Origin

The Taliban initially had had enormous goodwill from Afghans weary of the corruption, brutality and incessant fighting of Mujahideen warlords. Two contrasting narratives of the beginnings of the Taliban are that the rape and murder of boys and girls from a family traveling to Kandahar or a similar outrage by Mujahideen bandits sparked Mullah Omar and his students to vow to rid Afghanistan of these criminals. The other is that the Pakistan-based truck shipping mafia known as the "Afghanistan Transit Trade" and their allies in the Pakistan government, trained, armed and financed the Taliban to clear the southern road across Afghanistan to the Central Asian Republics of extortionate bandit gangs.
The basis of the Taliban was provided when, in the early 1980s, the CIA and the ISI (Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence Agency) provided arms to any group resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and started the process of gathering radical Muslims from around the world to fight against the Soviets. Osama Bin Laden was one of the key players in organizing these U.S.-backed training camps for the Muslims. The U.S. poured funds and arms into Afghanistan and "by 1987, 65,000 tons of U.S.-made weapons and ammunition a year were entering the war".
The Taliban were based in the Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan regions, and were overwhelmingly ethnic Pashtuns and predominantly Durrani Pashtuns. They received training and arms from Pakistan, the U.S. as well as other Middle Eastern countries who had been recruited by the U.S. to thwart the Soviet invasion of this region.
The first major military activity of the Taliban was in October-November 1994 when they marched from Maiwand in southern Afghanistan to capture Kandahar City and the surrounding provinces, losing only a few dozen men. Starting with the capture of a border crossing and a huge ammunition dump from warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a few weeks later they freed "a convoy trying to open a trade route from Pakistan to Central Asia" from another group of warlords attempting to extort money. In the next three months this hitherto "unknown force" took control of twelve of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, with Mujahideen warlords often surrendering to them without a fight and the "heavily armed population" giving up their weapons. By September 1996 they captured Afghanistan's capital, Kabul.