Weren’t they protecting bin Laden?
The 9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudis lead by a US-trained individual that was later found and executed in Pakistan. The only way Afghanistan was close to any of this was geographically.
charonn0@startrek.website 9 months ago
GreatGrapeApe@reddthat.com 9 months ago
It’s where the majority of Al Qaeda was
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Yeah it’s kinda hard to isolate sunni terrorism to a single location. America and Saudi Arabia funded a whole bunch of extremist madrasa in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a bid to oust the Soviet occupation.
This militant force was primarily led by Arab fighters who operated largely in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan. So the hijackers were mostly Arab, but a lot of their organizational infrastructure operated out of central Asia.
severien@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You (intentionally?) leave out the important detail that the main orchestrator of the attack bin Laden was at the time in Afghanistan and Taliban refused to extradite him.
GreatGrapeApe@reddthat.com 9 months ago
They offered to extradite him if America could prove that he was responsible. This seems reasonable until you realize that the only way to do this would be to offer the Taliban, who never were allies, a list of most of the US’ intelligence assets, so what would happen is they would either give OBL up or not but then would execute everyone supplying info.
It was easier and more expedient for GWB to go to war