Pakistan, Sept. 22 -- When the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, Pakistan had every reason to hope that the situation would move in a better direction. There was an expectation that, having returned to power after two decades, the Taliban would have learned from their past experience and would now show greater maturity in governance, strategic affairs and diplomacy. Unfortunately, the reality has turned out to be almost the exact opposite.

The Taliban of the 1990s were essentially a ragtag militia with little understanding of how a modern state was governed. This time, however, they did not have to build a state from scratch. They inherited, virtually free of cost, the entire institutional infrastructure of a modern state. In the...