As for the enemy, "they were quarrelsome and confrontational with each other; weakness in conventional war, but qualities that gave them flexibility and unbeatable power in an insurgency. Their disunity generated centrifugal forces that made the country ungovernable and gave them a sinuous strength when they came together." This is Loyn's description of Afghan's opposition to British rule in the 1870s, but it could just as well apply to the Taliban today.
Shortly before he died two years ago, America's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, told me that training the Afghan army and police was our best hope of disengaging from Afghanistan with some modicum of success. He advised me to go see General William Caldwell in Kabul, who was in charge of training our Afghans. I did, and Caldwell told me that his training mission was "our ticket home."
But today we read that NATO is suspending joint operations and patrols with the Afghans, and that training has been curtailed lest our Afghans turn on us and kill us. Our ticket home may be still there, but it's looking less and less valid.
Some say that Afghanistan will return to civil war when we leave, the civil war that broke out when the Soviets withdrew. I say that civil war never ended. The Tajiks, Uzbeks and other minorities that took over Kabul when the Soviet regime crumbled were later defeated by the Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group that forced the minorities into a Northern Alliance on the border with Tajikistan. The United States reversed that situation after 9/11 and put the Tajiks back in power in Kabul, forcing the Pashtuns into a southern alliance near the border with Pakistan where they fight on today.
Our Afghan war has morphed into a war against the Pashtuns, a conflict in which foreign armies have had little success over the centuries.
Relations with the man we put on Afghanistan's throne, President Hamid Karzai, go from bad to worse. Afghanistan seethes with deception and betrayal, and so it has always been. As former Emir Yukub Khan, whose rebellious soldiers overran the British compound in 1879, said: "This is Afghanistan. We cannot get on here without practicing deceit."
And so the American Embassy puts on the best face it can, doing its duty and hoping for the best. The mirage of Afghanistan "good enough" steadily recedes before us.
