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Well they weren't in the beginning.
After 9/11, when we determined that Bin Laden and his al Qaeda group (a small group of radicals and some financial backers we later named al Qaeda, actually) was responsible for 9/11, we found out they'd organized and trained in Afghanistan, and we worried that might happen again. We were also really, really pissed that Afghanistan was not only allowing such training to go on, but that they were still holding Bin Laden and refused to hand him over.
Had the Taliban not been so short-sighted and handed over Bin Laden, the Taliban today would be relatively small. The problem is that we took great offense when they refused to hand over Bin Laden, and we started bombing them. A lot. We killed a lot of Taliban, but a lot more civilians. If you know anything about terrorist organizations in the Middle East (or anywhere, really), killing civilians tends to increase recruitment numbers. Like it has in Lebanon with Hezbollah and in Palestine with Hamas.
The increasing numbers of Taliban made it harder to locate Bin Laden. We invaded, but found resistance from the growing Taliban and other "insurgents". Eventually they went from simply being people in our way to being "the trrrists" even though they had nothing to do with 9/11.
So now we're facing a much stronger, widespread, and larger Taliban which has used that control very wisely to take root in Pakistan. We're still looking for Bin Laden, but now we've settled into the role as "liberators" again, this time for Afghanistan, trying to fix the mess we made.
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