&gt; <i>Financing the Taliban and Bin-laden to fight the soviets in the 80&#x27;s</i><p>Can anyone make guesses how Afghanistan would have turned out if the Soviets had been let to freely occupy Afghanistan? Would the country have turned into another North Korea, or perhaps something like Afghanistan&#x27;s northern neighbors, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, are today?<p>Or would the secular socialistic and religious elements have gone into civil war anyway, even without the US supporting the religious side?