Hold, Hold, repeat HOLD YOUR POSITIONS; our war planners and commanders had miscalculated on how effective their ally’s advance would be, irrespective of the motley and disorganized appearance the Northern Alliance gave as soldiers. Like wild Afghan ponies that would never be corralled by a sometimes cowboy, the fighters broke away rather easily from instructions that would be anything contrary to the utter defeat of their sworn enemy, the Taliban.

When the joint US & Northern Alliance offensive began ousting the Islamist regime the NA rebels had clung to just 5% of the Afghan countryside after enduring a long and losing struggle against Kabul. Within just one month the irregulars were racing into their country’s capitol along a popular road devoid of any meaningful opposition from the Taliban army… victory was close at hand. Also within that span the USAF claimed it had run the course of significant targets to engage. Yet the international war reporters on the ground recorded many complaints coming from rebel commanders stating that US airplanes were deliberately avoiding attacks on sighted Taliban positions, choosing instead to precision bomb previously targeted structures. Many of these ruins had already been destroyed several times over, some already ruined prior to our own Afghan intervention… although bombed again and again in spite of that fact. Why the wasting of such expensive hi-tech ordinance where there was no enemy to be shattered? The war was ending too quickly for Washington, and worse, in favor of our ally the Northern Alliance.

Meanwhile far away on the other side of the globe, our own State department fought against the fact that Afghanistan had little political infrastructure besides that which the Taliban created. Much sooner than expected they needed some surrogate to handover control of the nation to, and thus claim victory in the spread of freedom. But there were very limited options that could be considered feasible at all for Afghanistan, because it is a rugged country based on clan and family loyalties, no ideology or political movement besides the rather infamous Koran-based one to tap into. Communication was extraordinarily difficult between our officialdom and any of the Afghan tribal leaders you could locate, even for the most rudimentary mediation. Overarching this in toto, the choice would have to be one that wouldn’t roil Pakistani interests in the campaign as well as for the entire region. Appeasing Pakistan with a toothless Afghani leadership figured prominently in all of Washington’s important decisions here; lest President Bush risk endangering his one preeminent friend in the newly-minted Global War on Terror, President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, losing him to overthrow from his own country’s Islamists (and also by extension the ISI cartel). Washington’s plan for Afghanistan’s new “coalition” government distilled down to a twofold enterprise that had nothing at all to do with coalition: 1] An arrangement that would placate the Pakistani madrassahs and their adherents by not providing any more reason to revolt (for example a northern leader who would destroy the Taliban) against Musharraf’s collaboration with the Great Satanic war confronting Usama Bin Laden and his protectors. 2] To assuage Musharraf’s secret service by not installing any leader from the Northern Alliance, who would undoubtedly disturb a very profitable industry of opium maintained by Islamist crop-growers all along the northern Afghan-Pakistani Border that ISI controls. The more imperative component of the two is debatable, since Afghanistan’s opium has not been curtailed to the slightest degree and neither has the Taliban been fully eliminated.

At first, Secretary of State Colin Powell was banking on exiled royalty. Zahir Shah was a former ruler of Afghanistan who abdicated his throne in 1973 and was currently residing in Italy. It was decided Zahir would lead the post-Taliban Afghan government of our liking and Secretary Powell was ‘efforting’ this aim outside the established purview of the United Nations. It was envisioned that Zahir would unite his own clan with other southern Pashtun tribes before the Taliban regime fell, with the reward of regaining his lost throne (sweetened by plentiful US reconstruction aid to come). Zahir was having no such success however. In fact to anyone observing (the world press) it became evident that he wasn’t any sort of credible national leader at all to lead a march into Kabul. In point, his movements around his own adopted territory were labored and fraught with risk of his very elimination. While he was in exile he never maintained a close relationship with his southern cousins, so after a 30-year absence it was rather natural for the tribesmen to view their new heir as an almost complete outsider. Coming along with the daily news of victories over the Taliban were the comic relief rescues of the Shah by US Special Forces from his own people. Unfortunately for Mr. Powell, Zahir wasn’t even in the minutest sense sufficiently passable to the scrutiny that examined his lonely statecraft. So entering forth into the picture (from out of nowhere and to the rescue) arrived the green-robed Hamid Karzai, a member of a powerful family also from a much more desirable non-northern tribe. Under great delusion our State Department imagined that it could handle the entire regime change unilaterally without international assistance or advice from the United Nations. It chose to follow the Neo-Conservative myths and fairytales espoused by its new leaders. When it entered office, the Bush administration had utilized the UN as a straw man to distinguish its own doctrine of unilateralism on numerous occasions. But when it became evident how peevish the entire situation was in this distant country, and how ineffective their choice of leadership was turning out to be in front of the entire world, they deferred to the offices of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan without much shame at all. The end was coming rapidly for the Taliban and it would be Karzai as the choice proffered under hasty efforts from both UN and US administrators.

(end of part 2)