a_Turk: Wrong, the US supported Afghani civilians who were being butchered by the Russian army. That during the cold war when the USSR was probably your favourite, you shoulda just gone to live there, traitor!
Correct, but don't let him get away with the Chomsky cribbing claim that the U.S. (or its agencies) supported or worked with bin Laden. We did not. UBL was a free-lancer in Afghanistan during the Soviet War. He brought in supplies, equipment and recruits for the anti-Soviet effort in general, without tying himself to any particular organization.
UBL certainly "networked" with other Arabs in Afghanistan during the Soviet war, and earned the respect and even deference of many, but contra Lazarus he did not "lead" anyone, not even the fighters he personally recruited. Furthermore the CIA could not have worked with UBL even if they had wanted to or felt the need to. Even then UBL was urging his fellow Arabs NOT to co-operate with the U.S., and he would certainly never have done so himself.
Bin Laden genuinely believed the Afghans and the Arab fighters could and should defeat the Soviets by themselves, without American help. Retrospectively he believes that they essentially did in fact do so (i.e. that American assistance had a minimal impact, and was really unnecessary, and that the Soviets would have been driven out without the Americans pitching in). These beliefs were and are, of course, thoroughly delusional, but the point is the UBL was so deluded, and would never have accepted any sort of American help.
Notice that when you read these assertions that we "helped" or "worked with" Bin Laden, it is always in the form of a bald assertion, without specifics or documentation.
You do present what appears to be an accurate assessment Bin Laden's lack of DIRECT involvement with the US in the Afghanistan/Soviet war days, but thats certainly not the whole picture, is it? And to say that Bin Laden never led anyone? He most certainly did lead his own band of Arab "freedom fighters", albeit more on making roads and camps and caves in the war with the Soviets.
And now lets be even more accurate, and rather than dismiss totally any US/CIA involvement with the now deemed Afghan terrorists, lets state for the record that some of the Afghan "freedom fighters" the US aided against the Soviets, are now some of the same people we call "terrorists."
If you can stomach this interview of Bin Laden from a few years ago by Robert Fisk of "The Nation", this paragraph is interesting:
I doubt if Osama bin Laden understands the hierarchy of US hate figures--or whether he would care if he did. The Afghan conflict against the Soviets molded him, taught him the meaning of his religion, made him think. "What I lived in two years there," he told me, "I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere." When he brought his 9,000 Arab fighters to support the Afghans in their conflict against the Soviet occupation army, hacking out the mountain trails with his construction equipment, building hospitals and arms dumps, he became a war hero. Some of his current Afghan fellow fighters had been trained earlier by the CIA in the very camps that were the target of the recent US missiles--but whereas they had been called camps for "freedom fighters" when US agents set them up in the early eighties, now they had become camps for "terrorists." He and his comrades never saw "evidence of American help" in Afghanistan, he told me, but he must have been aware of the CIA's presence.
Talks with Osama bin Laden