Word: mujahedeen
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...United Front is an alliance of convenience among widely divergent groups ranging from veteran anti-Soviet mujahedeen to commanders of the former Soviet-backed regime - a series of Uzbek, Tajik and Hazari militias based on ethnic lines, united mainly by an enmity to the Taliban and the majority Pashtun ethnic group they represent. Other than that alliance of convenience, they are extremely wary of one another. And nobody is going to make the mistake of calling them "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers," as President Reagan famously said of their mujahedeen forebears in the 1980s...
...helping the Taliban to power was based in large part on self-interest. Afghanistan descended into chaos once the superpowers lost interest in 1989 - the Soviets withdrew as a prelude amid the collapse of their empire, and the U.S. stayed out of the ongoing battle of the mujahedeen to unseat Moscow's puppet government. By 1992, the Afghan warriors President Reagan had heralded as the "moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers" were each others' throats in a bloody civil war that had killed many thousands of Afghans and showed no signs of ending. Pakistan helped create and train the Taliban...
...wealthy Saudi heir had been the prime organizer of volunteers for the 'jihad' against the Soviet invasion. That made him a key player in an effort backed by the CIA and the intelligence agencies of Egypt and Saudi Arabia to funnel aid, equipment, training and volunteers to the Afghan mujahedeen. Many of the "Arab Afghans," as the volunteers became known, had been radical Islamist dissidents in their home countries, and their pro-Western governments were only too happy to ship them off to fight the Russians. But the 'jihad' experience forged unprecedented bonds among the world's radical Islamists, turning...
...Soviet era gunships arrived from Ukraine, and just in time from the government's point of view. It's a devastating weapon against guerrillas, as the Afghan mujahedeen found during the 1980s - it was only after the Afghans got Stinger missiles from the U.S. that they could counter those gunships, and the Albanian fighters in Macedonia obviously don't have anything like that...
...while enthusiasts of such Reagan-era proxy warriors as the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahedeen insist that the way forward in Iraq is to increase pressure and to arm the ragtag collection of opposition organizations gathered under the banner of the Iraqi National Congress, U.S. allies in the region believe such a policy would be at best ineffective, and at worst a recipe for the sort of chaos that has literally reduced Afghanistan to rubble over the past decade. Regional stakeholders such as Saudi Arabia might be more inclined to sign off on a direct U.S. invasion to depose...