Avedon Carol brought to my attention this interview by Scott Horton of Ahmed Rashid, an influential Pakistani writer. In Rashid’s telling, the relationship between Pakistan and the United States is of the United States as an amiable dunce, evacuating the ISI from Kunduz at the height of the 2001 fighting in Afghanistan, and genially providing Musharraf with advanced weapons with which to confront India, even as he declined to participate in hostilities against the Taliban.
There is a darker telling of the story, one about which I have been writing for many years (see, for example, A House Divided this piece, originally published at Smirking Chimp, if memory serves.). In a footnote that is missing from the only online copy of that article, I noted that:
Ahmed Rashid, an esteemed Pakistani expert on the Taliban, stated in an e-mail on 10/14/01 that all U.S. aid to Afghanistan ceased after the seizure of Kabul in 1992. He said he believed that aid to the Taliban came exclusively from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but that it is possible that illicit funds from the U.S. also made their way to the Taliban. He also denied that the money that flowed to poppy farmers was a gift to the Taliban. In assessing this opinion, one may recall that Rashid is the citizen of a dictatorship, albeit one that permits remarkable latitude to the press. Discussing covert aid, however, could be a forbidden topic.
The dictatorship is–sort of–gone. But as I said in A House Divided:
Selig Harrison of the Century Foundation, however, was widely reported to have gone farther and ascribed the creation of the Taliban directly to the US (see, for example, Mushahid Hussain, writing in globalinfo.org, #8833).
According to Rahul Bedi, writing in the London Telegraph on 9/26/01, there were even deeper ties:
Intelligence sources said that the ISI-CIA collaboration in the 1980s assisted Osama bin Laden, as well as Mir Aimal Kansi, who assassinated two CIA officers outside their office in Langley, Virginia, in 1993, and Ramzi Yousef.
Yousef and his accomplices were involved in the failed bomb attack on the World Trade Centre in New York five years later [Bedi presumably means that he was convicted for conspiracy five years later]. The intelligence link-up also helped powerful international drug smugglers.
Bedi added that the CIA trained the ISI. According to Tara Kartha, writing for the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in October 2000, the US played a direct role in equipping the Taliban.
Human Rights Watch (“Fueling Afghanistan’s War,”12/15/00) identified U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as sources of Taliban funding. Testimony by Michael Sheehan of the State Department before the House Judiciary Committee on December 13, 2000 made it clear that the drug trade was also a likely major source of funding. Notably, Human Rights Watch also characterized the conflict in Afghanistan as primarily between the Taliban, funded by American allies, and the Iranian- and Russian-funded United Front, which effectively frames the relationship between the U.S. and the Taliban as patron-client.
In summary, the Taliban appears to have been created by Pakistan, perhaps on the instigation of the U.S. It was funded by U.S. allies, as well as by Pakistan, and operated in a manner that the U.S. believed at least until 1998 largely served U.S. strategic interests. It is not difficult to imagine that elements of the U.S. government might have seen the Taliban as a means to bleed long-term rivals. That could explain why the warnings from other elements of the government about the dangers of Al Qaida took so long to become policy.
(I haven’t included links that have since gone dead. For an online reference to Harrison, see here)
At this writing, I lean toward believing that the US government created the Taliban as an instrument to exert control in Afghanistan and that we continue to believe that it is in some manner useful. But until we start getting some serious answers from South Asia experts, it’s hard to tell. History tells us that the US government is not as stupid as it looks.
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