 The Taliban is a complex religious and political movement. The Taliban initially emerged in 1994 in the southern province of Kandahar. This is a time when Afghanistan has disintegrated into anarchy and civil war following the collapse of the last cross-Soviet government of Reza Najibullah in Kabul. The Taliban emerged during this period with the slogan of bringing peace to Afghanistan. And its emergence was facilitated by critical support it received from Pakistan, especially Pakistan's military intelligence, the ISI. Initially, according to most reports, it began with a really humble beginning locally. It was led by Mullah Muhammad Umar who was a local religious figure but with no known reputation in Islamic law, jurisprudence or Afghanistan's national politics. He and his group of students first started disarming locally abusive militias and then they were also starting supporting Pakistan's ambition at that time in 1994 in Afghanistan to open a trade route through Afghanistan, through the cities of Kandahar and Herat to Central Asia. So for the first time we also see that the Taliban emerged as a force that achieves this really standing victories against this locally abusive militias that were fighting for control of the city in the province of Kandahar. And then subsequently as they seized control of territories and provinces across Afghanistan, they reached Kabul in 1995 and they became just another important player in Afghanistan's bloody conflict for the second half of the 1990s. They started implementing the version of the Sharia law as they interpreted which was really a totalitarian interpretation of Sharia which they would use to impose their will on every aspect of the Afghan society. The Taliban are remembered now with executions of women and other members of the society and public places like stadiums and they also engage in mass killings of the Shia Hazaras, one of the most important of which is August 1998. After they took control of the city, they went on a campaign of killing primarily the Hazaras residents of that city. After they achieved control of the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif in August of 1998, three countries extended diplomatic recognition to the Taliban. This one Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. I live part of those years in Afghanistan and I witnessed firsthand how the Taliban ruled the country. They turned the iPhone radio network into a mouthpiece of propaganda calling it Sharia. Afghanistan of the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 is one in which there is no video, no photograph, no art. They destroyed famously the Buddha statues of Bamiyan, such a monumental important heritage of Afghanistan's civilizational past. By the end of 2001, following the US military intervention, the Taliban regime, the Taliban as a movement disintegrated. And that explains also in important ways how vulnerable, how fragile the movement was because it did not enjoy a lot of popular legitimacy in Afghanistan. Another important layer of the Taliban would be described as local Taliban. These are people who have grievances at the local level, especially in the context of the post-2001 Afghanistan, where sub-national governments proved to be one of the main failures of the international intervention. It created a lot of opportunities for abuse of power by local power holders and as a result there were many people who were pushed into the heart of the Taliban as a result of those governance failures, abuse of power at the local level. And then at the top of all of this, I think we should also keep in mind that the Taliban have also been evolving over the past few years and months in particular. There are a range of other groups that have joined the Taliban for pragmatic reasons, primarily seeking to ensure their survival in rapidly changing security environments in Afghanistan. This is especially true of the past few weeks and months. I suspect there are many groups locally who switched sides to the Taliban just to ensure their survival. So just to sum it up, I think it's important to keep in mind that the Taliban is a very complex movement. It was best described by an analyst of Afghanistan, Thomas Rottick, as a network of networks. The impact of the US intervention on the Taliban has been profound. I think that for the first time the Taliban found itself in a fight with a very major technologically advanced power like the United States. So as a result of this, to fight back, they also needed to adapt to the changing circumstances. And I think one of those really important adaptations by the Taliban is their appropriation of very effective public relations campaign propaganda. So far what I'm seeing is the propaganda wing of the Taliban having quite effective in telling the world what it hears at the moment. There are differences of views and different groups in that system represents the diverse groups of Afghanistan. For me, I would like to be pessimistic unless I see evidence is coming that proved me wrong and I would be quite happy to see that.