Afghanistan at the tipping Point

by Charles Sennott

JALALABAD, Afghanistan—Here in this bustling town off the storied Silk Road, Osama bin Laden made his last-known public appearance in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

On that day in November, 2001, there were 1,000 tribal leaders from the surrounding provinces, all still professing loyalty to the Taliban, who gathered to hear bin Laden deliver a stirring speech in which he assured the crowd, “God is with us!” According to an account by Gary Berntsen, the CIA field commander in Afghanistan at that time, bin Laden told the cheering throng, “The Americans had a plan to invade, but if we are united and believe in Allah, we’ll teach them a lesson, the same one we taught the Russians.” Then a caravan of pickup trucks laden with fighters and led by bin Laden’s signature white Toyota Corolla headed up into the nearby hills of Tora Bora along the Pakistan border and narrowly escaped the wrath of U.S. forces as they were closing in on the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership just days before the Taliban government would be toppled in Kabul.

I was in Afghanistan at that time and on my way to the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif reporting for The Boston Globe on the frontlines of the U.S.-led military response to September 11th as air strikes picked up the pace and teams of American Special Forces were fanning out across the country from the Hindu Kush down to the Shomali Plain and across the northern provinces strung along the Amu Darya River.

Some five-and-a-half years later, in April 2007, I was back in Afghanistan for another reporting trip and traveled to Jalalabad where I witnessed another gathering of 1,000 tribal leaders and village elders in the ancient city and in the same hall where bin Laden had gathered a crowd. Many of the tribal leaders in attendance were the very same ones who cheered at bin Laden’s now-famous departing speech. This time, however, it wasn’t bin Laden hosting the event but an Afghan nongovernmental organization known as the Welfare Association for the Development of Afghanistan (WADAN), which receives funding from the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute.

At the gathering, a large banner over the stage proclaimed, in Pashto, the purpose of the meeting, “Building Democracy and National Unity.” There was criticism of the American presence in Afghanistan and of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, but also support for the enterprise of building a new government and for the spotty but significant development that Western aid had brought to the war-ravaged country and to its people.

The mixed messages, indicative of the willingness of these tribal leaders to switch allegiances, is all a part of the opaque culture of Afghanistan, as ancient as the trading routes that make up the Silk Road. It is a culture in which tribal and clan structures are more important than centralized government and have been since the 13th century conquest of Genghis Khan and later, throughout the British Empire’s presence here—even, to some extent, during the former Soviet Union’s exertion of influence and ultimate military occupation.

These tribal leaders see little irony in such a switching of sides and are surprised when Americans are puzzled by this behavior. To them, it is all part of the ancient traditions of participatory politics in Afghanistan’s remote, tribal areas where such fluid allegiances are often viewed by Afghans as the Pashtun equivalent to bipartisan initiatives. To Afghans there is something more important, more central to their lives than consensus government—and that is security.

To develop an understanding of how the Taliban has now significantly regrouped and regained effective control in a half-dozen Afghan provinces as well as to understand the long, storied history of Afghanistan, one must begin with an appreciation for this overwhelming desire for security and how it trumps the desire for democracy.

The “Great Game”: Before and After

My flight into Kabul from Dubai brought me once again over the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain range and the stark, beautiful and impenetrable terrain of Afghanistan. From the air it is easy to see how the country’s unique geography has defined its politics, its history, and its culture.

The Hindu Kush, which runs east to west, makes a jagged tear diagonally through the country, dividing the north from the south. The Kush has been the defining feature of Afghanistan’s history and its place at the crossroads of Asia has made it a crucible for—and battleground of—great civilizations.

The Kush has served to both repel attack and thwart development. The rugged mountains and rocky passes that weave through them have produced some of the world’s most proficient warriors and its lush valleys and vivid peaks have also served as inspiration to poets. Out of this romantic landscape and rich history of both invasion and resistance, there emerged a complex and layered ethnic, religious and cultural mix in what is today, Afghanistan. Although in the last century there has been a great deal of mingling of these cultures, in general terms, western Afghanistan is dominated by speakers of the Persian language, or Dari, as the Afghan dialect is referred to. The dialect is also spoken by the Hazaras who hail from central Afghanistan and the Tajiks from the west. To the north is the home of Uzbeks and Turcomans. And in the south and east there are the large Pashtun tribes who speak their own language, known as Pashto, and who make up a plurality of the country with an estimated 40 percent of the population.

