Jim D. writes: 1) there was a unified -- and unifying -- state in Afghanistan before the Taliban. (It was also modernizing, educating women, etc., which stimulated the ire of the fundamentalist men.) This, of course, was destroyed in the Russo-Afghan war.
===== Slings and arrows and accusations of pedantry aside, I think it's important not to allow history to be glossed over by the use of misleading terms like "Russo-Afghan war". Afghanistan was used as a proxy for the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, and it was the US, as emerging evidence makes clear, that stoked the flames in Afghanistan as part of the greater global US retrenchment/restructuring that took place throughout the 1970s. Brzezinski is really the author of the so-called Reagan "Doctrine" that promised US aid to and involvement in the "struggles" of anti-communists, the "lovers of freedom" (ha! The Contras? The Khmer Rouge? The Taliban?). The modernising regime in Afghanistan was destabilised as was that of Chile, indeed that of Argentina, around this period, and Soviet intervention was a response to this. That the USSR had its own less than admirable reasons for going in is absolutely true, but the civil war between different factions within the Afghan state (as was) was given a great push by the creation of an entirely new element -- the "fundamentalist men" you mention. These were the product of hitherto obscure madrassas located in remote parts of Northern Pakistan, whose own leadership had just been changed in a bloody coup bringing to power the not at all lovely General Zia, whose own ideas of women's status under Islamic law were very much in accordance with the general direction of what became Taliban thinking. Zia attempted to impose laws that would have rendered women's status in Pakistan exactly half that of a man (i.e. two women's votes = one man's vote). Among the Pakistani emigre population in Glasgow this was not at all popular. But Zia was "our sonofabitch" and was delighted to receive copious funding from the CIA and MI6 and lavish media attention from the Dan Rathers and Sandy Galls who dutifully reported on the glorious "freedom" fighters intent on destroying the rather more admirable government of Najibullah (by comparison, at least, with Zia's and with what was to come as a result of all that "freedom fighting"). He died in what is still called a "mysterious" plane crash. Meanwhile the regional power status that Zia attempted to construct remains a curse blighting the Pakistani ruling classes, which must reconcile the contradictory impulses to modernisation (secular elements in the military, civil service and business arena) and religious fidelity (until now growing elements of lower military ranks and political class) with those sub-imperialist aspirations. The US stands, once again, in the dock for having encouraged the delusion of Pakistani state power exerting itself beyond Pakistani borders, only to find that delusion becoming closer to reality as a result of its inconsistent and arrogant treatment of its erstwhile ally which was allowed to continue harbouring such ambitions. China also has a part in this, given its support of Pakistan's military as part of a regional containment strategy aimed at India. Thus the legacy of Richard Nixon, that bequeathed the world Pol Pot (supported throughout the 1980s by the US, UK and China) also gave us the very same Taliban and an utterly destabilised and now nuclear Pakistan. All of which is to say, there was no "Russo-Afghan war". Michael K.
