The US makes a lot of money from the government allowing defense contractors to sell the stuff they design for it to its allies as well. The munitions-export provisions exist because, although we aren't too worried about our allies reselling the tents or latrines we send them to our enemies, we really don't like the idea of having the guns we've manufactured pointed back at us.
A secure softphone implementing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_A_Cryptography is a lot more like a gun than it is like a tent or a latrine, in terms of what an enemy nation that gets their hands on it will do with it.
The "Taliban" were never armed by the US. There were some members who were US allies during the Soviet-Afghan war. Just like they are some members of the Northern Alliance, US ally during the Afghan campaign, that were allies of the Soviet Union.
In the end one war ended and groups broke up. Then the next war came and alliances had changed.
The names may have changed but the people didn't. We funded Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and provided numerous FIM-92 stingers which after the war was over turned into the buyback fiasco, where many of these stingers were never recovered.
Not to mention the third-party plausible denability effect, through which arms may not have passed directly to "Muj" or Taliban, but were supplied by the US.
So to say the "Taliban" were never armed is completely factually incorrect, both in relevance to the Soviet war and the current one.
If you want to learn more about the US involvement as the number one arms dealer in the word, the revised Shadow Factory book is out and worth the long read.
> So to say the "Taliban" were never armed is completely factually incorrect
By this logic the US has armed every one of its enemies. I said the US never armed the Taliban. You are saying that through enough backchannels and shifting alliances the US did arm the Taliban. Now who is being obtuse?
The US funnelled hundreds of millions of $ through Pakistan to help fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The CIA also provided direct support, in training and weapons, etc.
Here's an Afghan with a Stinger missile (and there are lots of similar photos), not sold on the open market then, could realistically only have been acquired in bulk with US government assistance:
So, would that also cover citizens? As in, if I made my own encryption method and then supplied that to some friends overseas, would that be violating munitions exporting if crypto was still covered?
Essentially, yes. A well educated person with the motivation and no cooperation from existing tech is very much capable of making the state department rather unhappy by exporting their own creation.
A secure softphone implementing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_A_Cryptography is a lot more like a gun than it is like a tent or a latrine, in terms of what an enemy nation that gets their hands on it will do with it.