The roots of modern Afghanistan begin in what Rudyard Kipling called, “The Great Game,” a clandestine and mischievous struggle for control that pitted Britain, whose Indian empire lay to the east, against the ambitions of tsarist Russia to the north. In the 19th century, the British made two ill-fated military assaults on Afghanistan in an attempt to subjugate the country before realizing that the Afghan tribal leaders and ethnic clans could be bought off far more easily than they could be militarily defeated. In May 1879, the Afghani amir Yakub Khan signed the Treaty of Gandamak to forestall further British advances.

The spirit and history of the British presence in Afghanistan is still alive in a guest house in downtown Kabul known as the Gandamack Lodge. Its proprietor, Peter Jouvenal, a former officer in a British parachute regiment turned freelance cameraman for the BBC, has lived in Afghanistan for most of the last three decades. I stayed in the guest house during part of my reporting trip.

The Gandamack Lodge prides itself on retaining the trappings of the British colonial past with a collection of 19th century Enfield rifles of the type used by Her Majesty’s regiments during the Great Game era. There is even a restaurant named for Harry Flashman, a fictional 19th century James Bond-type character who, as related in the George MacDonald Fraser series of novels, made his fame in the First Anglo-Afghan War. The whole setting at Gandamack today is done up in a tongue-in-cheek manner by Jouvenal who is, in fact, a serious photographer and cameraman who covered the frontlines of the conflicts in Afghanistan for the BBC as well as CBS and others from 1979 straight through to today.

Shortly after the fall of the Taliban, Jouvenal opened the lodge to a host of foreign correspondents and diplomats and the staff of nongovernmental-organizations. I talked with Jouvenal as he was sitting over a very British breakfast of bacon and eggs and marmalade and toast. With him was his wife, Hassina, who is Afghani, and their two young daughters, who were giggling and chasing after ducks in the garden. Jouvenal is widely considered one of the more studied Western observers in Kabul, and he believes the U.S. and its NATO allies are making many of the same errors the British Empire made before them.

“The biggest mistake we are making is going for the military option again,” said Jouvenal. “And what is on the Afghan side, and what is always on their side, is time. They will wait this out, just as they did with the British.”

In fact, Afghanistan’s patience did pay off with the British. The country established official independence from Britain in 1919 and set up its first constitution. But political assassinations and tribal revolts, as well as fighting on all levels, revealed the difficulty in trying to transform a multi-ethnic, tribally based society into a modern state. For the next half-century Afghanistan’s history would be one of struggling to modernize while trying to maintain neutrality through World War II and the early days of the Cold War.

The country was held together by the reign of King Zahir Shah from 1933 to 1973. During that time—from 1953 to 1963—the king’s brother-in-law, Daoud, came to power with the tacit support of the royal family as the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Cold War pushed Afghanistan into the arms of the Soviet Union, which offered economic and military aid. In that era, Afghanistan revealed itself to be what political scientist Barnett Rubin calls the “rentier state par excellence,” a “rentier state” being one that relies heavily on unearned income and outside investment. In the case of Afghanistan, this bounty came in the form of a steady flow of foreign aid and development projects.

The period from 1963 to 1973 was what Angelo Rasanayagam, former director of the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) in Peshawar, Pakistan and author of Afghanistan: A Modern History (I.B. Tauris & Co., 2005) called “the experiment in democracy.” During that decade, an impressive constitution was written and the traditional institutions of consensus governance such as the loya jirga, or “great council” of tribal chiefs were woven together with modern principles of democratic government. Building institutions of governance was not easy in a country with 90 percent illiteracy and a largely peasant population that was hit hard by a bitter, three-year drought. At the end of this period, Daoud reemerged and this time exiled Zahir Shah to Italy and ruled as president while increasing Afghanistan’s financial reliance upon the Soviet Union.

