Hacker News Reader

Comment by eurasiantiger | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t see it mentioned that USA trained and armed the Taliban when they were waging their jihad against the Soviets.

The Taliban didn’t exist during the Soviet war. The Pakistani ISI, and the US by proxy, trained and equipped the Afghan mujahedeen fighters to fight the Soviets. Then, once the Soviets pulled out, multiple former fighters, notably the Haqqani family, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, created their own militias and began fighting over control of various parts of the country.

Pakistani ISI backed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the “Butcher of Kabul”, in an effort to help install a Pakistani friendly government in Afghanistan, but backed off after pressure from the US. The Taliban was then formed in southern Afghanistan by Mullah Mohammad Omar, also from former Soviet fighters, and quickly conquered significant territory from the other warring factions. The Pakistani ISI backed them, but covertly to avoid pushback from the US. The Haqqanis and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar became allies, with the Taliban controlling the majority of Afghanistan, while Ahmad Shah Massoud and his “Northern Alliance” controlled the north.

The US under Clinton was pretty wishy washy about Afghanistan at that point, mostly just wanting the fighting to end. But they did work with Massoud and the Northern Alliance in order to attempt to target Osama Bin Laden after the 1998 embassy bombings. Under Bush, the CIA was in the process of beginning a covert operation to support the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, but then Massoud was assassinated by the Taliban on September 9th, 2001, and two days later was 9/11.

Funny how you do not mention the CIA link through the ISI.

I thought that was clear from me saying “The Pakistani ISI, and the US by proxy,”. If it wasn’t clear, the US (specifically the CIA) absolutely provided money and equipment to the ISI (basically the Pakistan version of the FBI and CIA for anyone that doesn’t know) for them to use to train and equip mujahedeen fighters.

But the ISI was not run by the CIA. Pakistan had, and still has, their own agenda and priorities that do not align with the US. So if you are implying that the ISI funding of the Taliban must have actually been the CIA, that is not supported by the evidence.

If not funding, how about training and materiel?

You are like a dog with a bone. As far as I have read anywhere and the available evidence, the CIA did not provide funding, training, or material to the Taliban, and the CIA was specifically pushing to support the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. The ISI backed the Taliban before and after 9/11, both to attempt to have some control over them, and to counter Indian attempts at influence through funding the Northern Alliance. ISI’ funding and support of the Taliban in direct contradiction to US efforts is one of the reasons US-Pakistan relations are severely damaged.

None of that is to say the CIA misadventures in Afghanistan before 9/11 were somehow harmless. They handed over briefcases of cash to Jalaluddin Haqqani, who became a key ally of the Taliban and the Haqqani Network he created ended up supplying explosives to the Taliban and lauching highly successful suicide attacks on US forces in Afghanistan.

I know people like simple narratives and having someone to blame, but the situation in Afghanistan over the past 40 years is not simple and is not because of the actions of just one country.

> the situation in Afghanistan over the past 40 years is not simple and is not because of the actions of just one country

I never made such claims; starting on an ad hominem and ending on a strawman doesn’t really lend much credibility to what lies in between.

I mean, you barely said anything, and the few claims you did make were completely incorrect. It seems like you are just throwing out the one thing you think you know "the CIA funded the Taliban!!!" and when that is completely debunked, you ignore all the information, and go for the "your argument is invalid because you used an informal logical fallacy. Checkmate" card. If you have anything at all of substance to say about the situation in Afghanistan, I'd love to hear it.

Any books on the subject you'd recommend for curious readers?

Highly recommend Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 and the sequel Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are long but very detailed and really lays out the complex relationships between the CIA, Pakistani ISI, and the various groups that came and went leading up to 9/11 in the first book, and post 9/11 in the second.

Descent into Chaos: The United States & the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan & Central Asia and In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan are also great reads about Afghanistan.

Not as on topic, but still good would include The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth about how the CIA shifted towards more targeting operations and the military shifted to more intelligence gathering and how that has blurred the lines between the two. And The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One about how insurgencies work, how local people are recruited and coopted by globally minded jihadists using local problems, and how a counter insurgency operation requires understanding and addressing local dynamics and issues, and breaking the connection between locally focused fighters and global jihadists.

>The Taliban was then formed in southern Afghanistan by Mullah Mohammad Omar, also from former Soviet fighters

Wasn't Omar part of the mujahideen?

That was poor wording on my part. I meant to say anti-Soviet fighters, which you are correct, were Afghan mujahedeen. Mullah Mohammad Omar and all of the original founding leadership were former mujahedeen fighters from the Soviet occupation. But most of the leadership from every militia faction that formed in that post Soviet vacuum were former mujahedeen.

From Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Background

> After the Soviet Union intervened and occupied Afghanistan in 1979, Islamic mujahideen fighters engaged in war with those Soviet forces.

> Pakistan's President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq feared that the Soviets were planning to also invade Balochistan, Pakistan, so he sent Akhtar Abdur Rahman to Saudi Arabia to garner support for the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation forces. A while later, the US CIA and Saudi Arabian General Intelligence Directorate (GID) funnelled funding and equipment through the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) to the Afghan mujahideen.[112]

> About 90,000 Afghans, including Mohammed Omar, were trained by Pakistan's ISI during the 1980s.[112] British professor Carole Hillenbrand concluded that the Taliban have arisen from those US-Saudi-Pakistan-supported mujahideen: "The West helped the Taliban to fight the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan".[113] Nearly all of the Taliban's original leadership previously fought in the Soviet-Afghan War for either the Hezb-i Islami Khalis or Harakat-i Inqilab-e Islami factions of the Mujahideen.

Actually according to recently declassified documents (and comments by Brezinski in the 1990s) the “rebels” were armed and created before the Soviet invasion by the CIA under Carter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/07/history-tr...

So it is a fact that USA created the Taliban. Nice.

There are many facts you can cherry pick to suit whatever narrative you want to sell. Why ignore the support and funding from Sunnis across the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia? Why ignore the founding of early Taliban madrassas by Jamiat Ulema-e Islam in Pakistan?

There's plenty of blame to go around, and no reason to be selective unless you have an agenda.

You make it sound like the SRF don’t owe everything to USA. :)

It's the modern BBC after all. Did you expect unbiased reporting?

That's because such a claim is patently and indisputably false (unless you think the Taliban have time travel capability).

Not entirely false. Taliban was initially formed by Pushtun students of Pakistan Medrese. By coincidence, they were the core of resistance to the Soviet army. Mohammed Omar, founder of Taliban, was a veteran of Anti-Soviet war. So, not entirely a time travel case.

Yes, entirely false. The fact that a veteran of some group later did something else doesn't mean everyone involved in the first venture contributed to the second.

That's like saying Peter Thiel founded Tesla. It's so obviously false that anyone pushing that narrative is presumptively dishonest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com