The National Security Archive has a large document dump on U.S.-Taliban relations and intelligence reports from the Clinton administration. It’s worth wading through if you want to learn more about the challenges we’re facing right now in Afghanistan. This excerpt is from the end:
As a collection, the documents reproduced here provide an interesting illustration of the complexity of dealing with a repugnant political regime. U.S. State Department officials describe Taliban social policies as abominable; yet they find themselves engaged in regular diplomatic contact and even supporting potential commercial deals. While the State Department is studying reports of growing domestic opposition to the Taliban (prompting Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to write in the margins of one memo, "This is encouraging"), UNOCAL (the Union Oil Company of California) is sponsoring a Taliban delegation on a tour of the United States in hopes of getting permission to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. One of the visitors, Mullah Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban Minister of Education and Minister of Information and Culture, is described as a "key figure in the Taliban’s ideological projects," and an individual even more "extreme on social issues than most Taliban." The State Department confesses U.S. policy "will inevitably be messy and the policy we follow will be ridden with inner tensions, as we simultaneously engage with the Taliban and criticize their abuses."
A more updated version might read, “U.S. policy will inevitably be messy and the policy we follow will be ridden with inner tensions as we simultaneously fight and kill the Taliban and criticize the Karzai regime’s abuses.”
