Saudi Arabia began financing global Islamism in the early 70's, before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia also gave more money to the jihadis in Afghanistan than the US. Who was following who? Saudi Arabia was near the USSR, it was ideologically opposed to the USSR. Why the assumption that Muslim countries are too dumb to have thoughts of their own? The Saudis are very sophisticated and have extended their influence throughout the Sunni Muslim world, Western Europe, and even in the US.
What madrassas did the West finance? Did they send imams and textbooks which taught that you go to heaven for "jihad"? Did they create the theological framework? Did they create the ideological framework in the 1920's with Mawdudi and and al-Banna? Where did Mawdudi draw his inspiration and ideology (of global jihad extending shariah to all countries) from? America? This is an internal virus threatening to infect the rest of the world. The tendency to blame everything on outsiders is holding the entire Muslim world down.
Let's postulate for a moment the myth that the West is why Muslims from Pakistan believe that you go to heaven for killing people, What does the West have to do with Islamists in the Philippines, China, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Kashmir, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Bosnia, Nigeria, Algeria, Somalia and so on?
Since you call yourself an American i would request you to point the finger at USA :) then the rest of the world.
"Inconveniently, invading Afghanistan was not ObL – at least not directly. First, regardless of the brutality of the Taleban inside Afghanistan, the U.S. was friendly with the Taleban. Through the Clinton administration, and into George W. Bush administration, the U.S. supported the Taleban government. In fact, Colin Powell gave the Taleban government $43 million in the summer of 2001 to facilitate progress on a pipeline through Afghanistan. That was the carrot. The stick was – do it or we will invade by October. Wow! Time lines from the Bush administration.
The short story is that Hamid Karzai, former UNOCAL advisor in Afghanistan, became the head of the new Afghan government. The pipeline project moved forward, and the Bush administration jumped off to the next big energy target for control – Iraq. But Afghanistan would not, and did not, go away. Now the people of Afghanistan want Karzai out for corruption and failure."
OpEdNews October 24th, 2008