FIGHTING THE TALIBAN - We'll never send British troops back to fight in Afghanistan, pledges Fallon as soldiers make on last assault on the Taliban

We'll never send British troops back to fight in Afghanistan, pledges Fallon as soldiers make on last assault on the Taliban

• Michael Fallon says British combat troops would not return to Afghanistan
• Comments come as troops make one last assault on the Taliban
• Royal Artillery gunners fired 105mm shells into enemy positions
• UK preparing to withdraw combat personnel from Afghanistan by January
• Defence Secretary admits 'mistakes were made' by both senior military officials and politicians during the campaign in the country
• 
  

By LARISA BROWN, DAILY MAIL DEFENCE REPORTER IN CAMP BASTION, AFGHANISTAN

PUBLISHED: 01:31 GMT, 27 October 2014 | UPDATED: 08:52 GMT, 27 October 2014

British combat troops will not be deployed in Afghanistan again ‘under any circumstances’, the Defence Secretary has vowed.

Michael Fallon said yesterday: ‘We are not going to send combat troops back into Afghanistan. We’ve made that very, very clear. Under any circumstances, combat troops will not be going in there.’

His comments came as British troops were forced to make one last assault on Taliban positions as they prepared for withdrawal from Camp Bastion. Royal Artillery gunners fired 105mm shells from the base into enemy positions several miles outside the wire.

Scroll down for video 

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Last mission: As British troops prepared to withdraw from Camp Bastion, the Royal Artillery 105mm light gun crew fire out and over the perimeter of the base on their last fire mission to deter Taliban

As the UK prepares to withdraw all combat personnel from Afghanistan by the end of the year, Mr Fallon admitted ‘mistakes were made’ by both senior military officials and politicians during the campaign in the country.

He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: ‘I think the generals have been clear that mistakes were made. Mistakes were made militarily and mistakes were made by the politicians at the time.

‘Clearly the numbers weren’t there at the beginning, the equipment wasn’t quite good enough at the beginning, and we have learnt an awful lot from the campaign.

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Mistakes: Defence Secretary Michael Fallon told the BBC's Andrew Marr show that 'mistakes were made' by both senior military officials 

and politicians during the campaign in Afghanistan

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‘But don’t let’s ignore what has been achieved.

‘We have now some six million people in school in Afghanistan, three million of them girls. There is access in Helmand to healthcare and to education in that province that simply didn’t exist ten years ago.’ Military chiefs admitted yesterday that only ‘time will tell’ whether the Afghan National Security Forces will be able to keep Camp Bastion and the Helmand province out of the hands of the Taliban.

But they said the British campaign in the country had given a new ‘sense of hope’ to the Afghan people and made streets in the UK safer from terrorist threats.

Brigadier Rob Thomson, the most senior British officer in Helmand, said: ‘What we have achieved is something we can be proud of.

British troops have officially withdrawn from Afghanistan

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Time to go home: The Union flag is lowered at Camp Bastion for the final time as British troops handed the base over to Afghan forces

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Handover: British and Afghan soldiers embrace one another other during the handover ceremony of the Camp Bastion-Leatherneck 

military camp complex

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Worry: Military chiefs admitted yesterday that only 'time will tell' whether the Afghan National Security Forces will be able to keep Camp Bastion and the Helmand province out of the hands of the Taliban

‘There are still some challenges in Afghanistan but we can be positive. We are happy we are all going back to our families but we are also sad because we are leaving behind some friends who were courageous on the battlefield.’

Thousands of British servicemen fought for eight years in the heat and dust of Helmand province to keep it out of the hands of the Taliban. They were picked off by snipers, blown up by roadside bombs and 453 men and women lost their lives.

Bastion, surrounded by desert, grew into a sprawling base and its largest had a perimeter of 22 miles.

Now its runway – at one point the fifth busiest UK-operated airstrip – is expected to handle commercial flights.

Cameron commends British killed and injured in Afghanistan

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Lying empty: Soldiers' tented accommodation in Camp Bastion is left deserted. In recent months, hundreds of military vehicles and 

shipping containers with kit have been brought back to the UK

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Base: Bastion, surrounded by desert, grew into a sprawling base and its largest had a perimeter of 22 miles

In recent months, hundreds of military vehicles and shipping containers with kit have been brought back to the UK.

One battalion of troops, believed to be Americans, are expected to be the only foreign forces to remain.

