[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
1-packlondoner wrote:
hedo wrote:
Iran and Iraq can’t support terrorism by proxy and not accept responsibilty for their actions. as
You are absolutely right. No nation can. So what about when America has done exactly that in the past?
ie. funding/training/equipping Bin Laden against the Russians
Completely untrue yet you and others keep repeating it.
US citizens funding the IRA
Same as British Muslims contributing to the many Islamic terrorist organizations.
Various elements in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Honduras etc…
Merely to counter the communists meddling.
THAT is why I call for honesty. Islam does not have the monopoly on terrorism and none of us in the west are squeaky clean. We just don’t hear about what OUR side has done every day.
Yet you know all abouty how evil the west is.
The honesty is there. The west is not perfect but it is far better than radical Islam.[/quote]
The honesty is obviously NOT there, when you have just denied known facts. And how on earth is terrorism justified in the name of ‘countering the communist’s medelling’?
I’m not defending the UK and have made it clear that the UK is complicit too but people have only argued about the points I made about America.
Fair enough if you disagree with me but stop getting so cross cos I said America has done some bad stuff in the past to the people that are now attacking us. It’s really quite petty.
To say the US had no involvement with the Taliban is just plain wrong.
Some Wiki data:
As part of a Cold War strategy, in 1979 the United States government under President Jimmy Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski began to covertly fund and train anti-government Mujahideen forces through the Pakistani secret service agency known as Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which were derived from discontented Muslims in the country who opposed the official atheism of the Marxist regime, in 1978. Brzezinski’s recruiting efforts included enlisting Usama bin Laden to fight the Soviets.
Bin Laden became a stinger missile expert in this war earning the nom de guerre “The Archer.” In order to bolster the local Communist forces the Soviet Union - citing the 1978 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good Neighborliness that had been signed between the two countries in 1978 - intervened on December 24, 1979. The Soviet occupation resulted in a mass exodus of over 5 million Afghans who moved into refugee camps in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. More than 3 million alone settled in Pakistan. Faced with mounting international pressure and the loss of approximately 15,000 Soviet soldiers as a result of Mujahideen opposition forces trained by the United States, Pakistan, and other foreign governments, the Soviets withdrew ten years later, in 1989.
The Soviet withdrawal was seen as an ideological victory in the U.S., which ostensibly had backed the Mujahideen through 3 bipartisan US Presidential Administrations in order to counter Soviet influence in the vicinity of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Following the removal of the Soviet forces in 1989, the U.S. and its allies lost interest in Afghanistan and did little to help rebuild the war-ravaged country or influence events there. The USSR continued to support the regime of Dr. Najibullah (formerly the head of the secret service, Khad) until its downfall in 1992. However, the absence of the Soviet forces resulted in the downfall of the government as it steadily lost ground to the guerrilla forces.
Extracts from a 2001 article by Peter Symonds.
Like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the US has repeatedly denied any support for the Taliban. Given the close involvement of the CIA with Pakistan and the ISI throughout the 1980s, however, it is highly implausible that Washington did not know of, and give tacit approval to, the Bhutto government?s plans for the Taliban. Pakistan?s support for the Taliban was an open secret, yet it was only in the late 1990s that the US began to put pressure on Islamabad over its relations with the regime.
Further indirect evidence of US-Taliban relations comes from the efforts of US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, to obtain access to official US documents related to Afghanistan since the Taliban?s formation. Rohrabacher, a supporter of the Afghani king, certainly had an axe to grind with the Clinton administration. But the response to his demands was significant. After two years of pressure, the State Department finally handed over nearly one thousand documents covering the period after 1996, but has stubbornly refused to release any dealing with the crucial earlier period.
While exact details of early US contacts with the Taliban or its Pakistani handlers are unavailable, Washington?s attitude was clear. Author Ahmed Rashid comments: ?The Clinton administration was clearly sympathetic to the Taliban, as they were in line with Washington?s anti-Iran policy and were important for the success of any southern pipeline from Central Asia that would avoid Iran. The US Congress had authorised a covert $20 million budget for the CIA to destabilise Iran, and Tehran had accused Washington of funnelling some of these funds to the Taliban?a charge that was always denied by Washington? [Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, p. 46].
In fact, the period from 1994 to 1997 coincided with a flurry of US diplomatic activity, aimed at securing support for the Unocal pipeline. In March 1996, prominent US senator Hank Brown, a supporter of the Unocal project, visited Kabul and other Afghan cities. He met with the Taliban and invited them to send delegates to a Unocal-funded conference on Afghanistan in the US. In the same month, the US also exerted pressure on the Pakistani government to ditch its arrangements with Bridas and back the American company.
The following month, US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphel visited Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, urging a political solution to the continuing conflict. ?We are also concerned that economic opportunities here will be missed, if political stability cannot be restored,? she told the media. Raphel did not hold talks with the Taliban leaders or offer any other indication of official support. But neither was the US stridently criticising the Taliban on women?s rights, drugs and terrorism, which were to form the basis of its ultimatums to the regime in the late 1990s. On all three issues, there was an abundance
The US attitude to the threat of Islamic extremism was just as hypocritical. In the 1980s, the US not only gave support to the Mujaheddin generally, but also, in 1986, specifically approved a Pakistani plan to recruit fighters internationally to demonstrate that the whole Muslim world supported the anti-Soviet war. Under the plan, an estimated 35,000 Islamic militants from the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and the Philippines were trained and armed to fight in Afghanistan. Prominent among the Arab Afghans, as they were dubbed, was Osama bin Laden, the son of a wealthy Yemeni construction magnate, who had been in Pakistan building roads and depots for the Mujaheddin since 1980. He worked with the CIA in 1986 to build the huge Khost tunnel complex as an arms dump and training facility, then went on to build his own training camp and, in 1989, established Al Qaeda (the Base) for Arab Afghans.
Just a couple of examples. Although I guess that was the ‘good’ kind of terrorism 'cos it was just countering communists, eh?
Terrorism is bad, mmmkay… But don’t think that these people don’t have honest and genuine gripes with the US.