Like it or not, the Taliban are now players on the world stage

Many years ago, before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, I was based in Peshawar in Pakistan, near Afghanistan. I was responsible for British diplomatic reporting on the war and engaging with Afghan leaders. I came to know the Taliban. They were, to put it mildly, not particularly nice guys: intensely parochial, geographically and politically sectarian, xenophobic, misogynistic, tribal and rigid.

As fierce Pashtuns, the biggest minority in Afghanistan, they would kill other ethnicities wantonly: Shia Hazaras in particular, as apostates, were killed. They detested Ahmad Shah Massoud, the ‘lion of Panjshir’ and a hero of the resistance to the Soviets, because he was a Tajik. Some of their fundamentalism was fuelled by the radicalised strains of Islam: Wahhab-ism and Deobandism, exports of Saudi Arabia and Dar al-Islam Howzah in India, respectively. But the Taliban mostly were doctrinally rooted in -Pashtunwali — ancient tribal custom.

Times have changed. The Taliban we see today present themselves as a more complex, multi-ethnic and sophisticated coalition — perhaps the reason they have been able to topple the western-installed Afghanistan government at such breathtaking speed.