"Key success for the Taliban has been not harming those who surrendered," he added. "Internationally from the last few months, the ANDSF was deprived of the close air support, key leverage for the ANDSF in the battlefield. That inflicted huge damage to the security forces."

in May 2014, a small group of young Taliban gunmen stormed a Kabul hotel and executed nine people in the restaurant

Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist group, seized control, later providing Osama bin Laden with a training base from which to launch terrorist operations worldwide.

Instead, according to the well-known story, the Taliban arose in extremist madrassas in Pakistan, spread across war-weary Afghanistan in two short years, and imposed an alien theocracy on the population the likes of which the world had never before seen. They were a phenomenon unprecedented in Afghan history, this story goes, a symptom of the hyper-regionalization of the conflict.

Irfan Siddiqui