What Motivated the Taliban?

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The united states never really understood or bothered to try and understand. What was motivating the taliban? Why? How was it able to recruit so many people in this very long and costly war.? Who's going to risk their lives to do that? What's the cause they're fighting for? And that was something that seems pretty basic. You'd want to know, what was driving the enemy? What was motivating them to fight us and our allies? But we never really got our arms around that. I think afghans do have a real sense of nationalism, that this is their country, right? It isn't just in balkanized place that they have a history of living under

Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains startling revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war, from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. The Afghanistan Papers is a shocking account that will supercharge a long overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.