Six years after being driven from power, the Taliban are demonstrating a resilience and a ferocity that are raising alarm here, in Washington, and in other NATO capitals, and they are engendering a fresh round of soul-searching. How has this relatively ragtag insurgency managed to keep the world’s most powerful armies at bay?

The objectives of the war have become increasingly uncertain in a conflict where Taliban leaders say they do not feel the need to control territory, at least for now, or to defeat American and NATO forces — only to outlast them in a region that is, in any case, their home.

The Taliban’s tenacity, military officials and analysts say, reflects their cohesive leadership — successfully maintained since being driven from power in Afghanistan —, their ability to attract a continuous stream of recruits, and their advantage in having a haven across the border in Pakistan. While the Taliban enjoy such a sanctuary, they will be very hard to beat, military officials say.

The advantage of that haven in Pakistan, even beyond the lawless tribal realms, is that it has allowed the Taliban leadership to exercise uninterrupted control of its insurgency through the same clique of mullahs and military commanders who ran Afghanistan as a theocracy and harbored Osama bin Laden until they were driven from power in December 2001.

The Taliban’s reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, a one-eyed cleric and war veteran, is widely believed by Afghan and Western officials to be based in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan.

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