How We Lost Afghanistan

Now a Third Afghan War is wrapping up its final act around Kandahar, and a laughable band of charlatans has lobbied in Bonn, Germany, for the right to rule the unruly. Somehow, if the Bushalopes and the Annanites are to be believed, a New Democratic Afghanistan will be cobbled together from the Hekmatyars and Dostums and Rabbanis, all united under the banner of an 87-year-old king who owes more to Fellini than to Shah Mohammed. And get this: After the Afghan parliament gets together, the burkas will come off, the Fairway will open up next to the main gate of the Kabul bazaar, and that Internet-famous Unocal pipeline project, dormant for far too long, will begin sucking Kazakh crude out from under the Caspian and into the Pakistani port of Karachi. Next mission: bombing Iraq into capitalism.

The networks aired maps turning from Taliban red to Northern Alliance blue, but here on the ground, as people who prefer to remain anywhere-but like to say, no such thing occurred. Dasht-e Qaleh and Taloqan and Kunduz all “fell,” but 99 percent of the conquerors were Taliban troops who shed their beards and turbans and picked up Shah Masood’s hip hat for a buck. There were, before September 11, a mere 6000 to 20,000 Northern Alliance soldiers holding the eastern portion of Takhar province and the extremely mountainous Badakhshan and Wakhan corridor, an inland peninsula created as a buffer zone between imperial Russia and British India during the 19th century.

When your taxpayer-funded $75,000 bombs began pounding frontline Taliban positions and the not-so-occasional farming village, the age-old Afghan tradition of ideological flexibility and self-preservation led thousands of Taliban to cross the lines to “defect.” “I am so sorry,” a Taliban commander cried in the welcoming arms of his Northern Alliance counterpart a day before Kunduz “fell.” “We are brothers and should not have fought.”

Finally, a rare truth in a land of lies—both men had fought together in the Taliban and before that against the Soviets. The vast majority of “Northern Alliance” fighters now were Taliban a few weeks ago; welcome to the first fashion war of the new millennium. Village Voice