On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
> By the way, Ahmed Rashid argues in his book that U.S. feminists had a
> lot to do with the Clinton administration's turn away from supporting
> the Taliban (though the embassy bombings in 1998 helped too)
I thinking that "supporting" a government that you don't even deign to recognize -- where you in fact recognize their opponents -- on a scale of one to ten, is kind of a one. It's more like thinking about supporting it, and not actively stopping others from doing so. I think the overriding factor in our 1990 to 1998 relation to Afghanistan was that the US power elite barely knew or cared what happened there then. That's what allowed first Unocal and then the feminists to have so much leverage over policy: they cared a lot when nobody else cared at all. Or even knew much about what they were talking about.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com