Former U.S. Special Envoy to the Afghan resistance Edmund McWilliams sent a confidential cable to Washington on February 5, 1993, titled, ” ‘Implications of Continued Stalemate in Afghanistan.’ McWilliams argued that the ‘principled U.S. posture of letting Afghans find solutions to *their problems* fails to take into account a central reality: Intense and continuing foreign involvement in Afghan affairs–by friendly and unfriendly governments and a myriad of well-financed fundamentalist organizations–thus far had precluded Afghans from finding *their own solutions.* ‘ The hands-off policy of the United States ‘serves neither Afghan interests nor our own. …The absence of an effective Kabul government also has allowed Afghanistan to become a spawning ground for insurgency against legally constituted governments.’ ”
– Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, Page 263