aq & taliban are both the result of a chain of events you can draw to the post meccan siege shift in power among the saudi elite to the clerics that led to the mass establishment and funding of salafi madrassas abroad, sending young men and funds abroad to the afghan conflict, etc. the taliban come directly out of these madrassas. they are part of the same great cultural current which is at its root a dialectic between royals and clerics in ksa. wahhabism is an exonym but is a perfectly valid descriptor.
I don't think it's reasonable to describe the Taliban as "part of the same great cultural current which is at its root a dialectic between royals and clerics in ksa".
The Taliban are interested in Afghanistan. In fact I suspect they are primarily interested in "Pashtunistan", or Waziristan. They are interested in western Afghanistan only insofar as it is primarily Shia, and the Taliban are very much sectarian Sunnis. I don't think many Taliban are particularly interested in what happens in faraway Saudi Arabia.
AQ are interested in destroying the enemies of their kind of Sunni islam, especially in Saudi Arabia and the USA. So while the Taliban and AQ share a Sunni affiliation, the former want to run Afghanistan; the latter want to change the whole world.
This is accurate. The Sunni-Shia divide is something I think westerners struggle with understanding, likely because- and perhaps especially for Americans- Islam is a distant religion and the only analog they can come up is the Protestant Reformation, which for reasons that need not be said is not usefully similar. Your last sentence also helps explain why the current administration, assuming they understand and are aware of these distinctions in a way that actually informs policy, is giving so much deference to the Taliban right now.
I didn't mean to over-emphasise the Sunni/Shia divide. I've been told by moslem friends that most ordinary moslems regard all fellow moslems as brothers, regardless of their sect affiliation.
My point was that the Taliban have limited geographical ambitions; even within Afghanistan, the regions on the border with Iran (like Jalalabad) are not Taliban-friendly. In the north, the tajiks, turkmen and so on are likely to oppose the Taliban. They face a lot of internal opposition, even without the West interfering.
