> > >Well, they [Al Qaeda] were in power in Afghanistan
>>
>> Are they now?
>
>Come on.
>
>> Were they ever?
>
>Yes.
Are you conflating Al Qaeda with the Taliban? If Ahmed Rashid's _Taliban_ (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000) is to be trusted, Al Qaeda doesn't equal the Taliban -- far from it:
***** By now [August 1998] Bin Laden had developed considerable influence with the Taliban, but that had not always been the case. The Taliban's contact with the Arab-Afghans and their Pan-Islamic ideology was non-existent until the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996. Pakistan was closely involved in introducing Bin Laden to the Taliban leaders in Kandahar, because it wanted to retain the Khost training camps for Kashmiri militants, which were now in Taliban hands. Persuasion by Pakistan, the Taliban's better-educated cadres, who also had Pan-Islamic ideas, and the lure of financial benefits from Bin Laden, encouraged the Taliban leaders to meet with Bin Laden and hand him back the Khost camps.
Partly for his own safety and partly to keep control over him, the Taliban shifted Bin Laden to Kandahar in 1997. At first he lived as a paying guest. He built a house for Mullah Omar's family and provided funds to other Taliban leaders. He promised to pave the road from Kandahar airport to the city and build mosques, schools and dams but his civic works never got started as his funds were frozen. While Bin Laden lived in enormous style in a huge mansion in Kandahar with his family, servants and fellow militants, the arrogant behaviour of the Arab-Afghans who arrived with him and their failure to fulfil any of the civic projects, antagonized the local population. The Kandaharis saw the Taliban leaders as beneficiaries of Arab largesse rather than the people.
Bin Laden endeared himself further to the leadership by sending several hundred Arab-Afghans to participate in the 1997 and 1998 Taliban offensives in the north. These Wahabbi fighters helped the Taliban carry out the massacres of the Shia Hazaras in the north. Several hundred Arab-Afghans, based in the Rishkor army garrison outside Kabul, fought on the Kabul front against Masud. Increasingly, Bin Laden's world view appeared to dominate the thinking of senior Taliban leaders. All-night conversations between Bin Laden and the Taliban leaders paid off. Until his arrival the Taliban leadership had not been particularly antagonistic to the USA or the West but demanded recognition for their government.
However, after the Africa bombings the Taliban became increasingly vociferous against the Americans, the UN, the Saudis and Muslim regimes around the world. Their statements increasingly reflected the language of defiance Bin Laden had adopted and which was not an original Taliban trait. As US pressure on the Taliban to expel Bin Laden intensified, the Taliban said he was a guest and it was against Afghan tradition to expel guests. When it appeared that Washington was planning another military strike against Bin Laden, the Taliban tried to cut a deal with Washington -- to allow him to leave the country in exchange for US recognition. Thus until the winter of 1998 the Taliban saw Bin Laden as an asset, a bargaining chip over whom they could negotiate with the Americans.
The US State Department opened a satellite telephone connection to speak to Mullah Omar directly. The Afghanistan desk officers, helped by a Pushto translator, held lengthy conversations with Omar in which both sides explored various options, but to no avail. By early 1999 it began to dawn on the Taliban that no compromise with the US was possible and they began to see Bin Laden as a liability.... (pp. 139-140) *****
The Taliban's changing attitudes to Bin Laden & Co. -- from an asset to a liability -- were shaped by a mixture of cost-benefit calculations of realpolitik, somewhat tempered by such ideas as honor and hospitality.
> > How likely are they to come into power? Just how well organized are
>> Al Qaeda? Leaderless resistance may be suitable for sporadic terrors
>> & other tactics of destabilization, but it's not very suitable for
>> taking & holding state power.
>
>Well, it may not be suitable to take power at Ohio State, but the state of
>affairs in Pakistan should give you pause.
It appears to me that states such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. on the periphery cannot be easily conquered and maintained without support of other states (in finance, intelligence, logistics, weaponry, military manpower, etc.), which is _the main raison d'etre of imperialism & what may be called sub-imperialism_: Pakistan's former assistance for the Taliban; the USA's aid to the Northern Alliance; etc. Al Qaeda doesn't have that.