The origin of the Taliban can be traced back to the 1979 USSR invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviets had brought in over one hundred thousand soldiers to preserve the tottering Communist government that had been established there in the 1970’s. However, they were met with fierce resistance when they ventured out of their strongholds into the countryside. Resistance fighters, called mujahedeen (from whom the Taliban evolved), saw the Christian or atheist Soviets controlling Afghanistan as a defilement of Islam as well as of their traditional culture.
The mujahedeen were a mix of Afghan resistance fighters and Afghan refugees who had crossed into Pakistan's North West Frontier Province at the onset of the Soviet invasion and later been recruited to fight the Soviet infidels. By 1982, the Mujahedeen controlled 75% of Afghanistan despite fighting the might of the world's second most powerful military power.
Cold War politics produced a strong condemnation of the invasion from the US and the CIA sent hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ammunitions and food to Afghanistan to aid the anti-communist mujahedeen and prevent USSR from increasing it's sphere of influence. While the mujahedeen were not any more accepting of American modernity and culture than they were of the Soviet's, the US was willing to risk strengthening an Islamic fundamentalist group to use as a bulwark against the growth of communism.
The mujahideen were eventually able to neutralize Soviet air power through the use of shoulder-fired aircraft missiles supplied by the United States. In 1988 the United States., Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union signed an agreement, the Geneva Accords, by which the latter would withdraw its troops. The mujahideen, were neither party to the negotiations nor to the Geneva accords and, consequently, refused to accept the terms of the agreement.
Hence, when Soviet-backed President Najibullah assumed control of the government, he failed to win popular support, territory, or international recognition and became increasingly weak with time and by 1992, Najibullah agreed to step down in favor of a neutral interim government.
An alliance of mujahideen set up a new government but the various factions were unable to cooperate and fell to fighting each other. Soon, they began to barrage Kabul with artillery and rockets in the hopes of cornering Rabbani to make him relinquish his power.
Partly as a response to this situation in the country, the Taliban, a puritanical Islamic group led by a former mujahideen commander, Mohammad Omar, emerged in the fall of 1994, promising a restoration of order. The origins of the Taliban lay in the children of Afghanistan, many of them orphaned by the war, and many of whom had been educated in the rapidly expanding network of Islamic schools, madrassas either in Kandahar or in the refugee camps on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Before this time, they had been loosely organized on a regional basis during the occupation and civil war. In late 1994, a group of well-trained Taliban mujahideen were chosen by Pakistani Interior Minister, Maj. Gen. Naseerullah Babbar to protect a convoy trying to open a trade route from Pakistan to Central Asia. They proved an able force, fighting off rival mujahideen and warlords.
The Taliban grew in popularity because they fought corruption and lawlessness and because they, like most of the Afghan people, were ethnic Pashtuns, while the leaders of the country were ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks from the north.
By 1998, the Taliban had virtually eliminated the opposing Northern Alliance, an ineffectual and factionalized force. At this point, the Taliban controlled 90 per cent of Afghanistan. Its rise to power effectively ended a 25-year period of civil war, but Afghanis then found themselves under the rule of an austere and puritanical regime that banned education and employment for women, television, dance, film, photography, clapping during sports events, kite-flying, non-religious music, and statues, such as the giant Buddhas in Bamiyan, which the Taliban destroyed in March 2001. The Taliban received manpower from madrassas in Pakistan’s border region i.e. the areas in and around Swat. After a request for help from Mullah Omar in 1997, Maulana Samiul Haq shut down his student madrassa of over 2500 students and sent his entire student body hundreds of miles away to fight alongside the Taliban. The next year, the same religious leader helped persuade 12 madrassas in NWFP to shut down for one month and send 8000 students to provide reinforcements for the Taliban army in Afghanistan.
Following the 9/11 attacks, USA declared war on Afghanistan and Taliban. The effects of this war on Pakistan were similar to those of the 1979 Soviet invasion i.e. thousands of more Afghani refugees spilled into Swat and NWFP. The years 2002 and 2003 saw a gradual but significant decline in the power of the Taliban as American and NATO soldiers effectively crushed the local resistance. Around 2004 however, the movement regrouped and rearmed. Bolstered by a compliant Pakistani government, hefty cash inflow from the drug trade and a population disillusioned by battered infrastructure and lackluster reconstruction efforts, the Taliban made a comeback.
The key to the resurgent Taliban can be summarized in one word: Pakistan. The Pakistani government has proved unwilling or incapable (or both) of clamping down on the religious militia, even though the headquarters of the Taliban and its key allies are in Pakistan. In Swat, the Taliban gained local empathy and sympathy from the Pashtun majority living in the region. In the major military offensives by the Pakistan Army against the Islamist groups in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), which are allegedly assisting the insurgency against the United States and NATO forces over the border in Afghanistan, the Taliban has so far emerged victorious.
In February 2009, the Pakistani government agreed to a withdrawal of troops and the imposition of Shariat law because without the support of the local population, the presence of the Army held no legitimacy. This peace agreement announced in February 2009 between the Pakistani government and pro-Taliban militants along the Afghan border raises more concerns that such groups will operate more freely on and across the border. The Swat Valley is now under the harsh, authoritarian rule of the Taliban. Girls' schools are blown up on a daily basis and thousands are migrating out of the region because their source of income, tourism, has been wiped out. Aid groups have warned of an intensifying humanitarian crisis because of the fighting. The U.N. refugee agency said a "massive displacement" was underway. Citing provincial government estimates, it said up to 200,000 people had left their homes.
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