The Taliban were largely founded by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in 1994.[14][61][62][63][64][65][66][67] The ISI used the Taliban to establish a regime in Afghanistan which would be favorable to Pakistan, as they were trying to gain strategic depth.[37][68][69][70] Since the creation of the Taliban, the ISI and the Pakistani military have given financial, logistical and military support.[15][71][72][73] According to Pakistani Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid, "between 1994 and 1999, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis trained and fought in Afghanistan" on the side of the Taliban.[74] Peter Tomsen stated that up until 9/11 Pakistani military and ISI officers along with thousands of regular Pakistani armed forces personnel had been involved in the fighting in Afghanistan.[75] In 2001 alone, according to several international sources, 28,000-30,000 Pakistani nationals, 14,000-15,000 Afghan Taliban and 2,000-3,000 Al Qaeda militants were fighting against anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan as a roughly 45,000 strong military force.[21][22][76][77] Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf – then as Chief of Army Staff – was responsible for sending thousands of Pakistanis to fight alongside the Taliban and Bin Laden against the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud.[22][58][78] Of the estimated 28,000 Pakistani nationals fighting in Afghanistan, 8,000 were militants recruited in madrassas filling regular Taliban ranks.[21] A 1998 document by the U.S. State Department confirms that "20–40 percent of [regular] Taliban soldiers are Pakistani."[58] The document further states that the parents of those Pakistani nationals "know nothing regarding their child's military involvement with the Taliban until their bodies are brought back to Pakistan."[58] According to the U.S. State Department report and reports by Human Rights Watch, the other Pakistani nationals fighting in Afghanistan were regular Pakistani soldiers especially from the Frontier Corps but also from the army providing direct combat support.[17][58] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban
Just deleted my earlier post after reading all of this further into the wiki. Very interesting stuff.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB97/index.htm Formed in 1994, the Taliban began with only a few followers, mostly religious students who fought with the Mujahideen in the war against the Soviets and who were schooled in Islamic seminaries (madrasahs) in Pakistan. These students, or seekers, as they are referred to in the documents, wanted to rid Afghanistan of the instability, violence, and warlordism that had been plaguing the country since the defeat and withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989. The departure of the Soviets, while welcomed by Afghans and the United States, left a political vacuum in Afghanistan. The resulting chaos and civil war led to the involvement of the United Nations which tried unsuccessfully to bring about political transition through the mission led by Special Representative Mahmoud Mestiri. Despite the UN's efforts, and those of the international community, the various factions, as well as the Kabul government led by Barnahuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Masoud, in addition to other outside parties, made a definitive peaceful or military solution difficult. As a result, the civil war continued with Rabbani and Masoud attempting to fill the government role, while the other warlord remnants of the Afghan resistance, such as the Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum, Pakistani-backed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Ismail Khan, remained unwilling to cede any power or make concessions that could have resulted in a peaceful solution. Consequently, outside forces saw instability in Afghanistan as an opportunity to press their own security and political agendas. Among them were terrorist groups such as Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and states such as Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and India. Pakistan, for example, saw an unstable Afghanistan as a boon for its internal security, allowing it a strategic depth against India. Initially, [See document 25] the Pakistanis supported the Pashtun-Islamicist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an incompetent commander from the Mujahideen days, in order to have influence over the Afghan political landscape. When Hekmatyar failed to deliver for Pakistan, the administration began to support a new movement of religious students known as the Taliban. The first document dates from November 1994, one month after the Taliban took the strategic post of Spin Boldak on the Afghan-Pakistan border, allegedly with cover fire provided by Pakistani Frontier Corps (see document 5). With that victory, the Taliban, who were being championed by a fellow Pashtun, Pakistani Interior Minister Nasrullah Babar (see document 4), began to make a name for themselves, and also gained a significant amount of military supplies. Pakistan supported the Taliban, not just to restore order to Afghan roads, which would open the way for a possible Trans-Afghan gas pipeline (TAP), but because they also saw the Taliban as a faction that they might have considerable influence over, and who might provide in Afghanistan, a strategic lever for Pakistan against India. As the documents and history show, Pakistani authorities discovered they had made a blunder. The Taliban were not only uncontrollable, but unpredictable as well. In certain instances the Taliban would declare their desire for peace, willingness to work with the UN, and desire for a non-military solution for Afghanistan, then state that "anyone who gets in our way will be crushed." http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/oct2001/tal1-o24.shtml The Taliban’s own account of its origins provide an insight into its appeal. In July 1994, the Taliban’s top leader Mohammad Omar, then a village mullah, responded to pleas for assistance in freeing two girls who had been kidnapped by a local militia commander and raped. Omar, who had fought in one of the Mujaheddin organisations, gathered together a group of his supporters among the religious students of the local madrassas. Armed with a handful of rifles, the group released the girls, captured the commander and hung him from the barrel of his tank. Whatever the truth of the story, the Taliban portrayed themselves as religious vigilantes, intent on righting the wrongs inflicted on ordinary people. Its leaders insisted that the movement, unlike the Mujaheddin organisations, was not a political party and not out to form a government. They claimed to be clearing the way for a true Islamic administration and, on that basis, demanded great sacrifices from their recruits, who received no pay, only weapons and food. Pakistani assistance There was always, however, a large gulf between the image and reality. If the Taliban were to be more than a group of armed religious zealots engaged in hit-and-run guerrilla warfare, the movement required large amounts of money, arms and ammunition, as well as considerable technical and military expertise—none of which would be forthcoming from its impoverished recruits. From the outset, the Taliban’s most prominent sponsor was Pakistan.
