I don't believe there was any contact between Osama bin Ladin and the US back in the days of the Afghan war.
I think there would have to have been some. The CIA was supplying virtually everybody who was fighting the Russians there, why wouldn’t they have worked with Osama? Certainly there would have been no policy against it, and given the policy framework in operation then, they would have been remiss in their duties if they hadn’t helped him.
I’ve read a number of things claiming fairly credibly that AQs initial recruitment in SE Asia was facilitated by US agencies (which makes sense, since Osama had no network here then, and the US did), and I’ve seen debriefing statements from people who fought in that war that mentioned frequent visits by American operatives to Osama’s base in Peshawar.
I believe these stories because it is perfectly logical that they should be true, and in fact completely unreasonable that they should not be true. The US wanted to make sure the Soviets had the worst possible time in Afghanistan, and Osama had the same objective. Why wouldn’t they cooperate?
If you read my original comment, you’ll see that it was not some nonsense about how the CIA created AQ, which would have been ridiculous. I wasn’t blaming the US for its role there. I cited it as an example of a course of action that made perfect sense according to the standards of the time, but seemed less ideal in retrospect. I cited the decision not to remove Saddam at the end of the first Gulf war as another example of the same phenomenon. I was talking about the impact of hindsight in evaluations of past decisions. There are a lot of things we would have done differently if we knew the future. There are things we are doing right now that we would do differently if we knew the future. The point is that these are not necessarily bad decisions, and that when we look back on them from the vantage point of the future, we will have to remember that there were things we didn’t know when those decisions were made.
to the extent Osama bin Ladin independently assisted the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation, he WAS at that time assisting the cause of freedom, even if he did not value freedom for its own sake.
What freedom would that have been? By all accounts I’ve seen, Afghans enjoyed more freedom under the Taraki and Karmal governments than they ever had in the past, even if those rulers were Russian puppets. Would you say that Afghans had more freedom under the Taliban – at which point they were free from foreign domination - than they did under those governments? Since they now have a puppet government again, are they now un-free? |