Commenting on the handover, Helmand’s provincial governor Naim Baluch said ‘the UK’s Armed Forces and their allies have helped to improve security in Helmand’.

He added: ‘We are very grateful for the courage and commitment of your soldiers and we are ready to deliver security ourselves.’

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Keeping fit: Once busy with soldiers enjoying a work out, this gym now stands silent, the equipment left behind

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Battle: Thousands of British servicemen fought for eight years in the heat and dust of Helmand province to keep it out of the hands of the Taliban

UK troops will shortly relocate to Kandahar air base as the mission comes to an end almost two months ahead of schedule. The British forces will spend the next few weeks shipping the remaining equipment back to the UK before flying home.

While logistics units, medics and infantry soldiers will head to the huge air base, it is understood about 500 troops will stay in Kabul, where they will train Afghan Army officers in a mission codenamed Operation Toral, and known as ‘Sandhurst in the Sand’.

Their new mission will be to train, advise and assist the Afghan forces as they continue to fight insurgents in the war-torn country.

Western officials insist the Afghan security forces – which have been trained by US and UK personnel – have managed to contain the Taliban’s offensives on their own.

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Coming home: UK troops will shortly relocate to Kandahar air base as the mission comes to an end almost two months ahead of schedule

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Packing up: The British forces will spend the next few weeks shipping the remaining equipment back to the UK before flying home

The Afghan National Army and police force now number almost 340,000 – though much of their focus is on Kabul and the government has struggled to extend its unity beyond the capital.

The Taliban have been launching attacks ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign forces by the end of this year.

The insurgents’ alarming gains in the south and east recently raise the nightmare prospect of the Taliban taking over swathes of land and assaulting the rest of the country.

In the northern province of Kunduz, there are now two districts almost entirely under Taliban rule, local officials have said.

The Taliban are administering legal cases and schools, and even allowing international aid operations to work there, it was claimed in the New York Times.

Similarly, in the Tangi Valley in the Wardak province, just an hour’s drive from Kabul, the Taliban are said to be in control of the everyday life of much of the population. A BBC Panorama investigation found they are using the valley as a staging post for attacks on the capital as it tries to seize back the country. 

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

AFGHANISTAN - Never Ending War in Afghanistan Full Documentary

TALIBAN - The Taliban in Afghanistan

The Taliban in Afghanistan

Author: Zachary Laub, Online Writer/Editor
Updated: July 4, 2014

Introduction

The Taliban is a predominantly Pashtun, Islamic fundamentalist group that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when a U.S.-led invasion toppled the regime for providing refuge to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The Taliban regrouped across the border in Pakistan, where its central leadership, headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar, leads an insurgency against the Western-backed government in Kabul. Both the United States and Afghanistan have pursued a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, but talks have little momentum as international forces prepare to conclude combat operations in December 2014 and withdraw by the end of 2016.

Rise of the Taliban

The Taliban was formed in the early 1990s by an Afghan faction of mujahideen, Islamic fighters who had resisted the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–89) with the covert backing of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and its Pakistani counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI). They were joined by younger Pashtun tribesmen who studied in Pakistani madrassas, or seminaries; taliban is Pashto for "students." Pashtuns comprise a plurality in Afghanistan and are the predominant ethnic group in much of the country's south and east.

Taliban militiamen chant slogans as they drive toward the front line near Kabul in November 1997. (Photo: Courtesy Reuters)

The movement attracted popular support in the initial post-Soviet era by promising to impose stability and rule of law after four years of conflict (1992–1996) among rival mujahideen groups. Talibs entered Kandahar in November 1994 to pacify the crime-ridden southern city, and by September 1996 seized the capital, Kabul, from President Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik whom they viewed as anti-Pashtun and corrupt. The Taliban regime controlled some 90 percent of the country before its 2001 overthrow, analysts say.

The Taliban imposed its brand of justice as it consolidated territorial control. Taliban jurisprudence was drawn from the Pashtuns' pre-Islamic tribal code and interpretations of sharia colored by the austere Wahhabi doctrines of the madrassas' Saudi benefactors. The regime neglected social services and other basic state functions even as its Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice enforced prohibitions on behavior the Taliban deemed un-Islamic, requiring women to wear the head-to-toe burqa, or chadri; banning music and television; and jailing men whose beards it deemed too short.

