In 1991, Pakistan's intelligence services stashed a massive cache of assault rifles and ammunition at a secret weapons dump in Spin Boldak, rushing armaments across the border as a (phony) deadline loomed for ending direct supply of their favoured combatants in Afghanistan's civil war.
Seventeen tunnels beneath the dump contained enough weaponry to arm thousands of soldiers.
Three years later, the Taliban broke the depot open and handed out rifles – still wrapped in plastic – to volunteers summoned from local madrassas, an incident documented in the authoritative book Ghost Wars.
Within 24 hours, the Taliban captured Kandahar, Mullah Omar took possession of the governor's headquarters, and the airport was seized – with its six MiG-21 fighter jets, four Mi-17 transport helicopters, fleet of tanks and armed personnel carriers.
The Taliban gutting of Afghanistan was on, nearly all opponents swept aside, Kabul falling with barely a whimper.
As Ghost Wars author Steve Coll so dryly put it: "Benazir Bhutto was suddenly the matron of a new Afghan faction."
The late – twice – but no longer future prime minister of Pakistan was far, far from a stupid woman. The Taliban was a gamble she took, cunningly if not without considerable trepidation – and certainly at the behest of a powerful intelligence service, the ISI, she feared but had to accommodate, in the doomed hope of retaining office.
But make no mistake: The woman who is now being so widely mourned – assassinated last week, perhaps by the very elements she empowered more than a decade ago – was nurturing stepmother to terrorists incubated under her watch; the same Islamist fanatics she inveighed against during the election campaign that came to a screeching halt in the calamitous assault on her motorcade.
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