Uh, that's not how it was, is it?
...bin Laden already "rules" Afghanistan. His victory over the Russian has emboldened him significantly...Osama bin Laden didn't beat the Russians.
I don't think even the Taliban did, before he came to them.
What the Taliban have won is the *civil* war in Afghanistan, that got going *after* the Afghanis had kicked out the Russians -- once the common enemy was no longer there to unite them, the widely disparate factions inevitably turned on each other.
My own guess would be, the Taliban probably won this too pretty much without bin Laden's help -- sure, he may have contributed money for guns, but I've seen no reports that he's much of a guerilla leader; just a terrorist leader and agitator pandering to the more or less illiterate (and the difference is rather large, I think).
Who beat the Russians, if you want to attach that feat to a single name (which of course isn't really possible), was probably more than anyone else -- and, deeply ironically -- Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the "Northern Alliance" that got bumped off by assassins -- apparently working for bin Laden -- just days before the attack in the US.
At least Massoud's was the name you heard most of on the news, when Afghanistan was mentioned (and the fight against the Soviets was still going on), for most (at least the second half) of the eighties -- long before anyone had heard of this bin Laden character.
Right?