Things did not end well for Daoud. He was overthrown in a bloody coup by Marxists within the army who had been trained in the Soviet Union. Sharp divisions emerged within Afghanistan as the more traditional and religious structures of society declared “jihad” against the infidel Communists and their secular modernism. And the Communists themselves suffered bitter internal rivalries. Two quick political assassinations led to a country spiraling into chaos. Soviet troops invaded in December 1979 and installed a puppet government.

Suddenly, Afghanistan was at the center of an intensifying Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. Then, out of the traditional, religious sectors of Afghan society, emerged the mujahadeen who would organize armed resistance to the Soviet occupation. The U.S. funneled billions of dollars in covert aid to the mujahadeen in what became a proxy war in the ideological struggle between the Soviets and America. The U.S. funding was further helped along by the Saudis, China and neighboring Pakistan. Suddenly, a century after Kipling coined the phrase, a new “Great Game” was playing out in Afghanistan, which once again found itself at the center of a power struggle for global dominance by vying empires.

“Buzkashi” As Metaphor

A shadowy network of diplomats and spooks based largely out of Peshawar, Pakistan, set up a pipeline for more than $5 billion in covert funding from the CIA to be funneled to the mujahadeen in its insurgency against the Soviets throughout the 1980s. One who is acquainted with that setup is G. Whitney Azoy, an American academic who worked for the U.S. State Department in the 1970s as a cultural affairs officer in the region and “in other roles,” as he coyly puts it. “Let’s say I was in an unofficial capacity working with the State Department on what we called ‘cross border assistance,’” said Azoy.

Beyond his diplomatic work, Azoy is also an anthropologist who has done extensive academic research on Afghan culture and history. He has written a book on Afghanistan’s macabre national sport known as buzkashi, in which horsemen fight over the carcass of a goat and try to run away with it over a goal line. For Azoy, the sport serves as metaphor for Afghan politics. But he says the metaphor extends beyond the simplistic idea of a brutal and bewildering array of horsemen pulling at a body to try to control it. To Azoy, the higher idea of Buzkashi as metaphor lies not among the horsemen but the rich owners of the horses, who support the game for their own prestige. They do not ride horses at all, but watch from the sidelines. And they, he insists, are the real players. “When his horses and riders win, the khan’s name is said to rise. And reputation is the true currency of Afghan politics,” explains Azoy.

The matches often linger over several days and the “khan” who organizes the buzkashi match effectively and elegantly without the competition dissolving, as it often does, into mayhem and brawling, emerges as the true winner. His reputation will be enhanced for years to come for such a feat. If the match does dissolve into violence, on the other hand, the horsemen will literally ride away from the khan and search out a more suitable sponsor for the next event and the khan’s reputation will plummet. “Americans should recognize the metaphor while they are here,” says Azoy.

His weathered face looked stark as he made the point and let the drama of it linger while speaking over pints of lager in the candle-lit garden of the Gandamack Lodge on a cool spring night. “The mistake [President] Bush is making here is to think freedom is some sort of baseline human aspiration. What he doesn’t realize is that for most people in the world it’s an untrustworthy idea. It’s security they want. And in Afghanistan, it’s order and control and security that is desired, just like the players in buzkashi. If the organizer of the game does not achieve that, the players will simply ride away and find a different suitor,” Azoy said.

The resistance to the Soviet occupation that Azoy and others took part in promoting was a brutal war of insurgency, and it took more than 1.5 million lives. It left Afghanistan’s mujahadeen commanders triumphant when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, but it also left the Afghan people badly and brutally suffering from the losses of war.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. turned its attention away from Afghanistan at a time when help for reconstruction was desperately needed. From 1989 to 1994, Afghanistan was disintegrating into an abyss of civil war which, by the end, left all sides shelling each other in the rubble that was Kabul.

Out of that darkness emerged a movement known as the “Taliban,” which is a Pashto word meaning simply “students.” Most of the Taliban were born in refugee camps in Pakistan and educated in the madrassas, or religious schools that were set up there. I toured those madrassas in 1994 and 1995 when the nascent Taliban, as a group, were known as much for a spirit of youthful idealism as for their signature long beards and black silk turbans.

