https://uk.news.yahoo.com/islamic-state-group-reaches-afghanistan-pakistan-183209282.html#dEQ08sl extremists vs extremists! or the enemy of my enemy is my enemy (or friend depends on who`s winning)
Isn't that what happened in libya and syria... Pick which lot of nutters to support [sell guns to] and hope 'your' nutters win... [or sell to both and hope they kill each other]... *awaits 'it's a bit more complicated than that' or the like from [most likely] nexxo*
No, that's pretty much the tl;dr version. I suspect that ISIS will implode in the end. While it has an enemy to fight it is sticking together, but once they have conquered their territory and killed all their opponents and raped all the women, and have to get down to the boring mundanity of running a country, they'll turn on each other. First, they attract too many members who just like the killing and raping, and second integral to their ideology is the premise that you prove your piety by killing those who are not. Hence a holier-than-thou competition will ensue with members getting killed over increasingly trivial "offenses". It is already happening, in fact: one of their leaders was executed for smoking, and other members have left ISIS because they couldn't quit the cigs.
The real question is, who would win in a fight between a dragon and an apache? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cSzw9eUZOs
Heh, remember when the Taliban were our friends against the Russians? (depending on how you see/believe the mudjahideen-taliban origins)
They were never our friends, just an ally seemingly easy to manipulate for the purposes of the cold war. The BBC conveniently misses out Britain's involvement in the supply of arms and training to mujahedeen groups from around 1980, though Gerald Seymour did write a very topical book on the subject in 1984, "In Honour Bound". The Taliban were still being treated as such for some time after. I don't have a citation for this, but there is at least one biographical book out there that alleges Bin Laden was flown to the UK while he was still an unknown name and given training by our forces.
There is no prima facie reason to doubt that. Consider who Bin Laden is, or was anyway. If he had been born in America he name would have been Rockefeller, or possibly Koch. The Bin Ladens are a massively wealthy family of Saudi construction magnates, worth billions of dollars. Osama seems to have been something of the prodigal son who went off to fight with the Mujihadeen in Afganistan after the Soviets invaded in 1979. We helped him because "The enemy of my enemy, etc etc" and since many top level Americans knew his family (especially the Bushes), he was less of a scary figure than the other Afghan leaders. After the Soviets left Afghanistan, so did Bin Laden and while I'm not sure what he was up to during this time, it stands to reason that the son of a massively wealthy Saudi family who fought heroically against the Soviets during the cold war would be welcomed with open arms in the UK. it wasn't until 1991 and the first Gulf War that bin Laden turned against the Americans. News reports of US soldiers, including women, "defending" Saudi Arabia against the Iraqis really did not sit well with him and this was the genesis of what led to 9-11 and what followed. Al Queda wasn't all that active until the late 90s and the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998 was their first real operation and no one paid much attention to them until 2001.
