A little less than two years ago the Taliban was a fragmented — albeit lethal — collection of competing interests, a group at war with itself as often as it was at war with the Afghan government.
It had been beaten down by nearly two decades of war and stumbled along following the death of its infamous leader Mullah Omar.
That was then, this is now.
Today's Taliban — the juggernaut which has swept across much of northern, western and southern Afghanistan this summer — is a cohesive, well-organized insurgency that in the opinion of some experts could only have had its fractured parts bolted back together with outside help.
The breathless collapse in recent days of provincial capitals — including the southern city of Kandahar where so much Canadian blood and treasure was spilled — may have come as a shock to many Western nations.
In many ways, it does not surprise those who are steeped in the shifting politics and alliances of Afghan tribal culture.
Sean Maloney, a professor of history at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont., has taken to calling them "The New Taliban" — a sophisticated, vicious force with 40 per cent of its ranks filled with foreign fighters, he estimates.
Many of the Afghan troops who've encountered the Taliban 2.0 have noticed that they are not the traditional Pashtuns who filled the original militant ranks, but include many Urdu speakers among the insurgents. Urdu is a language more common to Pakistan and northern India.
"There's no way, I believe, the disparate elements inside Afghanistan worked together to create this coalition we're confronted with right now," said Maloney, who served as an expert adviser on Afghanistan to the commander of the Canadian Army. "There had to be external support for that."
Perhaps more significantly, the melting away of NATO-trained Afghan National Army units, especially in Kandahar, is likely being driven by the complex web of tribal politics and allegiances - something Western military commanders struggled to understand and appreciate through nearly two decades, said Maloney.
Some of the more important tribes who could have stood in the way of the Taliban have declared themselves neutral and that could have only been achieved through negotiation and perhaps even buying them off ahead of time.
"They had to do months of preparation to get some of that," said Maloney. "This isn't like some Nazi blitzkrieg in the same way, with tanks overrunning everything. There had to be significant preparations for this."
Pashtun tribes always back a winner — someone that looks like a winner, he said.
One tribe apparently sitting on the sidelines is the Popalzai, which counts former Afghan president Hamid Karzai among its luminaries.
