Crawling from the Wreckage Read Free Page A

soon face the same choice between reinforcing its troops or pulling them back.
    A country that has been invaded four times in less than two centuries is bound to know a couple of things about dealing with foreign conquerors, and the first thing Afghans have learned is never to trust foreigners, no matter how pure they say their intentions are. There are probably no people in the world more xenophobic than the Afghans, and they have earned the right to be so. If there was ever a window of opportunity for the current crop of invaders to convince Afghans that this time is different it closed some time ago.
    The other thing Afghans know is how to deal with invaders. Invaders will always be richer and better armed, so let them occupy the country. Don’t try to hold the cities; instead, fade back into the mountains. Take a couple of years to regroup and set up your supply lines (this time around, mostly across the border from Pakistan), and then start the guerrilla war in earnest. Ambush, harass and bleed the foreigners for as long as it takes. Eventually they will cut their losses and go home.
    It has worked every time, and it will work again. Des Browne remarked plaintively last week that “the very act of [British] deployment into the south has energized opposition.” But the reality is that the rural areas of Helmand province, like most of the Pashto-speaking provinces of the south and southeast, have been under the effective control of the resistance for several years. The arrival of foreign troops in these areas simply gives the insurgents more targets to attack.
    The endgame is beginning, even in Kabul. Hamid Karzai, the West’s chosen leader for Afghanistan, is now starting to make deals with the forces that will hold his life in their hands once the foreigners leave: the warlords and drug barons. In April, he dropped many candidates who had been approved by the “coalition” powers from a list of new provincial police chiefs, and replaced their names with those of known gangsters and criminals who work for the local warlords. He will also have to talk to the Taliban before long.
    The “Taliban” that Western troops are now fighting in Afghanistan is more inclusive than the narrow band of fanatics who imposed order on the country in 1996, after seven years of civil war. The current Afghan resistance movement includes farmers trying to protect their poppy fields, nationalists furious at the foreign presence and young men who just want to show that they are as brave as previous generations of Afghans. In other words, the Afghan fighters have the usual grab bag of motives that fuels any national resistance movement.
    Nor should we assume that the regime that eventually emerges in Kabul after the foreigners have gone home will resemble the old Taliban, a Pakistani-backed and almost entirely Pashto-speaking organization. The foreign invasion overthrew the long domination of the Pashto-speakers in Afghanistan (about 40 percent of the population), and it is most unlikely that Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmen will accept that domination again. Their own warlords will have to have a share of the power, too, and even Karzai might find a role.
    Post-occupation Afghanistan will certainly live under strict Islamic law, but there is no reason to believe that it would export Islamist revolution of the al-Qaeda brand. Even the old Taliban regime never did that; it gave hospitality to Osama bin Laden and his gang, but it almost certainly had no knowledge of his plans for 9/11, and on other issues it was often open to Western pressure. In early 2001, for example, the former Taliban regimeshut down the whole heroin industry in Afghanistan, simply by shooting enough poppy farmers to frighten the rest into obedience.
    Afghanistan will not be left to its own devices until after the people who ordered the invasion leave office: presumably next year for Tony Blair, and January 2009 for George W. Bush. There is time for lots of killing