The regime was internationally isolated from its inception. Two UN Security Council resolutions passed in 1998 urged the Taliban to end its abusive treatment of women. The following year the council imposed sanctions on the regime for harboring al-Qaeda. Only Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan recognized the government. Many analysts say Islamabad supported the Taliban as a force that could unify and stabilize Afghanistan while staving off Indian, Iranian, and Russian influence.

Courtesy Congressional Research Service

Leadership and Support

Mullah Omar, a cleric and veteran of the anti-Soviet resistance, led Taliban-ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 as amir al-mu'minin, or "commander of the faithful." He granted al-Qaeda sanctuary on the condition that it not antagonize the United States, but bin Laden reneged on their agreement in 1998 when he orchestrated bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa. The episode was indicative of tensions that emerged between the two groups, analysts say. The Taliban was fundamentally parochial while al-Qaeda had its sights set on global jihad—yet after 9/11, Omar rejected U.S. demands that he give up bin Laden.

Ethnic minority Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras in northern Afghanistan opposed to Taliban rule formed the Northern Alliance, which assisted U.S.-led forces in routing the Taliban after 9/11. Though the regime was dismantled during the occupation, Mullah Omar and many of his top aides escaped to the frontier territories of Pakistan, where they reconstituted the Taliban's central leadership. Dubbed the "Quetta Shura" for the capital of Balochistan province, where they are believed to have taken refuge, they maintain a degree of operational authority over Afghan Taliban fighters, but appear "unwilling or unable to monopolize anti-state violence," a UN Security Council monitoring team found in September 2013.

Many experts suspect the Pakistani security establishment continues to provide Taliban militants sanctuary in the country's western tribal areas in an effort to counter India's influence in Afghanistan. Islamabad dismisses these charges. (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, is an insurgent group distinct from its Afghan namesake; it coalesced in response to the Pakistani military's incursions into that country's tribal areas. The Afghan Taliban, by contrast, views Pakistan as a benefactor.)

The Taliban's post-2001 resurgence has partially been financed by narcotics production and trafficking, though Mullah Omar issued injunctions against opium production, and the Taliban eradicated much of the poppy crop during its rule. Insurgents and other strongmen extort ushr, an agricultural tithe, from farmers and levies at roadside checkpoints. Revenues from illicit mining [PDF] also contribute to Taliban coffers, which net some $400 million [PDF] a year, the UN estimated in 2012.

Public Opinion of the Taliban

More than a decade since its fall from power, the Taliban enjoys continued, if declining, support. The Asia Foundation found that in 2013, a third of Afghans—mostly Pashtuns and rural Afghans—had sympathy for armed opposition groups (AOGs), primarily the Taliban. Nearly two-thirds of Afghans, the survey found, believed that reconciliation between the government and AOGs would stabilize the country.

Afghan support for the Taliban and allied groups stems in part from grievances directed at public institutions. While the Asia Foundation survey found the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police garner high public confidence, many civilians see government institutions such as the militia-like Afghan Local Police as predatory. Likewise, international forces' support for warlords and strongmen, an expedient in securing territory, likely also alienated many rural Afghans from Kabul, analysts say.

Many rural Afghans have come to trust the Taliban's extensive judicial network over government courts to "solve disputes in a fair war, without tribal or ethnic bias, or more commonly, without having to pay bribes," says Graeme Smith, a Kabul-based senior analyst at the International Crisis Group.

A Resilient Insurgency

As the Obama administration wound down the war in Iraq, it recommitted the United States to counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban and allied groups in Afghanistan, authorizing a surge that brought peak troop levels to about one hundred thousand in June 2011 and redoubled civilian efforts. Pakistani safe havens stymied U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, though the CIA's targeted-killing program there has sought, in part, to fulfill a "force protection" mission where the U.S. military cannot operate.

But as the Pentagon withdrew the surge troops in 2012, further drew down its military footprint in 2013, and handed lead security authority over to Afghan forces in June of that year, the Taliban-led insurgency escalated.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) documented 8,615 civilian deaths and injuries [PDF] in 2013, a 14 percent increase over the previous year and the highest toll since it began keeping these records in 2009. UNAMA attributed the vast majority of these casualties to insurgents who deliberately targeted civilians or used such indiscriminate tactics as improvised explosive devices; other civilians were caught in the crossfire between insurgents and government forces.

