The Taliban captured Kabul on 27 September 1996. The previous day Ahmed Shah Massoud, the greatest leader of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union’s ingress into Afghanistan, retreated from Kabul. He withdrew his forces through the Shomali Plain into his stronghold of the Panjshir Valley. With the Afghan capital in its possession, the group declared the establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, culminating a process that began two years earlier with its taking Kandahar.
Through these two years, Western countries, including the United States (US), considered the Taliban merely as one of the parties to the Afghan civil conflict. They were not concerned about its ideology. They considered its practices representative of the conservative traditions of the Pashtuns. The US also overlooked the clear nexus that had developed between Pakistan and the Taliban.