“The Taliban was virtually created by the I.S.I. [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence], which wanted to insure that a friendly government took over in Afghanistan after the Soviet war. ‘If you think about how Pakistan views Afghanistan, then it’s no surprise that it supported the Taliban,’ Roger Cressey, a former director for Trans-National Threats on the National Security Council, told me [journalist Jane Mayer]. ‘The Taliban provided strategic depth to Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistan political game. Without Pakistani support, the Taliban would have been a bunch of frustrated students of the Koran sitting in coffeehouses.’ ”
– Jane Mayer, “The Search for Osama,” The New Yorker, Aug. 4, 2003