It may be worth following the career of Ayman al-Zawahiri to understand al Qaeda. The following is from memory so may be a little inaccurate.

Briefly, he was a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. When the Muslim Brotherhood decided to pursue revolution by peaceful means, he split from it. In Pakistan he met bin Laden

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, there was much debate among the Arab jihadis and some assassinations too, about where the jihad should proceed. Some wanted to attack the near enemy - the supposedly Islamic-in-name-only governments of Muslim countries and others the far enemy - the US of A, for its support of these governments. There were factions, and one that became Al Qaeda chose the far enemy.

As Amity pointed out, the NYT pretty much carried everything but the actual date of the hit on America. If anything, the squabbling over internal politics - over Clinton, and wedge issues, and such - and not paying enough attention to the threat, is our collective fault. We find ourselves in an unpleasant place because of past mistakes. To extricate ourselves will take positive action, not just retreating into Fortress America and lowering our taxes.

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If you read history, you will find that it was by 1970 or so that US domestic oil production no longer covered domestic consumption and the US lost control of oil prices. It is within a few years of that huge amount of dollars started flowing to oil producing countries and some fraction of that started funding fundamentalist Islamic movements. If you don't want to fight wars or have foreign entanglements, find a substitute to the internal combustion engine powered by petroleum. That really, is the most pacifist move that you can make.

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IMO, financing the Afghan jihad was a huge mistake. The Afghan war may have contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union. But it also gave the scattered fundamentalists of many countries the opportunity to congregate, under Western and Pakistani umbrella, and internationalize their individual plans for havoc.

The US and the Soviet Union, not having let Afghans muddle through their problems, but making it infinitely more lethal by arming one side or the other, over the 1970s and 80s, have a moral obligation to set things right there.

The US neglected to do that in 1990 and then neglected to do that in 2002. We can hope it does it right the third time.

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The obligation, for the libertarians among us, is as follows by analogy, if you've been profiting by slavery, then simply stopping slavery is not enough; you have to make up for it, and yes, that includes taxation.

Posted before:

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/AllDocsByUNID/d9fb1f92f03c0facc1256e3f003d4697

As of 2004, 3 million Afghans had returned home, 3 million still remaining outside Afghanistan.

We should leave Afghanistan to the Afghani. Will there be horror there if we leave? Yes. There will be even more if we stay.

There was much more horror before we arrived than after. This is an objective fact, e.g., measurable by how many Afghans were and remain as refugees outside Afghanistan.

May your tribe increase!

Have any of you thought about how the world would change if the USA just surrendered in the drug war and let human adults ingest any weed or flower that we want to?

It has been tried in the past, in fact in the opposite direction. With not good results, either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_wars

Any attempt to relate US involvement during the Soviet Invasion and today's US actions is, at best, futile and, at worst, misleading.

That is the Obama Slogan: Let us look forward only, never look back.

http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?&act_id=1594&menu=11d

posted here before, I think.

One of the main points is that perhaps the international community should let Burma and Afghanistan join Turkey and India as producers of licit opium.

The DEA confirms the UN findings re: poppy ban by Taliban.

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n904/a07.html

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/561/context/archive

"The Bush administration has given Afghanistan $43 million including $10 million for “other livelihood and food security programs,” a reference to the ruling Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation that dramatically changed the economy of the war-torn nation......Colin Powell, in announcing the gift, said the administration hoped that the Taliban "will act on a number of fundamental issues that separate us: their support of terrorism, their violation of internationally recognized human rights--especially their treatment of women and girls--and their refusal to resolve Afghanistan's civil war through a negotiated settlement." He also called on other nation's to join the U.S. with “dispatch and energy.”"