Maybe the US didn't recognize them, but the US did give them a bunch of money for the war on opium.
A day or two before 9-11, the Northern Alliance's leader Massoud(sp?) was assassinated; some have speculated this was the signal to unleash hell on southern Manhattan and DC. In other words, the Taliban was winning the civil war and the Northern Alliance was in disarray. I remember hearing at the time from peaceniks not that the NA was a bunch of savage brutes, but that they were a ragtag army who couldn't win.
>for an operation like 9-11 to succeed probably no one in the
Taliban knew it
>was going to happen; none of the perpetrators deployed directly
from
>Afghanistan; and quite likely even OBL himself didn't know
directly of the
>operation (a highly motivated revenge plot of a small group with
some key
>support most likely)--that is how he has worked in the past as
well, as
>inspiration, as brainstormer and as financer. Kind of a Jack
Welch of
>terrorism if you will.
Kind of a dumbshit in my opinion. The Taliban (and Al Queda?) was slowly taking over the Pakistani military and Pakistani society. In other words, the cancer that Pakistani intelligence had inflicted upon Afghanistan was metastasizing back into Pakistan. A few years years down the road the Taliban and Al Queda would have had access to nuclear weapons, because South Asia wasn't a high priority for the Bush administration. Plus, the Taliban were our allies in the war on drugs, no? With nuclear weapons, they could have really caused some trouble, but instead ObL goes for the premature, dramatic gesture and voila, his second-in-command is dead, his foreign legion pals are being massacred, his friends in the Taliban are reduced to fighting to the death in their hometown Kandahar, and the Pakistani nukes will now be safely tucked away. Way to go, dude!
Fellow anti-imperialist Saddam Hussein is probably pissed at ObL too, for now the shitstorm is coming his way.
>I do have to admire the US government's resolve to turn
Afghanistan into the
>smokescreen to cover their own collective incompetence. And
perhaps the next
>time there is a prison riot in the US they'll know to use B-52s
to put it
>down. What effectiveness! What bravery!
>Can't wait for the next exciting episode!
The US government has sent a pretty clear message. If your country is host to a group that is at war with the US and has no compunction about massacring US civilians, you risk entering a world of pain. Sudan must be glad they kicked ObL and Al Queda out when they did.
Peter