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The Taliban have significantly more military skill than the Afghan warlords they've been fighting for the last decade.

Documentation? Plus what does "war lord" mean in this context?

As I understand it, the Taliban would simply represent one faction of rural lords and clerics within Afghanistan. The former-northern alliance was simply another with the groups distinguished a bit by ideology but mostly by the Taliban being comprised of the dominant peshtoon ethnicity.

I mean, both the Northern Alliance (war lords presently making up the Afghan state) and the Taliban were groups origianly brought into existence by CIA interventions in the 1980s. Each faction becomes more or less corrupt, makes one or another alliance depending on the shift tides of war.

The Taliban would have the same difficulty controlling the entire country that the US and its allies currently have




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