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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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9/11 was Al-Qaeda, not the Taliban.

The Taliban fought the US after (a) the US demanded that Bin Laden etc. were handed over and (b) the US joined with the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban. If the Taliban had demanded the extradition of Pinochet (if he had been in hiding in the US) and allied with China to invade the US, I imagine that Americans would also have turned on the Taliban - not that the US was ever actually allied with or directly helping the Taliban, but I'm sure your suggestion to the contrary was just terse writing.

Well you've really changed my mind with that bit of scintillating criticism.

This is unnecessary dickishness. You do this often enough that you can't pretend you haven't been warned, and you are a grown man who can control your mouth and your typing fingers, so stop pretending you can't help it.

9/11 was Al-Qaeda, not the Taliban.

Bin Laden got his start in the mujahideen in Afghanistan, fighting the Soviets, supported and trained by the US. Is there an objection here beyond terminology?

[EDIT] - no, wait, it isn't even terminology. Your correction is straightforwardly less accurate than the comment it aims to correct. Didn't the Taliban get significant support from the US as well?

Bin Laden got his start in the mujahideen in Afghanistan, fighting the Soviets, supported and trained by the US.

(1) I specifically said Al-Qaeda, because the original claim was about groups, not individuals. For the specific claim I made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden

Bin Laden was able to get Al-Qaeda going with his own money.

That bin Laden was a CIA proxy turned rogue makes for a great story and many people find it "too good not to be true". It supports non-interventionist ideologies, especially those who have never forgiven the US and the mujahideen for defeating the Soviets. The only problem is that it is not true, unless the CIA is far better at covering its tracks than we know. The suggestion in your comment (which may just be amphiboly) that he was trained by the US is a new one to me, though. I suppose it makes the story even better?

You could say that Al-Qaeda benefited INDIRECTLY from US aid to the mujahideen, but that's a clear motte-and-bailey. The original claim was (sarcastically) "we've never given weapons to some indigenous radical group because they were fighting the Russians, only to have them turn on us once that war was over!"

(2) "Didn't the Taliban get significant support from the US as well?"

You mean the organisation founded two years after the war with the Soviet-backed government ended? No.

However, someone could argue that the Taliban was the successor group of some mujahideen (specifically Pashtun ones around Kandahar) who had US support during the war, so I deliberately focused the discussion on Al-Qaeda, who seem to have undertaken 9/11 independently of the Taliban. Bin Laden claimed that Al-Qaeda was operating independently of the Taliban in the 9/11 attacks. He also did not attribute responsibility to the Taliban in tapes discovered in Afghanistan that (apparently) recorded bin Laden talking candidly. This was prior to his later (2004) admission of responsibility for the attack.

Indeed, the Taliban condemned the attack and were open (officially) to extraditing bin Laden to an Islamic country, if the US presented evidence. Of course, this offer was probably bullshit, and the US was justified in attacking the Taliban. However, the point is that 9/11 was not blowback for supporting a side in Afghanistan. If anything, it was the failure by the Bush I and Clinton administrations to support the establishment of a non-Taliban government in the mid-1990s that led to Afghanistan becoming a safe haven for bin Laden.