12 years on from the US led invasion that forced them from power in Afghanistan, the
Taliban don't look like they're going anywhere anytime soon.
Not only have they proved themselves to be a formidable fighting force but even the United
States has said that future peace can only be achieved if the Afghan government negotiates
with the hard-line Islamic movement.
But who actually are the Taliban?
This is what one viewer asked us earlier this week in the comments section of the Monday
show and so we thought we'd try and give him and all the rest of you who might be wondering
the same thing, an answer.
Let's go back to the beginning.
The Taliban is a mainly Pashtun movement that emerged in Northern Pakistan in the early
1990s.
A few years after the withdrawal of occupying Soviet forces from neighbouring Afghanistan
in 1988.
The Pashtun people own ethnic group primarily living in Southern Afghanistan and north western
Pakistan.
However while the majority of the Taliban's fighters are of Pashtun ethnicity, the Afghan
journalist Abbad Daiyar says it would be wrong to call the Taliban a Pashtun nationalist
movement and that most Afghans see the movement as influenced by a certain strand of religious
teaching rather than nationality or ethnicity.
The Taliban is believed to have its origins of a group of about 50 students at a Madrases
or religious school for Afghan refugees who organised as a political and religious group.
The word Taliban actually means religious students in Pashto, one of Afghanistan's two
official languages.
By 1994 the group had grown to several thousand strong with additional students arriving from
other Madrases in Pakistan that were preaching a hard-line form of Sunni Islam.
The group promised to restore peace and security in the Pashtun areas across the Pakistan and
Afghanistan border and to enforce their own version of Islamic law once in power.
For many Afghan's this was a welcome change to the chaos and in-fighting of the mujahideen
groups or Islamic fighters who had fought against the soviet forces in the 1980s and
who were by this point controlling much of Afghanistan.
That same year a man named Mullah Mohammed Omar led this group in an uprising against
the former mujahideen war lords who were controlling the southern Afghan province of Kandahar.
You might recognise Mullah Omar from this photo, the story goes that he lost his right
eye while fighting the soviet forces in Afghan during the 1980s.
Two years later the movement had taken control of the Afghan capital Kabul overthrowing the
regime of the former mujahideen leader and President Burhanuddin Rabbani and established
the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
It was at this time that Mullah Omar emerged as the movements leader or commander of the
faithful.
Mullah Omar has evaded capture by the Americans since 2001 and despite not having been seen
by the public for the past 12 years, still remains the Taliban's leader today.
But back to the 90s.
Between 1996 and 2001 the Taliban controlled much of Afghanistan.
However, even in 1998 at the peak of their power, they still only controlled about 90%
of the country and were only officially recognised as a legitimate government of Afghanistan
by three countries.
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
During this time the Taliban were accused of numerous human rights and cultural abuses
including the destruction of the famous Bamiyan Buddha statues in 2001.
But they are perhaps most notorious for their record on women's rights.
Under the Taliban women are forced to wear burkhas, a loose fitting garment covering
a woman's entire body, and women as a whole were relegated to second class citizens in
Afghan society.
However according The Guardian's foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele it's wrong to single out the
Taliban as uniquely oppressive.
He says the forced isolation of women, as well as violence against women has a long
history in many parts of Afghanistan and within many of its communities.
This includes girls being prevented from going to school.
In fact many curbs on Afghan's libertys such as the closure of cinemas, and the compulsory
wear of the hijab or headscarf had already been introduced by the mujahideen groups in
1992.
On the 7th October 2001 a US led military coalition invaded Afghanistan and two months
later the Taliban had been toppled from power with thousands of Taliban fighters melting
away into the countrysides and most of the movements leaders retreating to neighbouring
Pakistan.
This came after the US accused the Taliban of providing a sanctuary to Osama bin Laden
and his associates who they accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks.
However Mullah Omar always defended his friend against the allegations and accused the US
of trying to cover up its own intelligence alias.
The past ten years NATO led foreign forces have been involved in a seemingly endless
game of cat and mouse with the Taliban as well as over anti-government groups who returned
with a vengeance not long after their retreat in 2001.
Violence in Afghanistan is now back to levels not seen since the 2001 invasion and the Taliban
now have a presence throughout much of the country.
And in 2009 a range of surveys carried out by the UK's department for international development
found that NATO's attempt to demonise the Taliban weren't really working and that most
respondents reported at least some parts of the movement.
There's a common image in part purported by the Taliban themselves that the movement is
a barefoot army of men surviving on little but ideology and faith.
But in fact the movement is now a sophisticated guerrilla force that relies on a massive income
in order to recruit local fighters, pay for weapons, provide medical weapons for their
wounded, and of course to pay for the infamous 4x4 in which many of them travel around.
What is more the Taliban movement today is made up of many different factions and localised
groups with fighters joining for many different reasons.
These include money, nationalism, local clan rivalries, and to resist foreign invaders.
Afghanistan has long been the world's leading supplier of opium accounting for about 90%
of global output.
And for a while it was believed that the main source of the Taliban's money came from the
opium trade but it's now commonly accepted that this isn't true.
In 2012 a United Nations report revealed that the Taliban had raised $400 million the previous
year from sources including donations, local taxes, and extorting money from drug dealers,
cellphone operators and aid and development projects.
And embarrassingly for the US and other foreign donors, it was estimated that the Taliban
was receiving 10-20% of all foreign funding to these aid and development projects.
There's so much more we can say on this you'll probably even notice that we've pretty much
ignored the Pakistani Taliban, this is because it's actually a seperate movement from the
Afghan Taliban and probably best saved for a future video but for now let us know your
thoughts on the Taliban by leaving us a comment and we'll see you again next time.