No, those two are FAR from mutually exclusive they're definitely religious organizations at their core. And they reflect exactly what OP is talking about. The Taliban is a terrorist organisation AND they were the community organizer and religious front previously in Afghanistan that enforced religious policy that put a cap on even more primitive and disturbing practices like bacha bazi. Religion is definitely always one of the first glues that holds places together, from our view they are barbaric and despotic, from their view they were putting a stop to a culture of even worse deeds. In the west we've been living with the leviathan for so long their situation and development so archaic it's a part of the reason for many of our miscalculations in the middle east. We thought we could liberalize them by nation building and teaching old dogs new tricks, we severely underestimated how hard it is to 'fast-track' cultural evolution. The Taliban may seem brutal, and they are, and they are terrorists, but they are also the religious group that keeps the community from serial raping kids.

The same extremism can be seen emergent in most developing areas in history, including the US. By ALL of today's standards the Mormons, a very large body of them including the main sect, were defacto terrorists ... and community organizers and a church, religion, etc. They killed other's that threatened their viewpoints, they killed infidels that transverses on 'Mormon' land, they did heinous things, they tried to separate themselves from the union and we had to send in troops to occupy what is today Utah.

How quickly people seem to forget.