As the United States continues attempting to disrupt the operations and funding of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network, the New York Times reported that President Bush has approved efforts to strengthen militant groups opposing the Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

The Taliban is believed to be sheltering bin Laden’s network against U.S. requests that he be turned over.

In order to assist in the Northern Alliance and several other factions vying to rule Afghanistan, the U.S. has decided to secretly back the opposing forces and supply them with financing to purchase more armaments and supplies to continue an uprising.

Sound familiar?

Was it not the U.S. that supported Afghanistan and the people who were to become the Taliban in their fight against the then “fearful and evil Red Empire?” What happened there?

Some would say that after we had used the Afghani “freedom fighters,” as the press donned them in 1979, to stop the spread of what we were taught to be the red plague of communism, we left Afghanistan shattered as we cut off its funding.

Of course, we as Americans didn’t see it that way. We were the good guys, right? We stopped what we believed to be an atheist country from invading a deeply religious one and did so for all the right reasons. At least that’s how the public was supposed to see it.

Others believe the only reason the U.S. supported Afghanistan against the Russians was to prevent them from holding territory that could pose a serious threat to U.S. interests. Were the Russians to take Afghanistan, they would be within three hundred miles of the Arabian Sea, allowing access to the Indian Ocean. Pakistan would be the only country standing in Russia’s way to controlling a military seaport in the Indian Ocean.

The strategic value of Pakistan’s coast during the Cold War could dramatically have shifted the way the U.S. treated the Soviet threat, and further stretched U.S. military assets.

So, we funded and trained the Afghanis to thwart the Russians to protect our interests, also delving the final blow to a bankrupt Russia. The Soviet Union crumbled not long after its defeat in Afghanistan. Did we only help Afghanistan in order to protect our own interests? We’ve proven through much of history that we don’t usually become involved in conflicts simply out of the kindness of our hearts.

Almost immediately after the Soviets began withdrawing from Afghanistan, so did the U.S. support, leaving the country in ruins. Are we to blame for Afghanistan’s civil and social unrest, or the Taliban’s climb to authority? Not likely. That probably would have happened anyway.

Basically, we use other people’s militaries to do our dirty work when we don’t want our own men involved. Once the deed is done, we forget all about them and leave them to clean up the mess.

What we did wrong was fail to help Afghanistan rebuild after the war. Now they’re angry. We left them to fend for themselves with a devastated country to govern. Does our lack of support now, when we initially came to the rescue, mean we deserve to live in fear of terrorism? Of course not. We did help them remain independent and self-governed, we did not attack them, and they had no right to attack us.

So, we must act to prove that we will not tolerate terrorist actions anywhere in today’s world.

The problem is that we need to do it ourselves. The last time we funded and trained a loose group of fighters in Afghanistan, they quickly turned around and used our own techniques and military organization skills against us.

Now we are funding and supplying several other Afghani military groups, only this time we’re funding groups opposite the Taliban.

If we really want to maintain military superiority, we need to do the work ourselves. Simply training and funding military groups who are willing to fight against groups we don’t want to fight ourselves is not a good idea. We have no control over these groups. Who is to say that they will always see eye to eye with us? Twenty years down the road, it might be the Northern Alliance or whatever group ends up in control that we will have to fight, and they will have the arsenal to use against us.

If we feel that it is necessary to uproot the Taliban, we need to do it ourselves and stop training and supplying these aggressive and uncontrollable militant groups.