Reply #62: Yes, they were the product of the CIA and ISI effort.

[mmonk]

The road to 9/11 and its continued bloody aftermath began in earnest at the tail end of the Carter administration when the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI decided it would be a good idea to train and fund a coalition of groups of mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan to give the Soviet backed government of President Mohammed Najibullah more problems than it could handle. For the Pakistani military, the strategy was to provide itself with more reach and influence. For the United States, it was to create a Vietnam type of quagmire for the Soviet Union and its success began when the USSR invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979. Ironically, this Soviet quagmire that ultimately led to the implosion of the USSR now threatens us with the same fate.

Post cold war imperial ambitions of the U.S. have pushed the Middle East and Central Asia into intolerable peril for these regions the U.S. desires to control for unmatched hegemony. Benazir Bhutto knowing the true nature of the mujahideen coalition even down to each leader of each group and what they were capable of, warned George H.W. Bush in June of 1989, "Mr. President, I fear we have created a Frankenstein that will come back to haunt us" according to her book. The United States, blinded by the Wolfowitz doctrine, has not seen the warning signs until too late. It did not see bin Laden’s rebellion among its jihad network. It did not see the intransigence of the Taliban government concerning the price it wanted to extract for the Unocal oil pipeline through Afghanistan or the refusal to hand over bin Laden. Washington then had to become allied to Iran and Russia’s friends, the Northern Alliance, to topple what it created. Afterward, with former Unocal representative Hamid Karzai in charge in Kabul, the U.S. has underestimated the staying power and resurgence of its old creation, the Taliban and al Qaeda. Unfortunately also, Washington did not properly read the stability status of its friend Musharraf and the military dictatorship, the imbalance of funding the military, and the social imbalance that resulted. It did not see or want to see the still close relationships or ties the resurgent Taliban has with some in Pakistan’s military dictatorship as well with many in the population of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Now with the province in increasing Taliban control and the provincial capital of Peshawar in the crosshairs, the Bush administration’s pretense of protecting us from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Islamic militants seems even more absurd. The United States was going to counter this situation by having Benazir Bhutto step back into the political process, but given the confluence of Pakistan’s U.S. backed military dictatorship with its old rebellious tools of a resurgent Taliban and mujahideen groups, her life and the plan were struck short. The plan of having her back in power whereby U.S. military assets would be allowed in the provincial area to remove the threat are gone. That leaves the U.S. with the destabilizing option of military strikes without Pakistani approval and yet another U.S. attack on a nation’s sovereignty. In the midst of this clear and present danger, the Bush administration along with its allies in both parties of Congress and Israel, are pushing for the destabilization of Iran with the possibility of air strikes in order to continue the Milton Friedman utopia dream for the Persian Gulf States, and in spite of the fact Iran has not attacked another country directly in the modern era of history






http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/6/123449/0822/844/547337