Well, yeah, no-one is saying that the Taliban aren’t natives of Afghanistan or that they haven’t persisted the whole time before and the misguided American occupation that’s left them a power vacuum to fill. That doesn’t change the fact that they’re a plague on the majority of people living in the country. They’re not even good at providing social services along with their religion-inspired violence and hate-mongering (it’s quite a feat to be bigger arseholes than Hamas).
Getting rid of these violent religious nuts is (and was) ultimately an problem the people of Afghanistan have to solve for themselves, assuming they’re so inclined. The West can provide their opponents with support going forward, but the whole idea of sending American soldiers to shove Western-style democracy down the throats of the people there was just another example of the discredited neoCon PNAC fantasy.
