Excerpt from, "All Counterinsurgency Is Local" in the OCT issue of The Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810/afghan

The Taliban are well aware that the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural Pashtun district and village, and that Afghan army and coalition forces are seldom seen there. With one hand, the Taliban threaten tribal elders who do not welcome them. With the other, they offer assistance. (As one U.S. officer recently noted, they’re “taking a page from the Hezbollah organizations in Lebanon, with their own public works to assist the tribes in villages that are deep in the inaccessible regions of the country. This helps support their cause with the population, making it hard to turn the population in support of the Afghan government and the coalition.”)

The rural Pashtun south has its own systems of tribal governance and law, and its people don’t want Western styles of either. But nor are they predisposed to support the Taliban, which espouses an alien and intolerant form of Islam, and goes against the grain of traditional respect for elders and decision by consensus. Re-empowering the village coun*cils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to re-create the traditional check against the powerful political network of rural mullahs, who have been radicalized by the Taliban. But the elders won’t commit to opposing the Taliban if they and their families are vulnerable to Taliban torture and murder, and they can hardly be blamed for that.
Ski, I agree that we naively attempt to make other countries mirror our political, social, economic and security systems, assuming that if we simply overlayed an American Style template of any country, their problems would magically go away. As you pointed out, this creates an entirely new set of problems.

The authors above point out a more feasible approach to pacify the country to establish conditions where we're reasonably ensured that the Taliban will not be welcome. However, the strategy we apply depends upon our strategic end state (if there is one). Again if the desired end state is a stable, democratic government that practices free market capitalism, the approach offered above may not get us there.