>But then (remember Brezinsky's interview?), the Taliban were the invention of the USA/CIA, as a means of destabilizing the socialist government Afghanistan had in the eighties, and saddling the USSR with their own private Vietnam war. Which worked, except that the Taliban refused to vanish after accomplishing their mission.

Uh, not quite. We were funding and arming many different groups of mujahideen in Afghanistan. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mujahideen:

The best-known and arguably most feared mujahideen were the various loosely-aligned opposition groups that fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s and then fought against each other in the subsequent Afghan Civil War.

The mujahideen were significantly financed, armed, and trained by the United States (during the Carter and Reagan administrations) and by Pakistan (during the Zia-ul-Haq military regime), the People's Republic of China, and Saudi Arabia. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was the interagent used in the majority of these activities to disguise the sources of support for the resistance...

Following the Soviet retreat, many of the larger mujahideen groups began to fight each other. After several years of this fighting, a village mullah organized religious students into an armed movement, with the backing of Pakistan, who was being funded by the United States, which found the existing government to be too Russian-influenced, even following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This movement became known as the Taliban, meaning "students", and referring to the Saudi-backed religious schools which produced Islamic fundamentalism along the pacific coast of Asia. With each success the Taliban had, their popularity and numbers grew.

The author implies that the US was involved in the creation of the group, but only indirectly at best. From what I've read it was the doing of the ISI.