What role did the United States play in the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda?
The CIA initially supported Afghan fundamentalist Muslim guerrillas or mujaheddin with weapons and war resources against the pro-Soviet government in 1979 in order to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and fatally mire the USSR in their own Vietnam. After the Soviet invasion, the U.S. escalated its aid in weapons and war resources to the Afghan militants throughout the 1980s. USAID funded a companion strategy in the early 1980s -- the development of textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren which were filled with jihad images and text, including weapons, soldiers, landmines, and tales of heroic violent resistance to the Soviets. The books continued to be used through the 1990s and were still widely available in 2002, when the story broke. This inculcation of violence through US-funded children's textbooks was sustained in Pakistani refugee camps and madrassas filled with war-orphaned boys of the Soviet-Afghan conflict. The camp and madrass culture set the stage for the violence and misogyny of the Taliban, the next generation of mujaheddin.
The U.S. venture to build a militant anti-Soviet base in Afghanistan also generated the Al-Qaeda network. In the 1980s, tens of thousands of fundamentalist Muslims, among them Osama Bin Laden, were recruited by the CIA and its collaborators from numerous countries to military training camps along the Afghan/Pakistan border to join in the guerrilla war against the Soviets. The U.S. and Pakistan provided military trainers, weapons and war resources; and Pakistani and Afghan military leaders were secretly brought to military bases in the United States for warfare training. "What Washington was not prepared to admit was that the Afghan jihad, with the support of the CIA, had spawned dozens of fundamentalist movements across the Muslim world." (Rashid) (6) Virtually all leaders of Islamic terrorism and terrorist attacks over the past 30 years, including Osama bin Laden and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, have their roots in the covert U.S. military training and aid to the Afghans in their war against the Soviets.
What role did Pakistan have in the present conflict and what are the implications of the spread of war to Pakistan?
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