The Taliban is the point of a spear Osama has helped to organize.
The point of the spear is to create a reactionary throwbck to a fantasy of medieval Islam called the "Caliphate".
This would be a theocratic network of states ruled by people like the Taliban and Osama, across all the Moslem world.
They would inflict on the West any amount of violence required in their view to make us unable to do more than allow them to do as they wish.
They would slaughter any, Moslem or not, who stand in their way.
They would expropriate anything they decide is needed to support their theocratic empire.
The reality is of course completely different.
The Taliban is a reactionary, corrupt and cowardly rule, using terror against its own people, with thought police on the street to inflict summary judgements up to and including murdering citizens who do not cooperate with their rule sufficiently.
To say they use a perverted logic to justify any and all abuses is an understatement.
To think of them as invincible, legitimate or clever would also be wrong.
They are already, at their leadership level, in hiding or on the run.
Their pitiful, undermanned military is down to something less than 200 stinger missles, and they are constrained in their use of weapons by the same geography that made the Soviet occupation untenable.
Unlike the resistance to the USSR invasion of Dec. 1979, they are already weak, opposed by governments around the world, and spread very thin, between the Pakistan frontier, the Russian (Uzbeki)border, the civil war, and now the fact that we are already acitvely exploring their countryside.
The popular opinion, held by a few in this country, that the Taliban are some kind of invincible force, is as wrong as was the same opinion about the Iraqi army in 1989-1990.
The Pakistani Government finally woke up to the fact that the Taliban, in repayment for the assistance and support that Pakistan has given, is planning to destroy the country and return it to the dispotic conditions it has inflicted on the people of Afghanistan.
That was a wake-up call the Taliban will regret.
We can fight the Taliban, we will fight the Taliban, and we will triumph over the Taliban and Osama.
The first skirmishes have already apparently happened.
They will lose.
Freedom will prevail.
Ed