ABSTRACT
Although much has been written on the post-2001 insurgency in Afghanistan, little of it is systematic in its analysis or has been carefully researched on the ground. The history of the Taliban and how they emerged as a powerful insurgent movement is however quite clear. The best analytical discussion of the Taliban before 9/11 and their transformation into a regime is in Dorronsoro (2005). The Taliban's origins are important to understand their modus operandi after 2001, because the nature of the movement has changed but not wholly transformed. The clerical nature of the pre-2001 Taliban is very clear, for example, and the core of the Taliban as an insurgent movement remains clerical in essence. Before 2001, the Taliban had little experience in handling a guerrilla war. Most of its members had been active in the 1980s jihad against the Soviet Army and the pro-Soviet government, but mainly in junior roles, leading small fronts of fighters and usually not the best organized ones. By 2001, the year when their regime was overthrown by American intervention, the Taliban had expanded their original alliance of southern clerical networks into a nationwide ‘network of networks’, a development which would later help them organize an insurgency on a much larger scale. Similarly the history of the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda until 2001 may be relevant to understand post-2001 developments (Lia 2008; Al-Masri 2005; Brown 2010).
