It is such a bitter irony that at a time when the entire Muslim world is reveling in the Arab Spring and the buzzword everywhere is democracy, pluralism and tolerance, Afghanistan, itself part of the Muslim world, continues to shiver in a winter of Taliban and increasing Talibanization. The so-called 'national peace and reconciliation' process, being a deeply flawed strategy, is at a dead-endand Afghanistan is staring in the eyes of the possibility of many more years of violence and bloodshed.

Although this Winter of Taliban fills the hearts and minds in Afghanistan with despair, on the other hand, the silver lining is that the incremental progress made over the past decade has contributed a great deal to erecting a strong firewall of resistance to Taliban and Talibanism. A predominant majority of Afghans even in the south and east are not in favor of a return of Taliban to Afghanistan but, instead, prefer the current political dispensation that has been to an extent successful in improving their lives over the past one decade.

This is, in fact, the strongest and the most significant weapon in the arsenal of the U.S.-led international community and the government of Afghanistan to use in this battle against the Taliban and their like-minded companions.

The bottom-line is clear:during more than five year of their rule, the Taliban have made it absolutely clear who they are, in what they believe and what is the kind of social, political and cultural order that they intend to impose on populations if they manage to take over territories.

Today, if you talk to young men and women from around the country, whether from Paktia, Helmand or Logar, you can clearly feel the resentment towards the Taliban that they harbor. For them, the Taliban are all about a strict and alien lifestyle whom they can neither understand nor tolerate especially after a decade of progressive experience in a relatively free cultural and political environment.

It is plain obvious that the Taliban will never be able to take over political power in Afghanistan in the manner they did in the 1990s. Afghanistan has long moved on and the idea of a return to the days and years of 1990s qualifies to be only the figment of imagination of over-zealous Taliban ideologues and commanders who continue to be out of touch with the reality. Most of the major decision-makers in the Taliban hierarchy are blinded by the intensity of their ideological leanings and disregard all the indications that their armed movement will not eventually end in a total triumph.

Contrary to popular belief, the most important factor that has fed into the Taliban's rise over the past one decade has not been the neighboring countries' intelligence agencies but the widespread disarray, ismanagement, incompetence and weakness of the state inside Afghanistan and its inability to provide good governance and successfully perform the necessary tasks that are expected of a state.

In the period between 2001 and 2005, the Taliban had not yet regrouped on a scale they did in the subsequent years. After witnessing the kind of prevailing disarray and chaos inside Afghanistan, the leadership of the Taliban grew bolder and decided to push ahead more firmly with reorganization of the defunct movement.

As the chaos, disorder and lack of the legitimacy of the current government reached mind-boggling proportions after the initial few years, so did the Taliban's ambitions and their plans to mount a large-scale insurgency. This is, more or less, the kind of dynamics that shaped the Taliban's re-emergence in the post-2001 Afghanistan. The role of the neighboring countries' intelligence agencies is definitely an important factor but it qualifies only as a secondary factor while Afghanistan's internal situation has always been the primary driving factor

The raison detre of the Taliban movement
The Taliban movement remains, no doubt, firmly ideological and this ideology constitutes this movement's raison detre. This has become apparent both for the government of Afghanistan and the international community including the U.S.

The killing of four French soldiers and injuring more than 15 others in an attack by a rogue Afghan National Army soldier (who was most probably also a Taliban member) was a rude reminder to the government and the public opinion in France that showed them who they are up against in Afghanistan.

A shocked and desperate government of President Nikolas Sarkozy (who is seeking re-election) ordered a suspension of all military cooperation with Afghanistan given the sensitivity of the issue and a presidential election that is only few months away.

The same goes for the United States whose decision-makers and policy-makers both at the political and military levels are having a tough time dealing with the Taliban both on the battlefield and in the meeting rooms in Germany and Qatar. The fiercely ideological underpinnings of the Taliban and the fact that the Taliban movement, in actuality, is a guerrilla army rather than a political organization make sure that it would take the Taliban many more years to find the necessary political skills and talent to negotiate.

This is evident in the fact that the negotiations between the Taliban and the U.S. have so far revolved only around the issue of prisoner transfers and no major breakthrough has been possible. The U.S. has indeed released a number of high-profile former Taliban officials from its prisons in recent weeks.

One among them, Mullah Fazl, is a particularly notorious former Taliban leader who had carried out systematic extermination of ethnic minorities in Afghanistan such as the Hazara people. The release of such hard-core and formerly influential members of the Taliban movement is a strategic move by the U.S. to build confidence with Taliban as well as to build a stronger platform for the movement inside Afghanistan towards the larger goal of handing them a chunk of political power.

The fact is that even the U.S. continues to lack the required experience and skills to deal with the Taliban movement. The U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, being the two agencies that are involved in the process of talks, still lack a proper understanding of the Taliban up to this day. This is apparent in the fact that they have committed a number of blunders along the way so far. Their insistence on bypassing the Pakistan government in the early days was proved to be a blunder, a mistake they rectified by eating the humble pie and knocking on the doors of Pakistanis once again.