James A Donald wrote...
What made it a breeding ground for terrorism was not civil war, but diminuition of civil war. The problem was that the Taliban was damn near victorious. If the US government had maintained the relationship with our former anti communist allies, and kept on sending them arms, we never would have had 9/11
Well, that's not particularly convincing. First of all, even during the Taliban's reign there were plenty of warlords that ran some regions of Afghanistan. More to the point is that a long term period of chaos and turbulence causes the locals to be willing to open the door to the like of the Taliban, as long as they offer some kind of peace. The period between Soviet withdrawal and the Taliban was uglier than practically anything imaginable...one batch of warlords would take over, killing the men loyal to the previous batch and raping the women, and then another batch would take over and do the same thing. When the Taliban came in to power, they seemed to offer some stability, albeit at a price. And I'd bet a lot of people in the shoes of the Afghanis would have been willing to pay that price. Such is the long-term consequence of an ill-thought out invasion by the US in Iraq OOPS I mean the Soviets in Afghanistan. They bet that all their power and their ultimate "inevitable" desitny as freers of the workers of the world should easily overcome the local will to control their own destiny (plus a few stingers of course). -TD