An Islamic friend who also speaks fairly fluent Arabic told me some years ago that jihad is one of those mutable words which acquires its meaning as much from the context as from its base definition which is "a striving".
Arabic is full of allusions, and you are expected to understand what is meant by some words from the context they are used in. Therefore "jihad" in the religious sense is a "holy struggle". What
kind of a holy struggle depends on the context.
The Taliban called the war with the western alliance a jihad but appeared to lose a lot of moderate support in doing so because it was clear to most educated Moslems that it was no such thing. It was just another tawdry political war. If the attack had been on say Mecca or Medina on the other hand, it would have been another thing entirely!
From the Taliban's point of view, however, it was probably a fair enough call. They did seem to believe that they were the keepers of a "pure" form of Islam completely lacking elsewhere, and that the attacks against them were an attempt to stamp it out. They didn't seem to want to understand that most of the world just saw that as a beneficial second-order effect!
