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Now welcome to the award winning BestOfTheLeft podcast with clips today from

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NBC's Chief Foreign Correspondent, my friend Richard Engel, knows more about the Taliban

than anybody else I have ever worked with in news.

Here's what Richard thinks. We all should understand about them to know what's at stake.

Especially if the Taliban are going to be called on to do a deal to end the war.

It was here in the streets of Kandahar that the Taliban were born from the Crucible of War.

When Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in defeat in 1989,

not civil war erupted.

Warlords and opium dealers carved out fiefdoms. The country was on the brink of starvation.

In Kandahar, a poor wheat farmer named Mullah Muhammad Omar offered a radical solution.

Stability, he said, would come through strict Islamic justice and zero tolerance for drug

trafficking and corruption. Mullah Omar attracted many young followers, especially Afghans,

who studied in Pakistani madrasas. They called themselves the Taliban, literally meeting religious

students. The Taliban are daobande Muslims, a hard-line evangelical sect of Sunni Islam.

Many daobandis believe it is their duty to rid the world of tyranny through jihad.

And they were about to receive outside help.

It came from Afghanistan's neighbor, Pakistan, eager to pursue its own interests.

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