Further information: Afghan Civil War (1992–1996) § 1994

The Taliban are a movement of religious students (talib) from the Pashtun areas of
eastern and southern Afghanistan who were educated in traditional Islamic schools
in Pakistan.[54] There were also Tajik and Uzbek students, demarking them from the
more ethnic-centric mujahideen groups "which played a key role in the Taliban’s
rapid growth and success."[101]

Education
Mullah Mohammad Omar in September 1994 in his hometown of Kandahar with 50 students
founded the group.[102][103][104] Omar had since 1992 been studying in the Sang-i-
Hisar madrassa in Maiwand (northern Kandahar Province). He was unhappy that Islamic
law had not been installed in Afghanistan after the ousting of communist rule, and
now with his group pledged to rid Afghanistan of warlords and criminals.[102]

Within months, 15,000 students, often Afghan refugees, from religious schools or
madrasas – one source calls them Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-run madrasas[103] – in
Pakistan joined the group.

The US government covertly provided violent schoolbooks filled with militant

Islamic teachings and jihad and images of weapons and soldiers in an effort to
inculcate in children anti-Soviet insurgency and hate for foreigners. The Taliban
used the American textbooks but scratched out human faces in keeping with strict
fundamentalist interpretation. The United States Agency for International
Development gave millions of dollars to the University of Nebraska at Omaha in the
1980s to develop and publish the textbooks in local languages.[105]

Motivation
Those early Taliban were motivated by the suffering among the Afghan people, which
they believed resulted from power struggles between Afghan groups not adhering to
the moral code of Islam; in their religious schools they had been taught a belief
in strict Islamic law.[102][55][56]

Pakistani involvement
Sources state that Pakistan was heavily involved, already in October 1994, in the
"creating" of the Taliban.[106][107] Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency
(ISI), strongly supporting the Taliban in 1994, hoped for a new ruling power in
Afghanistan favourable to Pakistan.[102] Even if the Taliban received financial
support from Pakistan in 1995 and 1996, and even if "Pakistani support was
forthcoming from an early stage of the Taliban movement’s existence, the connection
was fragile and statements from both the Pakistani ISI as well as the Taliban early
on demonstrated the uneasy nature of the relationship. The ISI and Pakistan aimed
to exert control, while the Taliban leadership manoeuvred between keeping its
independence and sustaining support." The main supporters in Pakistan were General
Naseerullah Babar, who mainly thought in terms of geopolitics (opening trade routes
to Central Asia), and Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F), as
"the group represented Deobandism and aimed to counter the influence of the
Jama’at-e Islami and growing Wahhabism."[108]

On 3 November 1994, the Taliban in a sur