Dexter Filkins: The Legacy of the Taliban Is a Sad and Broken Land. No doubt. I hope the new regime will do better (it almost has to, really), but unfortunately, failure won't surprise me. It's not just the legacy of the Taliban that is at issue, but the legacy of the Soviet invasion, the civil war afterwards, and everything else in this country's tragic history. It's easy to point fingers at the Taliban, but they were only the latest incarnation of Afghanistan in crisis.