The 9/11 attacks were, among other things, a species of blowback from a covert war that President Reagan and Poppy Bush had waged in the 1980s in Afghanistan. The purpose of the CIA-led campaign in Afghanistan, made famous in the book Charlie Wilson’s War and the film of the same title, was to drive out Russian occupiers who had invaded to prop up a communist regime in the waning days of the Cold War. […]
The Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and for the next five years the country suffered under the chaotic misrule of disputatious warlords. Once in control of Afghanistan’s major population centers, the formerly CIA-backed mujahideen, chief among them Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Nasim Akhundzada, turned Afghanistan into a giant plantation for the cultivation of the opium poppy plant, which is perfectly suited to certain hot and dry but well-irrigated regions of the country, notably a vast endorheic basin known as the Helmand. Infighting between the narco-warlords over control of lucrative trafficking routes made them unpopular with the Afghan people, who chafed at being forced into conditions of narco-serfdom in which they were obligated to grow poppy instead of food crops, as well as other systematic abuses, including the kidnapping and rape of children, especially little boys, whom the pederastic warlords kept as cross-dressed sex slaves.
The Taliban, a puritanical movement of Islamic scholars and students of religion, emerged in 1994 as a reaction to the fractious and iniquitous mujahideen, many of whom hailed from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. After consolidating power over all but the heavily Tajik north of Afghanistan, the primarily Pashtun Taliban implemented a severely intolerant brand of sharia law. The Taliban are rightly condemned worldwide for their restrictions on women’s freedoms, but their popularity in Afghanistan mainly stemmed from their tough-on-crime policies. The Taliban forbade poppy cultivation; bacha bazi, or boy play; suppressed kidnapping; and in the summer of 2001 completed a countrywide eradication campaign that radically reduced the world supply of heroin.