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Comment by jonnybgood | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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

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