Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[Tyler Durden]

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