In some outlying districts, Afghan forces and local insurgents have reached informal ceasefires that effectively cede a degree of authority to the Taliban. The UN reported in 2014 that the Taliban maintained outright control of four districts, out of 373 nationwide, but the insurgency's reach extends much further: Afghan security forces judged in late 2013 that some 40 percent of districts had a "raised" or "high" threat level.

An Elusive Endgame in Afghanistan

Afghan forces have taken over nearly all combat operations, but some military analysts question whether they can keep the insurgency at bay as coalition forces draw down. Though NATO's combat mission expires at the end of 2014, a consultative loya jirga, a traditional grand assembly of tribal elders and community leaders, overwhelmingly endorsed a longer-term role for the U.S. military and its partners in helping secure the country.

That role is likely to be narrowly circumscribed, however. The United States has articulated a post-2014 mission focused exclusively on training Afghan forces and conducting counterterrorism operations against "the remnants of al-Qaeda." In May 2014, President Barack Obama announced a timetable calling for a complete U.S. withdrawal by the end of 2016. (This residual force is contingent on the Afghan government concluding agreements [PDF] with the U.S. government and NATO; both candidates vying for the presidency have promised they would sign them.)

Some Afghans and U.S. military analysts see the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in late 2011, which followed Washington and Baghdad's failure to agree on a renewed status-of-forces agreement, as a cautionary tale. After the last U.S. troops departed Iraq, Sunni insurgents unleashed levels of violence not seen since the height of the civil war several years prior, and made territorial gains across large swathes of the country.

Meanwhile, as an outright battlefield victory appeared unattainable, the United States came to believe by 2010 that political reconciliation "is the solution to ending the war" [PDF]. But talks between the Taliban and the central government have suffered repeated setbacks. Most notably, in September 2011, Kabul's chief negotiator, former president Rabbani, was assassinated. The Taliban has so far shown little interest in accepting the constitution and laying down its arms, while some civil society groups also oppose a negotiated settlement, fearing a backslide on women's rights and other gains made in the past decade.

U.S.-Taliban talks have not fared better than those carried out by Kabul. Prospective negotiations mediated by Qatar in July 2013 were quickly scuttled after Afghan president Hamid Karzai objected to the manner in which the Taliban opened its office in Doha. The Obama administration had originally explored the prisoner swap of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban officials as a potential confidence-building measure tethered to broader peace talks, but no such deal was in the works by the time the exchange went through in June 2014; it appears to have taken place as a one-off event.

Some of the White House's detractors contend that the surge's rigid timetable undermined U.S. leverage at a moment when maximum military pressure was brought to bear on the insurgency, and that the anticipated withdrawal has likewise diminished the Taliban's incentives to negotiate.

As coalition forces draw down, the Taliban has recast its mission from one resisting foreign occupation to one that is confronting a government it considers a Western pawn. Meanwhile, its battlefield position and financial interests further reduce its incentives to negotiate, analysts say. The UN says the Taliban and Afghan forces are at a "military stalemate." Other analyses are less optimistic about the central government's ability to hold its ground. The International Crisis Group reports that insurgents are increasingly confident as "ongoing withdrawals of international soldiers have generally coincided with a deterioration of Kabul's reach in outlying districts." An independent assessment [PDF] of Afghan security forces commissioned by the Pentagon predicts that the Taliban will pick up the tempo of its operations and expand areas under its control between 2015 and 2018.

Meanwhile, strong revenues from a bumper poppy harvest [PDF] in 2013 and other illicit trade have further reduced the Taliban's incentives to reach a negotiated settlement. Some Taliban factions have become less an ideology-driven armed opposition group than a profit-driven mafia, according to the UN.

But while the insurgency remained formidable, the Taliban failed at one of its chief strategic objectives of 2014: mass disruption of Afghanistan's provincial and presidential elections.

Source: http://www.cfr.org

TALIBAN - History of the Taliban: Who They Are, What They Want

 By Pierre Tristam

Step 1 of 7

The Taliban: An Introduction

Paula Bronstein/Stringer/Getty Images News/Getty Images

The Taliban—from the Arabic word for student, “taleb”—are fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, mostly from Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes. The Taliban dominates large swaths of Afghanistan and a large part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

The Taliban seek to establish a puritanical caliphate that neither recognizes nor tolerates forms of Islam divergent from their own. They scorn democracy or any secular or pluralistic political process as an offense against Islam. The Taliban’s Islam, however, a close kin of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism, is far more perversion than interpretation. The Taliban’s version of Islamic law, or Sharia, is historically inaccurate, contradictory, self-serving and fundamentally deviant from prevailing interpretations of Islamic law and practice.

