Rigby5
Diamond Member
haha wrong aQ didn’t exist until 88
Al Qaeda is not what bin Laden or anyone called the Arab foreign legion of the Mujahedeen.
But that is what the Pashtun Mujahedeen taught the Arab foreign legion to say, in order to ask directions back to their base camp if they got lost.
The is all "al Qaeda" means is "base camp" in Pashto.
So all the Arab foreign legion became known as al Qaeda from the very beginning, in 1979.
Al Qaeda existed 1979 as much as it did after 1988.
It was never their official name and was not used by bin Laden or anyone involved.
{...
Experts debate the notion al-Qaeda attacks were an indirect result from the American CIA's Operation Cyclone program to help the Afghan mujahideen. Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, has written that al-Qaeda and bin Laden were "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies", and that "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."[410]
Munir Akram, Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations from 2002 to 2008, wrote in a letter published in The New York Times on January 19, 2008:
The strategy to support the Afghans against Soviet military intervention was evolved by several intelligence agencies, including the C.I.A. and Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. After the Soviet withdrawal, the Western powers walked away from the region, leaving behind 40,000 militants imported from several countries to wage the anti-Soviet jihad. Pakistan was left to face the blowback of extremism, drugs and guns.[411]
...}