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Comment by jmknoll | Hacker News Reader

Here is a (very) incomplete list of recent CIA activities in South Asia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Pakistan

Going back to the 80's, you have Operation Cyclone, which was the CIA operation to arm and finance the mujahadeen against the USSR, which led to the creation of the Taliban, 10 years of brutal theocratic rule and ethnic cleansing in Afghanistan, and ultimately to the September 11th attacks on the United States, and to the (still ongoing) NATO occupation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

I don't know much about India, but it looks like the CIA may be implicated in the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and bombed a plane in the 50's in an attempt to kill Zhou Enlai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_India

I think GP is pretty justified in saying that the presence of a CIA/NSA operative in South Asia would leave a bad taste in his mouth.

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> which was the CIA operation to arm and finance the mujahadeen against the USSR, which led to the creation of the Taliban

That is actually not what happened. The mujahadeen are not precursors of the Taliban. Matter of fact, the mujahadeen and Taliban fought each other. Many members of the mujahadeen left to join the Taliban but they are not the same. The Taliban was started by students.

Indeed, but the Taliban's rapid recruitment and easy access to heavy weapons was a direct consequence of the US support of the Mujahideen

Mujahideen just the plural form of mujahid: a person who engages in Jihad. It is not a specific group. The term applies equally well to the Taliban as the many other groups that operated in Afghanistan.

Not in this case. The mujahideen were a specific group of warlords who fought against the taliban (which just means 'students' by the way).

No, they really were not a specific group. There was eventually an organization that organised some of the biggest groups of mujahideen in Afghanistan into a couple of alliances (the Peshawar 7 and the Teheran Eight being two of them), but there were many other groups as well.

The Taliban did not in any case organize until after infighting broke out again among those groups, and the Taliban's growth came in large part exactly because these groups were far more disunited at the point the Taliban was rising than during the war against the Soviets.

Mujahideen are not a single group of people, check the meaning. Taliban was started by Omar who was trained by Pakistan (with CIA and Saudi Arabia throught it) during Soviet-Afgan war. He used books about jihad made and published by University of Nebraska-Omaha as a part of education. That's the only 2 links I know.

AHH yes how could I forget the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan. Thanks for the reminder!

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