US Terror - Afghanistan, The Taliban & War

Noam is more often than not off his rocker. I loathe his political views that are ill-informed and disingenuous, but his work in the linguistics field is amazing.

B. laden first created to fight the Russians, soon became a menace (or planned to appear this way). Taliban was formed to control Ben laden. Note the word control as the idea was never to eliminate BL. In fact as we speak many of ALQ operatives are being redeployed to Lebanon to engage Hezbollah.

"The CIA had pumped cash stipends as high as $200,000 a month to Massoud and his Islamic guerrilla organization" (Washington post)

Search for "Ahmad Shah Massoud links with CIA "

A series of clandestine CIA teams carrying electronic intercept equipment and relatively small amounts of cash -- up to $250,000 per visit -- began to visit Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. The first formal group, code-named NALT-1, flew on one of Massoud's helicopters from Dushanbe to the Panjshir Valley late in 1997. (Washington post 23 Feb 2004)

Taliban's an extremely strict and anti-modern ideology has been described as an "innovative form of sharia combining Pashtun tribal codes", or Pashtunwali, with radical Deobandi interpretations of Islam favored by members of the Pakistani fundamentalist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) organization and its splinter groups. Also contributing to the admixture was the Wahhabism of their Saudi financial benefactors, and the jihadism and pan-Islamism of sometime comrade-in-arms Osama bin Laden.