Back then, the Taliban saw themselves as an altruistic alternative to the brutal warlords, a kind of Islamic equivalent to the New England Puritans, inspired to create a society governed by the laws of God and guided by faith. As late as 1995, when I was given a briefing by the U.S. State Department in Pakistan, the Taliban were openly presented by U.S. diplomats as an honest and preferable alternative to the corrupt and brutal warlords who had been tearing apart their own country.

But what the Taliban became was something entirely different.

The Taliban, under their leader Mullah Omar, was attempting to rebuild a country in ruins, and at the same time would spend several years in a desperate and bloody struggle to consolidate power and impose their puritanical brand of Islam on Afghan society. Eventually, Mullah Omar, who was chosen as leader for his piety, not his political or military acuity, was offered what was essentially a leveraged buyout of his government by the wealthy Saudi scion of a construction magnate who had coordinated Arab fighters to assist the mujahadeen. His name was Osama bin Laden. And in the mid-to-late 1990s, Omar took bin Laden up on the offer, allowing bin Laden and his nascent al Qaeda to establish a secure base for its stated goal of fighting a holy war against the United States of America.

And after what counterterrorism officials believe was an eight-year process of planning and coordination, bin Laden struck his most direct blow against his sworn enemy on September 11th, 2001.

Security as a Core Issue

Now, five-and-a-half years since the Taliban was toppled and al Qaeda scattered by the U.S.-led offensive, Afghanistan is still struggling to rebuild its democracy and wondering if the U.S. will stray once again—as it did at the end of the Cold War—from its self-proclaimed commitment to help it create a democratic society.

And at the Jalalabad gathering of the maliks, or tribal leaders, that I witnessed in mid-April 2007, that question was in the air. The gathering offered a colorful insight into how consensus government is woven into the ancient fabric of Afghanistan’s tribal and clan structure. The sponsor, WADAN, has earned a reputation as one of the more sophisticated Afghan organizations in trying to nurture such dialogue.

The maliks arrived by car and bus and some by tractor and donkey. They came from the small, farming villages and larger trading towns in the surrounding provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar, Laghman and Nuristan. They arrived in a parade of Pashtun plumage, their outfits serving as emblems of the tribes from which they hailed. The men, in long beards, were adorned in grand capes and wore embroidered robes and silk headscarves wrapped in elaborate ways that highlighted thick black beards and their rugged Pashtun faces. Some were wealthy traders and large land owners who brought along an entourage of attendants and others were just poor farmers struggling to provide for extended clans on tiny plots of dry soil.

The meeting of the maliks represents the ancient traditions of participatory politics in Afghanistan’s remote, tribal areas. They are the local expression of what the Westerners like to call democracy. And at this town meeting, these local leaders came loaded with what, in Washington, might be called talking points. Down front of this meeting were reserved seats for provincial governors and officials of the central government in Kabul headed by Hamed Karzai. But those seats were sparsely occupied. No governors attended, only a few deputies, and no senior officials from the government of President Karzai.

To Learn More About Afghanistan, Past and Present: A Bibliography

• Afghanistan: A Modern History. By Angelo Rasanayagam (I.B. Tauris, 2003).
• Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan. By G. Whitney Azoy (Waveland Press, 2003).
• The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization 1880-1946. By Vartan Gregorian (Stanford University Press, 1969).
• Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. By Peter L.Bergen (Free Press, 2001).
• Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda—A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander. By Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo (Crown Publishers, 2005).
• The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. By Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 2006).
• Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords. By Ahmed Rashid (Yale University Press, 2000).
• Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism. By John K. Cooley (Pluto Press, 1999).

The tribal chiefs spoke primarily and most forcefully about the lack of security in the remote regions of Afghanistan. There can be no democracy without security, as they are quick to point out. They spoke of the desperate need among farmers to cultivate the illegal opium poppy because poor irrigation and a lack of subsidies makes for meager profits in growing legitimate crops, such as wheat. There can be no democracy without a legitimate economy.

