You are remembering something I must have forgotten. I recall Clinton taking a shot at Bin Laden with a missile and being derided as blowing up an aspirin fact

You are remembering something I must have forgotten. I recall Clinton taking a shot at Bin Laden with a missile and being derided as blowing up an aspirin factory (Bush made fun of him for this too, long before letting Bin Laden escape from a being surrounded in a hole in the ground), and I recall their policy position was that terrorism was the most significant threat to the US national defense and trying to get airport security money (among other things) into the budget. The country at that time, however, was really mad at him for getting hummers at work, so the Republicans took advantage of his political weakness to take money out of the antiterrorism budget and put it into "Star Wars" defense. They claimed that the biggest threat to Us national security were nukes. They were wrong. And, of course, nobody missed the Taliban because they were all over the news for smashing Buddhas and the throats of unveiled females. They were singly responsible for the influx of gaggles of beautiful Afghani women into US cosmopolitan cities, something that I didn't mind a bit. Perhaps you are referring to something pre-1998 or so, but I honestly don't recall them missing either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.