occupation of Kabul: Washington DC. Yet this was not the case.
Some saw in it an opportunity: Zalmay Khalilzad, who was to be
sent to Kabul in January 2002 by President George W. Bush as his
Special Envoy to Afghanistan, published an article in The
Washington Postarguing that it was time for the USA to reengage
Afghanistan, maintaining that ‘the departure of Osama Bin Laden,
the Saudi financier of various anti-U.S. terrorist groups, from
Afghanistan indicates some common interest between the United
States and the Taliban’ (Khalilzad, 1996). Once it became clear
that Bin Laden had notleft Afghanistan, but indeed had been a
principal financier of the Taliban’s final thrust to Kabul (LeVine,
1997), Dr Khalilzad distanced himself from this position (see
Khalilzad and Byman, 2000). The State Department’s reaction
caused more controversy. The Acting Spokesman, Glyn Davies,
remarked that ‘the United States finds nothing objectionable in the
policy statements of the new government, including its move to
impose Islamic law’ (Voice of America, 27 September 1996). A
week after the Taliban seized the Afghan capital, Assistant
Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphel stated that ‘We
have no quarrel with the Taliban in terms of their political legit-
imacy or lack thereof’ (BBC Newshour, 3 October 1996).
Comments such as this prompted widespread suspicions that the
State Department, driven by an anti-Iranian zeal, had directly mas-
terminded the Taliban takeover. No credible evidence to support
such a strong thesis ever surfaced, but there was a good deal of
evidence to support a weaker and in some ways no-less-damning
claim, namely that the Clinton Administration had culpably mis-
read the situation in Afghanistan, and that yet again, Washington
was being led by Islamabad down a very treacherous pathway.
Between 1994 and 1996, Ahmed Rashid has argued, ‘the USA sup-
ported the Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia, essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-
Iranian, anti-Shia, and pro-Western’ (Rashid, 2000: 176). On occa-
sion, this led US officials to make quite fatuous assertions about
the Taliban, such as the comment made by one State Department
staffer to the writer and film maker Richard Mackenzie: ‘You get
The Rise and Rule of the Taliban, 1994-2001 227