HOUSE REPUBLICAN FROM TEXAS TALKS SOME SENSE

Imagine my surprise to find so much in common with a Republican U.S. congressman from Texas, at least in one area: Our funding of the Taliban with tax dollars in our misguided and short-sighted attempts to further futile agendas.

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, provides a brief history of our actions and rails against the billions we've sent to Afghanistan and our naivete in the "senseless drug war."

Paul, in this 2001 document, spotlights the "staggering sum" of $6 billion spent by the CIA during the late 1970s and early 1980s to prop up fundamentalist Islamic groups in the region, which morphed into the Taliban.

Bin Laden himself received training and weapons from the CIA, and that agency's military and financial assistance helped the Afghan rebels build a set of encampments around the city of Khost. Tragically, those same camps became terrorist training facilities for Bin Laden, who uses some of the same soldiers our military once trained as lieutenants in his sickening terrorist network. Our heroic pilots are now busy bombing the same camps we paid to build, all the while threatened by the same Stinger missiles originally supplied by our CIA. Once again, the stark result of our foreign aid, however well-intentioned, was the arming and training of forces that later become our enemy.

Our foolish funding of Afghan terrorists hardly ended in the 1980s, however. Millions of your tax dollars continue to pour into Afghanistan even today. Our government publicly supported the Taliban right up until September 11. Already in 2001 the U.S. has provided $125 million in so-called humanitarian aid to the country, making us the world's single largest donor to Afghanistan. Rest assured the money went straight to the Taliban, and not to the impoverished, starving residents that make up most of the population. Do we really expect a government as intolerant and anti-west as the Taliban to use our foreign aid for humane purposes? If so, we are incredibly naive; if not, we foolishly have been seeking to influence a government that regards America as an enemy.

Incredibly, in May the U.S. announced that we would reward the Taliban with an additional $43 million in aid for its actions in banning the cultivation of poppy used to produce heroin and opium. Taliban rulers had agreed to assist us in our senseless drug war by declaring opium growing "against the will of God." They weren't serious, of course. Although reliable economic data for Afghanistan is nearly impossible to find (there simply is not much of an economy), the reality is that opium is far and away the most profitable industry in the country. The Taliban was hardly prepared to give up virtually its only source of export revenue, any more than the demand for opium was suddenly going to disappear. If anything, Afghanistan's production of opium is growing. Experts estimate it has doubled since 1999; the relatively small country is now believed to provide the raw material for fully 75% of the world's heroin. How tragic that our government was willing to ignore Taliban brutality in its quest to find "victories" in the failed drug war.