Why wasn't Clinton supporting Massood who was fighting the Taliban and Bin Laden? This was a clear case of "fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here."
Yet because Clinton wanted to obtain his objectives: stability, get bin Laden, build an oil pipeline, please the Pakis, to name a few, he tried to treat the Taliban as the legitimate govt. He simply didn't want to see that the Taliban were harboring and protecting bin Laden and lying to our faces about it.
BTW, read Ghost Wars by Steve Coll. Long read, but excellently traces the history of how bin Laden came to be (and all the players involved) from the Soviet invasion to 9/11.
It is also interesting that the Bush II admin had decided to go after bin Laden in late April of '01 and finalized a plan to use Massoud (with backing of Pashtun Hamid Karzai and other tribal leaders) a week before 9/11.