But such a scenario might, in turn, be simplistic. Afghanistan is an urbanized state to a much greater extent than it was in the 1990s. There is a feisty civil society that was altogether absent back then and that is often under-appreciated by those in the West; nor is there the vacuum in authority to quite the same extent as existed the last time the Taliban overran much of the country. History has rough equivalents, but rarely do situations repeat themselves entirely. Do not expect a precise replica of the mid-1990s.
Therefore, the third scenario presents itself: one that fits nicely with the third of Churchill's courses for dealing with the frontier tribes in the first place. This scenario can be described as semi-chaos. As the Taliban establish some control in parts of the Pashtun south and southeast of the country, a grouping of the Tajiks and Uzbeks re-establish some variant of the old Northern Alliance beyond the Hindu Kush, adjacent to former Soviet Central Asia. This will be complex and half-hearted, as the Pashtuns have forged alliances with parts of the Tajik and Uzbek north over the past decade. The Kabul government may not collapse so much as shrink or weaken a bit, becoming, once again, the enlarged city-state of Greater Kabul, with modest influence elsewhere in the country. As for the Talibanistan in parts of the south and southeast, that might be less a solid frame mini-state than an assemblage of loosely allied emirates of a sort, riven by different clans and criminal networks. Over time, that itself might encourage the ability of the ethnic Pashtun slice of western Pakistan to further distance itself from the central government in Islamabad, creating what a geographer might label Pashtunistan, even as the term itself went out of some fashion decades ago and thus will be vehemently denied by experts who concentrate on all the undeniable cleavages within the Pashtun tribal region.
I am using qualifiers in my language precisely because the emerging reality will be sufficiently obscure as to be open to debate. But that is exactly what anarchy is about. And remember, whatever the official statements or terminology of the moment, what counts are the power relationships behind the scenes. Political control is only about who monopolizes the use of force in a given locale on the ground -- who the residents fear most -- regardless of the claims made in faraway capitals.
In such a scenario, Pakistan, while not arming the Taliban, will be the most significant outside power in southern and eastern Afghanistan, even as the Iranians already are in western and parts of central Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Russians will do what they can to insure that transnational jihadists do not infiltrate back into northern Central Asia, following the American withdrawal from southern Central Asia. Thus, from the Iranian Plateau eastward to the Indus River Valley there will be vague political authority at best, matching the vagueness of such authority in the other direction, from the Iranian Plateau westward to the Mediterranean.
So we are back to the young Churchill's dictum, about maneuvering, at times in an undignified fashion, with the tribes and other forces in order to achieve, in this case, very limited objectives. Churchill had in mind an advance toward Afghanistan to buffer British India. America is trying to do just enough to ensure it will not have to return to the subcontinent out of military necessity. The goals are vastly different, but Churchill's conception bears repeating.
