In the year 2000, five years after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, nobody elsewhere cared what happened in that land-locked, benighted country.
It was ruled by angry rural fanatics who tormented the local people with their demented rules for proper ¡°Islamic¡± behavior, but it was not a military or diplomatic priority for anybody.
It is about to return to that isolated and isolationist existence. Neither then nor now do the Taliban even have a foreign policy. They are more like a franchise operation whose various elements share certain basic principles ¡ª e.g. foreigners, women and democracy are bad ¡ª but whose members are primarily focused on local issues and personal ambitions.
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