|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
|| [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Thomas Seay
|| Sent: 31 Ekim 2001 Çarþamba 22:09
|| To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
|| Subject: RE: Hydrocarbons and a New Strategic Region: The
|| Caspian Sea and Central Asia (and Al Saud)
||
||
||
|| --- Hakki Alacakaptan <nucleus at superonline.com> wrote:
|| >
|| ----
|| > The US in 1996 considered the Taliban not only an
|| > "ally" in the War on
|| > Drugs, but as a bulwark against international
|| > terrorism.
||
|| Where did this idea come from? From the Rashid book,
No. The excerpt answers your question, but you chose to ignore the rest of it:
Barnett Rubin, the Afghanistan expert at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, told Time in October, 1996, "The Taliban do not have any links to Islam's international radicals. In fact, they hate them."
The Independent reported that the Clinton Administration was counting on the "20,000-strong Taliban militia to also deal harshly with the various Islamic revolutionaries and terrorists, from the Middle East, the Gulf and even Chechnya, who have been using Afghanistan as a sanctuary and arms bazaar."
|| I got the idea that the US didn't really look into
|| these things and certainly the Taliban while
|| prohibiting domestic use of drugs actually encouraged
|| poppy farmers to export.
||
Where did you get this fantastic idea? The poppy fields are gone. Only the hoods of the Northern Alliance are still growing and selling the stuff.
|| It seems to me that the US was not at all interested
|| in
|| curbing the Taliban at all until the US feminist
|| movement put pressure on to criticize the Taliban.
|| Before that, the US was just focused on getting
|| pipelines through Afghanistan.
||
Right, feminists put the fear of god in the State Department, how did I overlook this?
|| It also seems that everything fell apart on the Unocal
|| afghanistan project and the caspian sea route through
|| Turkey was decided upon.
||
Try reading my posts. The Turkey route is economically insignificant. I know, I live there. Your other questions have also been enswered in my posts.
Hakki Alacakaptan