The very next day, a group of Taliban, well armed with weapons
obtained from the Pasha arms depot on 12 October (Davis, 1998:
46), miraculously materialised to free the convoy. They then moved
on to Kandahar city, and spread outward from there.
While key figures in the Taliban were Afghans, and the move-
ment to some degree built on local resonances in Afghanistan
which groups such as Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islaminever succeeded
in achieving (Harpviken, 1997: 280–2), it was ultimately not a
manifestation of resurgent Afghan tradition, but rather an example
of ‘creeping invasion’. Creeping invasion occurs when a middle
power uses force against the territorial integrity or political inde-
pendence of another state, but covertly and through surrogates,
denying all the while that it is doing any such thing; and this use
of force is on a sufficient scale to imperil the exercise of state
power, by the state under threat, on a significant part of its terri-
tory, and is designed and intended to do so (Maley, 2000c: 2). A
very large proportion of those Taliban who fought in Afghanistan
were not Afghans. According to Ahmed Rashid, ‘Between 1994
and 1999, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis trained and
fought in Afghanistan’ (Rashid, 1999: 27). This is an astonishing
figure by any standard. Pakistan was not the only state whose
nationals were to join the Taliban, but its support was much the
most important (Sirrs, 2001a: 62). A July 2001 report by Human
Rights Watch recorded in great detail the nature of Pakistan’s mil-
itary backing for the Taliban:
Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and
manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both
by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which
include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban
operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban’s virtual
emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters,
recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban
armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facili-
tating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occa-
sions apparently directly providing combat support.The Rise and Rule of the Taliban, 1994-2001 221