The talaban (led by a group of religious leaders) was pretty much unheard of as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Rashid Dostum, and other war lords were fighting. The taliban’s rise seemed to be quick and pushed back the warlords. I only remember hearing about the talaban after1995
The Al Qaeda was a splinter group formed by Osama bin Laden that seemed to be mostly an unforeseen consequence of us training of the Mujahedeen. Never heard of him until 2001.
I was watching arena television and checking the news at the time, so this is mostly from memory.
Of course there are huge gaps in what’s provided by Wikipedia. You may not have heard of the Taliban, I certainly hadn’t, but the CIA was well aware. Previous to taking control of Kabul in 1996 the Taliban received support not only from the CIA, but also from Pakistan’s intelligence agency (ISI), the American owned oil corporation, UNOCAL, and Delta, the Saudi Oil Company. The US government wanted UNOCAL to build an oil pipeline to the Caspian Sea region through Afghanistan. They were hoping the Taliban would not only take control of Afghanistan, but also lure the Soviets into battle. The US government counted on the Taliban to win and unite as many factions as possible within the country. This would of course facilitate the pipeline construction. The US has never openly acknowledged this connection, of course, and that would explain why Wikipedia hasn’t included it, but the connection was clear. Leili Helms, niece of Richard Helms, former director of US Central Intelligence, was even hired by the Taliban to be their PR representative in Washington. Yet another example of the close association the US had with the Taliban.
An article appearing in the German daily Frankfurter Rundschau, October 1996, reported that UNOCAL has been given the go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul (Taliban) to build the pipeline from the Caspian Sea region via Afghanistan to Pakistan. It would lead from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean coast. The same article noted that UN diplomats in Geneva believe that the war in Afghanistan is the result of a struggle between Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and the United States, to secure access to the rich oil and natural gas of the Caspian Sea. Other than UNOCAL, oil companies that are involved in exploiting Caspian oil, include AMOCO, BP, Chevron, EXXON, and Mobile.
If you examine the reports around that time in the International press as well as the US media you’ll find ample corroboration for the story about the pipeline project. This is an essential piece in the puzzle for understanding US relations with the Taliban and its’ rise to power.
In 1995 a fire in an apartment in Manilla led police and US investigators to discover on a computer hard drive a plot to assassinate Bill Clinton and the Pope. Of course the FBI was all over this case since it involved a presidential assassination plot. This was very early in the US government’s awareness about the existence of Al Qaeda, but long before 2001. The computer also contained plans for the Bojinka plot to hijack several passenger airliners and fly them into US targets including the World Trade Center, White House, the Pentagon, CIA headquarters, Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica building in San Francisco and others. The apartment belonged to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who got away. Abdul Hakim Ali Hashim Murad was arrested by Filipino investigators, later extradicted to the United States, and convicted in May, 1998.