Originally posted by Insight
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From Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. Yale Nota Bene Books. p. 39
"[T]he Taliban had spent the summer [of 1995] rebuilding their forces with arms, ammunition and vehicles provided by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and a new command structure created with the help of ISI advisers. The ISI also helped broker an agreement, never made public, between the Taliban and General Rashid Dostum ... to repair Mig fighters and helicopters the Taliban had captured a year earlier in Kandahar, thereby creating the Taliban's first airpower. ... the Taliban quickly mobilised some 25,000 men, many of them fresh volunteers from Pakistan."[6]
So this covers the Pakistani presence, So ....
Ahmed Rashid,
This lack of U.S. interest coincided with the interests of the Pakistani army: to go after Al Qaeda, but to allow the Taliban to resettle in Pakistan. Quite soon the Taliban was once again patronized by the ISI. The reason was that the Pakistani army was deeply offended by the Bonn agreement, which actually gave all power to the Northern Alliance–who were deemed the enemies of Pakistan and the Taliban because they had been backed in the civil war by India, Russia, and Iran (the regional opponents of the Taliban and Pakistan during the 1990s decade-long civil war in Afghanistan). Later, India asserted itself in Afghanistan by opening an embassy and four consulates in Afghanistan and then announced a large reconstruction program in Pakistan. Pakistan’s military told the West that Indian influence was undermining Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan and also subverting Pakistan by funding and supporting the Baloch insurgency in Balochistan province. Today India’s presumed influence in Afghanistan is the principle gripe of the military. I think the Americans knew quite early what was going on between the military and the Taliban, but were prepared to ignore it as long as Musharraf helped out with Al Qaeda and as long as the United States remained bogged down in Iraq.
So not only was Umar being a Stooge, but it's actually a much WORSE form of Stoogery by denying it and trying to be surreptitious. So technically Umar was WORSE than Karzai ....at least Karzai was obvious.

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