Crawling from the Wreckage Read Free Page B

yet, but Afghanistan stands a reasonable chance of sorting itself out once the Western armies leave.
    I would stand by everything in that article, except that it’s clearly going to take more time for the Western armies to pull out of Afghanistan
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October 5, 2007

A WAR WON AND LOST
    This week is the sixth anniversary of the start of U.S. air strikes against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. It was a very clever politico-military operation, and by December 2001 all of Afghanistan was under the control of the United States and its local allies for a total cost of twelve American dead.
    In the days just after 9/11, George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief, came up with a bold proposal. Why invade Afghanistan with a large American army, deploying massive firepower that kills large numbers of locals and alienates the population? Why give Osama bin Laden the long anti-American guerrilla war that he was undoubtedly counting on?
    Instead, Tenet proposed sending teams of CIA agents and special forces into the country to win the support of the various ethnic militias, loosely linked as the Northern Alliance, that still dominated Afghanistan’s northern regions. Although the Taliban had controlled most of the country since 1996, they had never decisively won the civil war. So why not intervene in that war, shower the opponents of the Taliban with money and weapons, and tip the balance against the regime?
    It worked like a charm. Pakistan, whose intelligence services had originally created the Taliban, withdrew its support. The Northern Alliance’s forces advanced, the US Air Force bombed wherever they met resistance, the regime fled Kabul, and most of the Taliban troops melted back intotheir villages. The government of a country of twenty-seven million people was taken down for a death toll that probably did not exceed four thousand on all sides.
    By mid-December 2001, the United States effectively controlled Afghanistan through its local allies, all drawn from the northern minority groups: the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara. There had not been the mass killing of innocent bystanders that would inevitably have accompanied a conventional U.S. invasion, so there was no guerrilla war. The traditional ruling group and biggest minority, the Pashtuns, who had put their money on the Taliban and lost, would have to be brought back into the game somehow, but the usual Afghan deal-making should take care of that.
    Washington had the wit to make Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from a clan that had never had much to do with the Taliban, its puppet president in Kabul, but it didn’t follow the same logic in its broader policy towards the Pashtuns. It froze out all the prominent Pashtun political and religious leaders who had had dealings with the Taliban—which was, of course, almost all of them.
    The Taliban had been the government of Afghanistan for almost five years, and were at the time the political vehicle of the Pashtun ascendancy in the country. If you were a traditional Pashtun leader, how could you not have had dealings with them? An amnesty that turned a blind eye to the past, plus pressure by the United States on its recent allies to grant the Pashtuns a fair share of the national pie, would have created a regime in Kabul to which Pashtuns could give their loyalty, even if they were less dominant at the centre than usual. But that never happened.
    The United States confused the Taliban with al-Qaeda and would not talk to Pashtun leaders who had been linked to the Taliban. Six years after the invasion that wasn’t, the Pashtuns are still largely frozen out. That is why the Taliban are coming back.
    Afghanistan has generally been run by regional and tribal warlords with little central control: nothing new there. But now it is also a country where the biggest minority has been largely excluded from power by foreign invaders who sided with the smaller minorities, and then blocked the process of accommodation by which