I'm talking about stuff that happened in the 70's-90's, that led to men like Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri becoming powerful. And I'm not "implying that there's all this behind the scenes smoke and mirror stuff", I'm stating it as fact. The CIA and other special ops were active in Afghanistan for decades, and we funneled money and arms to all kinds of radical, Islamist warlords who also happened to oppose the USSR. I'm not going to write a history essay here, but there are literally hundreds of books on the subject, from every point of view and ideological angle. But nobody sincerely argues that the US wasn't active in Afghanistan, and armed/funded shitty warlords for decades. The US was giving hundreds of millions of dollars annually to all kinds of militant factions in Afghanistan in the 80's. A lot of that ended up training and equipping the dudes who became the Taliban--not just the famous leaders, but the thousands and thousands of men who followed them too.