Doomsday Nation -- A Commentary On Pakistan

From The Australian:

IN 1994 a group of religious students from a madrassa in Kandahar banded together to take on the vicious warlords who then ran southern Afghanistan. About 30 young men with 16 rifles stormed a military camp where two girls were being held and raped, rescuing the girls and hanging the camp's commander from the gun barrel of a tank, or so the story goes.

Thus began the movement known as the Taliban, from the word talib, meaning student. As Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid wrote in his seminal book, Taliban: "They saw themselves as the cleansers and purifiers of a guerilla war gone astray, a social system gone wrong, and an Islamic way of life thathad been compromised by corruption and excess."

Within months, 12,000 volunteers had joined the new organisation.

Read more ....

My Comment: An excellent and well written summary of the history of the Taliban, and why Pakistan is in the situation that it is in today.

A must read.