So How Strong Are the Taliban?

I confess I don't understand this:

Yet victory by the West and its Afghan allies remains eminently achievable: the Taliban enjoys very little popular support and lacks the kind of superpower patron that enabled the Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s to defeat the occupying Soviet Army and the Vietnamese communists to outlast American forces in Southeast Asia a decade earlier.

This is a post from Dan Twining under the headline "The Future of the West, and the World it Made, is at Stake in Afghanistan."

So the Taliban - with no superpower patron and little popular support can nonetheless threaten to destroy the entire Western World?

(AP Photos)