Step 2 of 7

The Taliban's Origins

A young boy carries a heavy bag in a refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan in June 2008. The upsurge of fighting in southern Afghanistan during 2006 has compelled tens of thousands of people to flee their homes.  Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

There was no such thing as a Taliban until the Afghanistan’s civil war in the wake of Soviet troops’ withdrawal in 1989, after a decade-long occupation. But by the time their last troops withdrew in February 1989, they’d left a nation in social and economic shards, 1.5 million dead, millions of refugees and orphans in Iran and Pakistan, and gaping political vacuum that warlords attempted to fill. Afghan mujahideen warlords replaced their war with the Soviets with a civil war.

Thousands of Afghan orphans grew up never knowing Afghanistan or their parents, especially their mothers. They were schooled in Pakistan’s madrassas, religious schools which, in this case, were encouraged and financed by Pakistani and Saudi authorities to develop militantly inclined Islamists. Pakistan nurtured that corps of militants as proxy fighters in Pakistan’s ongoing conflict with over Muslim-dominated (and disputed) Kashmir. But Pakistan consciously intended to use the madrassas’ militants as leverage in its attempt to control Afghanistan as well.

As Jeri Laber of Human Rights Watch wrote in the New York Review of Books of the origins of the Taliban in refugee camps (recalling an article he’d written in 1986),

Hundreds of thousands of youths, who knew nothing of life but the bombings that destroyed their homes and drove them to seek refuge over the border, were being raised to hate and to fight, “in the spirit of Jihad,” a “holy war” that would restore Afghanistan to its people. “New kinds of Afghans are being born in the struggle,” I reported. “Caught in the midst of a grownups’ war, the young Afghans are under intense political pressure from one side or another, almost from birth." [...] The children that I interviewed and wrote about in 1986 are now young adults. Many are now with the Taliban.

 Step 3 of 7

Mullah Omar and the Taliban's Rise in Afghanistan

An undated photograph believed to be of the Taliban's Mullah Muhammad Omar, who is said never to allow himself to be photographed.  Getty Images

As civil war was ravaging Afghanistan, Afghans were desperate for a stabilizing counter-force that would put an end to the violence.

The Taliban’s most original aims were, as Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist and author of Taliban (2000), wrote, to “restore peace, disarm the population, enforce Sharia law and defend the integrity and Islamic character of Afghanistan.

As most of them were part-time or full-time students at madrassas, the name they chose for themselves was natural. A talib is an Islamic student, one who seeks knowledge compared to the mullah who is one who gives knowledge. By choosing such a name the Taliban (plural of Talib) distanced themselves from the party politics of the mujahideen and signaled that they were a movement for cleansing society rather than a party trying to grab power.”

For their leader in Afghanistan, the Taliban turned to Mohammed Omar, an itinerant preacher likely born in 1959 in Nodeh village near Kandahar, in southeastern Afghanistan. He had neither tribe nor religious pedigree. He had fought the Soviets and been wounded four times, including once in the eye. His reputation was that of a pious ascetic.

Omar's reputation grew when he ordered a group of Taliban militants to arrest a warlord who had captured two teenage girls and raped them. The 30 Talibs, with just 16 rifles between them—or so goes the story, one of many near-mythical accounts that have grown around Omar’s history—attacked the commander’s based, freed the girls, and hanged the commander by their favorite means: from the barrel of a tank, in full view, as an example of Taliban justice.

The Taliban’s reputation grew through similar feats.

Step 4 of 7

Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's Intelligence Services and the Taliban

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Religious indoctrination in Pakistan’s madrassas and Omar’s campaigns against rapists alone were not the light that lit the Taliban fuse. The Pakistani intelligence services known as the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, the Pakistani military and Benazir Bhutto, who was prime minister of Pakistan during the Taliban’s most politically and militarily formative years (1993-96), all saw in the Taliban a proxy army they could manipulate to Pakistan’s ends.

