" I believed in the Taliban when they first appeared,” Karzai later conceded. “I gave them fifty thousand dollars to help them out, and then handed them a cache of weapons I had hidden near Kandahar. . . . They were good people initially, but the tragedy was that very soon after they were taken over by the I.S.I. "

― Steve Coll , Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016