Reply #30: No Bigtree, that is simply untrue

[anigbrowl]

We largely left them alone, both through the Clinton and early parts of the Bush administration, doing little more than expressing out disapproval and hoping they would ease up a bit. The last war before 2000 that the US was involved in was in Bosnia, where we were defending the Muslim population against Serbian genocide.

We did not provoke the Taliban in any significant way, nor did we force them to support bin Laden's quasi-military ambitions, nor did we force bin Laden himself to organize attacks on September 11 that killed over 3,000 people (I do not subscribe to LIHOP or MIHOP conspiracy theories). No country in the world with the military capability to respond would accept such an attack on its territory. That is not opportunistic militarism, it is simple self-defense. To believe that any country would let such an incident go by without responding is delusional.

No, you can argue all day about the degree to which our strategy in Afghanistan has been productive or not (and I'd agree that the answer is 'not' to a large degree, though not completely). but there is simply no disputing the fact that the Taliban were operating a violent oppressive regime of their own free will before we entered into any direct conflict with them. And yes, it is appropriate to compare them iwht the Nazis or any other tyrranical government through history. Their misdeeds took place on a smaller scale, but were both systematic and directed at the entire population under their control.

I can understand things like the Taliban's hunting down and killing of communists. I don't like it, but the USSR killed a lot of Afghans during and following their invasion of that country, up to 2 million by some accounts. It's understandable hat a new government would want to get rid of anyone who had supported the soviet occupation. What is not understandable is going on to crush your own population with religious extremism that didn't even have the bad excuse of being an indigenous tradition.