In 1994, Bhutto’s government appointed the Taliban as protector of Pakistani convoys through Afghanistan. Controlling trade routs and the lucrative windfalls those routes provide in Afghanistan is a major source of lucre and power. The Taliban proved uniquely effective, swiftly defeating other warlords and conquering major Afghan cities.

Beginning in 1994, The Taliban rose to power and established their brutal, totalitarian rule over 90 percent of the country, in part by leading a genocidal campaign against Afghanistan’s Shiite, or Hazara.

Step 5 of 7

The Taliban and the Clinton Administration

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Following Pakistan’s lead, the Clinton administration initially supported the Taliban’s rise. Clinton’s judgment was clouded by the question that has often led American policy astray in the region: Who can best check Iran’s influence? In the 1980s, the Reagan administration armed and financed Saddam Hussein under the assumption that a totalitarian Iraq was more acceptable than an unbridled, Islamic Iran. The policy backfired in the form of two wars, one of which has yet to end.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration also funded the mujahideen in Afghanistan as well as their Islamist supporters in Pakistan. That blowback took the form of al-Qaeda. As the Soviets withdrew and the cold war ended, American support for Afghan mujahideen stopped abruptly, but military and diplomatic support for Afghanistan did not. Under the influence of Benazir Bhutto, the Clinton administration voiced itself willing to open a dialogue with the Taliban in the mid-1990s, especially as the Taliban was the only force in Afghanistan capable of guaranteeing another American interest in the region — potential oil pipelines.

On Sept. 27, 1996, Glyn Davies, a State Department spokesman, expressed hope that the Taliban “will move quickly to restore order and security and to form a representative interim government that can begin the process of reconciliation nationwide.” Davies called the Taliban’s execution of former Afghan President Najibullah merely “regrettable,” and said the United States would send diplomats to Afghanistan to meet with the Taliban, potentially to re-establishing full diplomatic ties. The Clinton’s administration’s flirtation with the Taliban did not last, however, as Madeleine Albright, incensed by the Taliban’s treatment of women, among other regressive measures, halted it when she became secretary of state in January 1997.

Step 6 of 7

The Taliban's Repressions and Regressions: A War on Women

Where the Buddhist colossus once stood, withstanding the barbarism of Genegis Khan and that of invaders before and since--until the Taliban demolished it in February-March 2001.  Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

The Taliban's long lists of edicts and decrees took an especially misogynistic view of women. Schools for girls were closed. Women were forbidden to work or leave their homes without verifiable permission. Wearing non-Islamic dress was forbidden. Wearing make-up, sporting western products like purses or shoes, was forbidden. Music, dancing, cinemas, any form of non-religious broadcasting and entertainment were banned. Lawbreakers were beaten, flogged, shot or beheaded.

In 1994, Osama bin Laden moved to Kandahar as a guest of Mullah Omar. On Aug. 23, 1996, bin Laden declared war on the United States and exerted increasing influence on Omar, helping to fund the Taliban’s offensives against other warlords in the north of the country. That lavish financial support made it impossible for Mullah Omar not to protect bin Laden when Saudi Arabia, then the United States, pressured the Taliban to extradite bin Laden. The fates and ideology of al-Qaeda and the Taliban became intertwined.

At the height of their power, in March 2001, the Taliban demolished the two enormous, centuries-old Buddha statues of Bamiyan, an act that showed to the world in ways that the Taliban’s wanton massacres and oppression should have much earlier the ruthless, distorted Puritanism of the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam.

Step 7 of 7

The Taliban's 2001 Downfall

A Taliban militant sporting the beard required by Taliban edict contributes money at a table for 'mujahideen' in the village of Koza Bandi in the Swat Valley, Pakistan, a tribal area controlled by the Taliban.  John Moore/Getty Images

The Taliban were overthrown in the 2001 American-backed invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban were never defeated, however. They retreated, regrouped, especially in Pakistan, and by 2006 were again controlling vast swaths of southern and western Afghanistan while inflicting heavy casualties on NATO and American forces.

The Pakistani Taliban is just as powerful. It now controls Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, virtually immune from Pakistani law and authority. Mullah Omar and bin laden are believed to be hiding in those tribal areas—and planning strategy against the NATO-American presence in Afghanistan, against Pakistan’s secular rulers, as well as tactically directing al-Qaeda attacks elsewhere in the world. In 2007, al-Qaeda was responsible for close to 30 attacks, the most, for a single year, in its history.

Source: http://middleeast.about.com