Robert Green wrote:

The US never supported the Taliban. The Taliban wasn't organized
until 1996. We didn't support ANYBODY in that country after the
Russians left in 1988.

Sure we did. Out of the $20B we've given Pakistan, clearly *some* of
it has gone to the Taliban.

Clearly? I'd appreciate a cite.

I wouldn't be surprised if American
dollars helped build OBL's compound near Islamabad. Ever since the
Vietnam war soldiers have complained that we always end up somehow
funding the opposition. That's the problem with foreign aid. It can
always be turned into cash and some of that aid always gets diverted.
Somalia is a classic case where the warlords steal food from aid
shipments to the poor and distribute it to their soldiers and not the
starving non-combatants.

Yep, cash is fungible.


To say that we supported no one after the Sovs left requires
knowledge of "black" CIA programs which I don't believe you have
access to.

But you seem certain "money went to the Taliban." I, too, have a crystal
ball.

Or do you believe we just rolled up the CIA station
chief, all his operators and left a country in flux on the borders of
one of our previously great national enemies? It just doesn't work
that way.

Yes it does work that way. There is STILL complaining about how Carter
rolled-up our intelligence assets the world over.

We don't abandon intelligence assets like that - ever.
They cost too much in money and lives to put in place and could be
unduplicable if we did abandon them, even temporarily.

See "Carter" above.


We're still funneling money to anti-Castro Cubans, for God's sake,
and that "hot spot" went cool 50 years ago. Yet we do trillions in
business with Red China. How could Cuba ever be a threat of the same
nature as China yet we continue to embargo them?

China is not now, never was, and never will be, a military threat to the US.
They have too much to lose in the economic sphere.