How Did The Afghan Taliban Survive?

Taliban members gathered under a tree in March in Alingar District of Laghman Province, Afghanistan.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

New York Times: How the Taliban Outlasted a Superpower: Tenacity and Carnage

The Taliban stand on the brink of realizing their most fervent desire: U.S. troops leaving Afghanistan. They have given up little of their extremist ideology to do it.

ALINGAR, Afghanistan — Under the shade of a mulberry tree, near grave sites dotted with Taliban flags, a top insurgent military leader in eastern Afghanistan acknowledged that the group had suffered devastating losses from American strikes and government operations over the past decade.

But those losses have changed little on the ground: The Taliban keep replacing their dead and wounded and delivering brutal violence.

“We see this fight as worship,” said Mawlawi Mohammed Qais, the head of the Taliban’s military commission in Laghman Province, as dozens of his fighters waited nearby on a hillside. “So if a brother is killed, the second brother won’t disappoint God’s wish — he’ll step into the brother’s shoes.”

It was March, and the Taliban had just signed a peace deal with the United States that now puts the movement on the brink of realizing its most fervent desire — the complete exit of American troops from Afghanistan.

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WNU Editor: I can sum up the above New York times post in one sentence. The Taliban are a factor in Afghanistan because of their safe havens in Pakistan, the madrases that they are permitted to operate in Pakistan, and Pakistan's flow of weapons to them.