A late, depressing discovery

[mtbc]

I knew that the US had trained and armed insurgents against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Perhaps I was the last to get the memo but it was only today that I discovered that madrassas teaching radical Islam to those such as the founders of the Taliban were backed by the US, among others. In the late eighties, USAID even had school textbooks produced that glorify violence against nonbelievers, which the Taliban have since reprinted. Sometimes US-led foreign policy goes well and the Cold War was a very different time but, on the whole, one can see where some of the present tendency toward isolationism may come from. We see desperate Afghans on the evening news but attention will shift after a while.

Comments

[wpadmirer]

There's a lot of dark history in the USA military/intelligence community. It wouldn't be the first time they supported bad guys to give problems to someone they saw as a bigger enemy, regardless of what it meant to the people and the country.

[conuly]

The USA needs to read the Evil Overlord List, which clearly reminds us all that the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. They are simply your enemy's other enemy.