KABUL — Taliban officials say they are uncertain about who will unwittingly fund their operations in the wake of President Joe Biden’s decision to pull all U.S troops from Afghanistan.

“The United States has either advertently or inadvertently provided the majority of our funding since we went public back in the ‘90s,” said Taliban spokesman Abdullah Gohar. “Without the steady cash flow coming in from [Department of Defense], we’ll have to dupe some other willfully ignorant superpower into pumping in capital.”

It isn’t just the financial support that the Taliban has appreciated, says Gohar, but the intangible benefits of having a foreign military occupy the lands of a fiercely independent tribal people for 20 years.

The U.S.-Taliban partnership has rapidly expanded since 2001. But the seeds of this enduring relationship were actually sown decades earlier.