The word “Talib” - طالب - comes from the Pashto language of southwest Asia and means “student.” It is actually a loan word that has the same meaning in the Arabic language and together with the Farsi (Iranian) plural ending, -an, becomes the plural form, Taliban – طالبان - meaning “students.”
Specifically, “Taliban” refers to Muslim students who attend a traditional madrassa, which is a school where Islamic studies comprise most of the curriculum (although, historically, other subjects including architecture, astronomy, and philosophy also were taught). Madrassas initially were established in the early centuries after the death of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in order to preserve religious conformity through the uniform teaching of Islam.
As the armies of Islam conquered vast territories whose inhabitants were neither Arab nor Muslim, but rather Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Persian Zoroastrian, the need to standardize the new belief system that was forcing its tenets at the point of the sword on such diverse communities gave rise to the institution of the madrassa. There, subjects like fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), the Sunna (acts and sayings of Muhammad, or hadith, and his biography, or Sira), and Tafsir (learned Qur’anic commentary) were taught in various levels of complexity. Such schools typically are attached to an Islamic Center or mosque.
More basic Islamic schools, that mostly focus on rote pronunciation and memorization of Qur’anic verses (often in the complete absence of any comprehension of Arabic), also sprang up to meet the lower-level needs of young students in the village setting. More recently in the 20th century, the word madrassa has come to be associated almost exclusively with these Qur’anic study schools that often attract poor boys who otherwise would get little or no formal education.
Fast forward to the lawless years after the 1989 withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Afghanistan, when Mujahedeen warlords, backed variously by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate and Interior Ministry, devastated whatever was left of a country laid waste by the bloody decade of fighting the Russians.
Accurately analyzing the desperation felt by many Afghans and well-aware of the indoctrinating role played by Pakistani madrassas (many associated with the jihadist Deobandi movement and funded by Saudi Arabia), some Pakistani generals hit on the idea of turning to the thousands of poor Afghan madrassa students for a ready source of puritanical fanaticism that could be formed into a potent army, easily managed and zealous to cleanse their homeland of its corrupt and warring factions.
This is how the modern-day conglomeration of groups known as the Afghan Taliban emerged in the early years of the 1990s. Afghans, weary of blood and privation and attracted by the Taliban’s pious image, flocked to their support and soon, they were unstoppable.
By the time Taliban forces captured Kabul in September 1996 and the world was just beginning to realize that a dangerous new force was filling the power vacuum in Afghanistan, it was too late. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan in that year after several years of safehaven in Sudan, where they had forged ominous alliances with Iran and Hizballah and established the foundations of what would soon become al-Qa’eda.
Warlords like Mullah Omar, the top Taliban commander, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom bin Laden and al-Zawahiri knew from the 1980s, were now controlling the government in Kabul and readily welcomed them back to Afghanistan. Under the protection of Mullah Omar, bin Laden and al-Qa’eda were free to operationalize their relationship with the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and intelligence service (MOIS-Ministry of Intelligence and Security).
As the Taliban focused on terrorizing the Afghan people, al-Qa’eda, Iran, and Hizballah launched a succession of terror attacks of their own (Khobar Towers, East Africa Embassies, USS Cole), punctuated by two public declarations of war, in 1996 and 1998, which were largely ignored, or at least misunderstood, by the U.S. national security leadership.
Islamic doctrine obligates Muslim jihadis to issue a warning, a call to Islam (Da’wa), before a military attack and this is exactly what Osama bin Laden, his al-Qa’eda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and others did. Their Islamic faith, reasoning, and philosophy were all spelled out in great detail in essays, letters, proclamations, and other writing; to no avail, though, as the West refused to understand then (as now) that Islamic doctrine, law, and scripture command the faithful to jihad.
The result of that failure, of that “willful blindness,” as the brilliant former Department of Justice prosecutor Andrew McCarthy calls it, was 9/11. Now as the U.S. enters the 2012 election year, one of the top priorities of the Obama administration appears to be completing the full withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.
Reporting indicates that State Department envoys actually have been in secret talks with Mullah Omar about the terms of that retreat for as much as a year already. Under consideration, according to those reports, are the opening of a Taliban political office in Doha, Qatar, and the possible release from detention at Guantanamo Bay of a number of top Taliban officials.
Additionally, some reports (described as “not accurate” but also not denied by the White House) have suggested that the U.S. has been availing itself of the mediation services of Yousef al-Qaradawi, the venomously anti-American, antisemitic ideological leader and spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, in those discussions with the Taliban.
Challenges abound before the U.S. can complete its Afghanistan withdrawal, not least of which are objections from the Afghan president Hamid Karzai (our ostensible ally) about those secret talks the U.S. has been holding with the Taliban. The Taliban and its al-Qa’eda and Iranian regime allies already have achieved some major victories, though, among which one of the most critical was manipulating the U.S. government into supporting the drafting of an Afghan constitution that subjugates the country to Islamic law (shariah).
That is, the Afghan constitution that the U.S. State Department helped write stipulates the death penalty for adultery, apostasy, blasphemy/slander, and homosexuality; amputation, flogging, and stoning as criminal penalties; and the forcible repression of women and girls. Once strictly enforced, it is exactly what the Taliban (and al-Qa’eda) want for Afghanistan.
As departing American troops begin to relinquish control to their Afghan government counterparts of territory wrested from Taliban control, Taliban warlords, coffers full from the opium trade and assured of safehaven just across the Pakistan border whenever they need it, once again are carving out districts where shariah is the only law.
With the impending full withdrawal of U.S. and other Western troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban eventually will achieve another of its key goals, which is the removal of all kuffar (infidel) forces from Afghan Muslim soil. The ultimate re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under Taliban control is now within reach and so is the possibility that al-Qa’eda and Iranian jihadis once again will find there an amenable host under whose protection new terror plots against the American homeland and global allies may be hatched.
After all, as Vice President Joe Biden announced in December 2011, “the Taliban…is not our enemy….” And he has a point: the Afghan Taliban (unlike its Pakistani counterpart, the Tarek-e Taliban Pakistan) has never been placed on the official U.S. government list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
So, despite their support for al-Qa’eda both before and after the 9/11 attacks, atrocious human rights record, rock solid commitment to the violent imposition of shariah Islam, and the thousands of Afghan, U.S., and coalition troops injured and killed by Taliban jihadis, they still get a pass…because the erstwhile leader of the free world has decided Afghanistan’s just not worth it and wants out.
Clare M. Lopez, a senior fellow at the Clarion Fund, writes regularly for RadicalIslam.org, and is a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on Middle East, national defense, and counterterrorism issues. 
Aside from the fact that Afghan President Hamid Karzai seems somehow to have been left out of this flurry of diplomatic activity with the Islamic jihadists who have been fighting for the better part of two decades to take over his country, the continuing failure of U.S. leadership to know the enemy cripples our ability to defend America’s most critical national security needs and exposes the homeland to the very real possibility of another 9/11. The December 2011 NIE on the Afghan Taliban plainly stated that Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Pashtun warlord whose government sheltered Usama bin Laden and al-Qa’eda in the 1990s, remains totally committed to taking over all of Afghanistan and subjugating it to the harsh dictates of shariah.
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