"Robert G Lewis"  wrote:

>Somehow I think some people in Washington have forgotten just which
>countries had ties to the Taliban before 9/11.

Including, it seems, quite a few of the people who during the 1980s were
channeling funds through Pakistan to the Taliban, and encouraging Saudi
Arabia to send more money and fighters -- including, as we now know, that
promising young bin Laden fellow.

NB: I am *not* saying "the CIA created the Taliban/al Qaeda" --
we were supporting any Afghan resistance group who'd give the Soviets
trouble, and didn't have enough local knowledge or people on the ground to
monitor how Pakistan -- or specific Islamist agendas within Pakistani intel
-- might be skewing the payroll.

In fact, for the benefit of those who believe that Reagan's sturdy
foreign/military policy drove the collapse of the USSR, I'll grant that
little "ghost war" sideshow delivered a lot more bang/buck than
SDI or Pershing missiles in Europe or the 600-ship Navy plan -- because the
long slog of a nasty unwinnable war discredited Soviet rule at home more
widely and deeply than grand strategy gambits.

But I *am* saying that the PNAC/neocon crowd took a lot of quiet credit
back then for their ingenuity in sticking it to the USSR: "we're
giving them their own little Vietnam, heh-heh." The more credit you
want, the more blame for the later blowback comes with it. It's absurd to
profess shock or surprise 20 years later that some Pakistanis who built
their careers in the 1980s as CIA proteges and middlemen -- and are now
running things -- still have their own agendas.

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