Look at, for instance, what they have lately been doing in the lawless territory between Afghanistan and Pakistan. From sending suicide bombers targeting innocents in places like hospitals to burning down schools, they continue to do the very things in the name of our faith that it strictly forbids.

There are reports of at least 100 girls' schools in SWAT, one of Pakistan's most backward regions, being burnt down by the militants. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Islam knows that these actions strike at the very heart of the great faith and what it stands for.

But this is not a debate about Islamic teachings and how the zealots like Taliban, or whoever these nuts are, are distorting them.

What really intrigues me is the fact that in spite of these patently absurd actions by the insurgents, support for them continues to grow in Afghanistan as well as in the adjoining tribal areas of Pakistan.

The more the Coalition of the Willing pours in billions of dollars in funds, nearly a hundred thousand of the world's finest soldiers and the most lethal arms and ammunition in Afghanistan, the more they seem to lose against an enemy that was supposed to have been destroyed in the U.S. invasion in 2001.

An enemy that has no ostensible external support, no funds and with weapons that may as well belong to the Stone Age continues to give the reigning superpower and its equally powerful allies a run for their money.

The more the U.S. and NATO forces kill and destroy the Taliban, the more they seem to grow, multiplying like those imperishable armies of zombie soldiers in the Hollywood productions, The Mummy II and III.

Seven years after the invasion, the coalition is as close to victory against the Taliban as the Russians had been against the mujahedin in 1970s and '80s. Last week, 10 French soldiers were killed in a single attack, the biggest single day's loss for France since the terrorist attack in Beirut in October 1983 killed 55 soldiers minutes after a truck bomb killed 241 U.S. service personnel near Beirut Airport.

Why? What keeps the Taliban going? The 3,000-year old history of Afghanistan is full of answers to the question. This mountainous land with moody weather and merciless winters has never come to terms with the invaders, however mighty and however conceited.

True, Afghanistan had been the gateway to the Indian sub-continent and the rest of Asia for successive invading armies. But it also proved their last abode -- the graveyard of great armies, from Alexander the Great to the Russian Czars.

Returning to the current occupiers, the Western observers and editorial pundits have been stunned by the recent spectacular successes of the Taliban.

And Western leaders from the speedy Sarko to bored Brown have been paying unannounced visits to their demoralized troops on the front that Barack Obama calls the main front of the U.S. war. Agitated Western publics are increasingly asking their governments: "What went wrong in Afghanistan? We thought we had won this war."

What really perplexes the West is the hopeless longing of ordinary Afghans for the barbarians called Taliban. Instead of singing paeans to their Western liberators who brought them invaluable gifts like democracy, freedom and human dignity, as George W. Bush puts it, the ungrateful Afghans are helping and cooperating with their tormentors.

But is it really a mystery to be unlocked by Dan Brown why ordinary Afghans still look to the Taliban? The clues are right there, staring you in the face.

This week, on Aug. 22, the coalition air strikes in western Afghanistan killed more than 90 civilians. The United Nations has now confirmed that more than 60 of the victims were children, the rest of them mostly women.

An understandably irate President Hamid Karzai vehemently protested to the coalition. But since he cannot do much except protest when it comes to dealing with the coalition, he sacked two of his own generals. The United States, however, insists that not more than 15 to 20 people were killed and most of them were insurgents.

Even the tiny bodies of the victims couldn't convince Karzai's friends in high places that those killed in Herat were indeed innocent civilians, going about their daily business.

But is this the first incident of its kind when the coalition mistook women and children for the militants? Last month, on July 6, a whole wedding party was wiped out by the coalition bombing near Jalalabad.

A government inquiry found that at least 47 people died in the attack; 39 of them were women and children. The United States maintained they were all "insurgents."

There have been scores of such incidents when civilians were deliberately targeted -- a wedding party here, a casual gathering of elders there -- by those who claim to be the saviors and protectors of Afghan people. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission reports that more than 900 civilians have been killed this year alone in the coalition attacks.

According to the United Nations, at least half of the civilians killed this year were not felled by Taliban bullets but by the coalition. Last year, nearly 2,000 civilians were killed by "friendly fire" of the trigger-happy soldiers of the empire. These were the people who even the coalition agrees were civilian.

There are thousands of others who are routinely killed as Taliban, without so much as meriting a passing mention in the Western media; let alone raising questions if they were really militants or innocents caught in the crossfire.

I wonder what crime those children in Herat committed except being born in a country on the wrong side of Uncle Sam. They don't look to me in any way different from my own kids or yours. Look at them, Mr. Bush, they are as human as your average American school-going kids. They might have different names and follow a different faith. But in the end, they were human too.

And yet our friends in the West wonder why the Afghans continue to support and empathize with the insurgents. As far as the Afghan people are concerned, there's little difference between the Soviet occupation and the current reign of terror. Only the markings on those fighter jets have changed from Russian to English.

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Aijaz Zaka Syed is Opinion Editor of Khaleej Times. Write to him at Aijaz@khaleejtimes.com.