Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has designated the Haqqani network a terrorist organization. What is the Haqqani network?

Wikipedia says that it

is an insurgent group using asymmetric warfare to fight against US-led NATO forces and the government of Afghanistan. Originating in Afghanistan during the mid-1970s, it was nurtured by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) during the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan.

So it was a U.S. ally when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, and it is fighting U.S. and NATO forces now that they are occupying Afghanistan.

See a pattern? The Haqqani network dislikes foreign occupation of their country and is willing to use violence to rid their country of the occupiers.

The designation as a terrorist group, “which will go into effect within 10 days,” the Associated Press reported, “completes an odyssey of sorts for the Haqqanis from the days they partnered with the CIA during the Cold War and were hailed as freedom fighters.”

It’s said that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. The U.S. government has been on both sides of that equation.

Eighteenth-century Americans saw the British as occupiers, and were willing to use violence to throw them out. If Secretary of State Clinton had been a British official in the 1770s, would she have designated the Sons of Liberty a “foreign terrorist organization”? Apparently so.

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Sheldon Richman (photo) is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of The Freeman magazine.