Quotation

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Mutahir Ahmed, Radical Islam and Central Asia, in: Eurasian Studies 
(sponsored by the Turkish International Cooperation Agency), 3, Fall 1994, p. 
54-60, here p. 59 f.:

"In present scenario (1994!), the West and the US do not want to see the 
emergence of any fundamentalist militant activities which further destabilize 
the region. A US-delegation led by Peter Bruley visited Pakistan in April 
1992 to investigate the allegations that Islamabad was backing certain 
terrorist movements (!). The Western media has been presenting Pakistan as 
stronghold of Muslim fundamentalist forces. The Afghan and Kashimiri 
resistance groups are being dubbed as "terrorist" on contrary, the government 
of Pakistan denied this allegation and assured that there is no training 
camps in Pakistani territory, and In Central Asian, its relation are totally 
based on trade and business and not on religious grounds. Inspite of this, 
there are still some extremist groups who desire to see a greater bloc of 
Muslim countries structing from Kyrghistan on the borders of China in the 
east to Mauritania on the African coast.
The same fear was also expressed by the former president of Afghanistan 
Najibullah, in an interview to The New York Times (!), he urged the US  to 
help him to crush the "fundamentalist guerillas" in his country and overt the 
spread of fundamentalism to the neighboring former Soviet republics. " We 
have a cmmon task, Afghanistan, the US and the civilized world, to launch a 
joint struggle against fundamentalism." He further added that Afghanistan had 
a strategic and political significance and that it serves as a bulmark 
against the spread of fundamentalism to the Muslim republics in Central Asia. 
He warned "If Afghanistan is lost it turned into a Center of fundamentalism, 
you will lose the Central Asian republics."

Two years later the Taliban came on power...

"Think tanks", hmmm?

Kurt-Werner Pörtner