I rather enjoyed that show History Bites........
In '78, when a pro-Soviet regime took hold in Afghanistan, the US began investing in an alliance with neighboring Pakistan, where the army led by General Zia, an orthodox Muslim, had recently deposed and murdered Bhutto, the elected prime-minister.
After '79, when Russian troops invaded Afghanistan to shore up the Marxist regime, the proxy warriors of the US were the mujahideen. Aid to the mujahideen — rag-tag groups of Muslim conservatives without money or power — had begun even before the Soviet invasion, and authorized by Carter himself. Reagan, rejecting containment or negotiation, raised the aid twenty fold and went full-steam for a Soviet “roll back,” determined to bleed them white and to hand them their own Vietnam.
With Operation Cyclone, the CIA and Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, Richard Perle, now began facilitating the real task at hand in Afghanistan: killing Russians. On the White House lawn in 1985, Reagan introduced the bearded leaders of the mujahideen to the US media: “These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.”[7] One such mujahideen leader was Osama bin Laden.
3quarksdaily: America, the Cold War, and the Taliban