Who Trains the Taliban?

Now that President Obama has made the decision to send an additional 30+ thousand troops to Afghanistan I again have this one question.  Who the hell is training the Taliban?  This is a post I made back in October.

Every time I hear someone say we have to put more trainers on the ground in Afghanistan to train the militia or the local federal army I wonder who trains the other side.  We pour millions into the effort, buy uniforms, give them huge amounts of equipment, support them with air power, medical facilities, etc.  Yet it seems that the Taliban fighters are just recruited from the population, given an AK47 with lots of rounds of ammo and sent out into the field.  They defeated the Brits, the Russians and it looks like they are winning the war against us.  If these Afghanistan fighters are so good why do we need to train them?  Maybe they should be training us to fight in their environment.  How is it that the Northern Alliance, in 2002, with just a few hundred of our special operations guys were able to totally defeat the Taliban in a matter of weeks or even days?  What happened to those guys?  Are they now the Taliban?  It seems that while we were off fighting a war we did not need to fight in Iraq, this whole Afghanistan thing has slipped away.  I really don't understand it and I really wonder if the upper echelon of our military and political leadership really understand it.

Posted via email from Captain Richard's Posterous Blog