[KevinTheOmnivore]

Here's a little piece from the book "Bin Laden: The Man who declared war on America," written by Yossef Bodansky, who was a top advisor to both the departments of State and Defence during I BELIEVE during the term of Bush I. He has also been the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare:

All this time [during the Soviet invasion] the Afghan Jihad was gaining support in Washington, and more money was being appropriated for covert and not-so-covert support for the Afghan mujahideen. The U.S. was convinced that it was supporting a genuine national liberation struggle, albeit with a strong Islamic foundation, and Islamabad went to great lengths to ensure that the U.S. did not discover firsthand the kind of mujahideen the American taxpayers were supporting. Toward this end the CIA was isolated by the ISI (Pakistan's secret police) from the training infrastructure it financed. Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, then head of the ISI Afghan Bureau, stressed that General Akhtar Abdul Rahman Khan, chief of the ISI from 1980 to 1987, "faced many problems with the Americans and the CIA." Akhtar adamantly refused American requests to train the mujahideen or even have direct access to them. "Akhtar never allowed Americans to become directly involved in the Jihad," Yousaf recalled. Akhtar and the ISI high command strongly insisted on "keeping Americans out" of the entire training and supply system they were sponsoring.

So, I guess it varies by who you get the info from, but I think it's rather clear that we provided the infrastructure for Bin Laden's network, despite having little knowledge of what was REALLY going on. Still, whether or not we helped create it seems to be a moot point, and probably something we need to learn from and move on with.