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On 21 Mar 2003 at 12:55, Ken Brown wrote:
> US originally helped the kind of people who later became the
> "Northern Alliance" - a rather odd mixture of unreconstructed
> Stalinists, "liberals" in the European sense of the word,
> separationists, local bandit chiefs, drug growers,
> pro-Iranian Shiite Islamists and who knows what else. The
> Taliban formed later, in Pakistan, and was at least at first
> indirectly funded by the US through Pakistan and through
> material inherited from some other groups - and of course
> later by various Arabs (who may or may not have thought of
> themselves as "Al Qaida" before the US pinned the name on
> them while looking for a New Enemy for the New World Order).
> But there certainly was some assistance from the US to the
> Taliban. US They didn't buy those 500 Stingers in Kmart
Commie lies.
My understanding is that the Taliban got twelve stingers, not
five hundred, and they got them from Hekmatyar, who did get
them from the US. Hekmatyar was certainly anti US, arguably a
Stalinist and a supporter of terrorism, but he was not and is
not an islamic fundamentalist -- his alliance with the taliban
was rather like Saddam's alliance with Bin Laden. They
temporarily agreed to hate someone else more than they hate
each other.
At the beginning of the recent Afghan war the US estimated the
Taliban had at most fifty stingers. During the war it became
apparent that they had far fewer, probably only the twelve that
Hekmatyar gave them.
--digsig
James A. Donald
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