Mark Carroll's Journal

I knew that the US had trained and armed insurgents against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Perhaps I was the last to get the memo but it was only today that I discovered that madrassas teaching radical Islam to those such as the founders of the Taliban were backed by the US, among others. In the late eighties, USAID even had school textbooks produced that glorify violence against nonbelievers, which the Taliban have since reprinted. Sometimes US-led foreign policy goes well and the Cold War was a very different time but, on the whole, one can see where some of the present tendency toward isolationism may come from. We see desperate Afghans on the evening news but attention will shift after a while.