But most of all, they railed against the U.S. forces in the area for being too aggressive and too reliant on poor intelligence estimates that result in them making serious—and deadly—mistakes, such as the killing of 19 civilians and the wounding of 50 others by U.S. Marines in a March 4, 2007 attack in the Nangarhar province. (The spring and summer of 2007 would be marked by a spate of attacks in which large numbers of civilians were killed. The rising toll of civilian casualties has undercut the U.S. and NATO mission significantly. In one incident, at the end of June 2007, 45 civilian deaths were reported in one weekend in the Helmand Province, according to The Independent of London. That same weekend, President Karzai spoke out forcefully against the rise in civilian casualties saying at a press conference, “Afghan life is not cheap, and it should not be treated as such.” For sure, there can be no democracy when innocent lives are taken and no one is taken to task in a court of law.)

The message of the maliks was sharpened by the fact that the gathering occurred amid the height of the Taliban’s spring offensive, in which it has engaged the American and NATO forces in firefights and suicide bombings. The Taliban resurgence has succeeded in taking effective control of several pockets in the four provinces that had representatives at the meeting, and what is described by Western diplomats as nearly full control of other provinces in the South, particularly Helmand. To borrow from Azoy’s buzkashi metaphor, there are some Afghans who are riding away from the U.S. and NATO troops and finding a preferred suitor in the Taliban because they offer more security and order.

One former Taliban leader who is now a member of parliament, Azbul Abdul Salam, described the reemergence of the Taliban with classic Pashtun simplicity: “They were in power and they want power back. It is not so complicated.” Through a translator, Salam spoke with me in Pashto as we sat inside the parliament building, in the grand lobby with its oil paintings of Afghan kings and nation builders. He is a big man with strong hands and a rugged face. He is more commonly known by his nomme de guerre, “Mullah Rocketi,” which would roughly translate into English as “Reverend Rocket.”

The name is a tribute to his skill in launching rocket attacks on Soviet troops as a mujahadeen and later, for the Taliban during the civil war. But Salam is one of those Taliban who crossed over to join parliament and supports building unity and democracy under the name of an Islamic state in Afghanistan. He maintains that he never endorsed the leadership’s decision to offer bin Laden support and that what happened on September 11th is a crime for which “those responsible will have to answer to God.”

Salam insists that the U.S., particularly the military, needs to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the Taliban. He also says that there are many who served in the Taliban government and who sympathized with the movement who now share in the new government’s goals of democracy building. Salam maintains that are many who saw the excesses and mistakes of the Taliban leadership, but still adhere to its core goal of building democracy within the context of the Koran and religious law.

He also believes the new government under Karzai should wake up to the fact that what Afghans want more than democracy is honesty in government and security in their villages. He said, “Why are people supporting the Taliban again in the south and the east? Because some government officials are corrupt and this makes the tribes unhappy with the government so they are switching sides. Under the Taliban we had problems for sure. But we also had no corruption and much security. Today, we have corruption and no security.”

At the Crossroads

Almost all sides in Afghanistan—from Western diplomats inside air-conditioned embassies in Kabul to senior representatives of the Karzai government to provincial leaders in gatherings like the one in April 2007—agree that these days, Afghanistan is at a tipping point.

The considerable success of the international community in building roads and schools and establishing a functioning parliament and a struggling, but well-intentioned army is imperiled. A lack of security fostered by a growing insurgency that combines a mixture of Afghan Taliban and foreign fighters coming across from Pakistan has persistently undermined the achievements that have been realized. As one U.S. official described the situation in Afghanistan: “We’re at an important crossroads.”

But, the American official hastened to add, “Impatience is our worst enemy. We have to recognize it is going to be a long, slow process. This place has had thirty years of being frozen in time, thirty years of warfare. You don’t turn that around overnight.”

Still, the tribal chiefs gathered in Jalalabad came together to assert a timeless truth of Afghanistan. That is, that any central government in Kabul, no matter which empire or Western power backs it, is doomed to fail if it does not hear the voice of the remote tribes and respond to their needs. And judging by this meeting, the U.S.-backed government in Kabul is not listening, at least not closely. Important provincial governors and Afghan leaders from Kabul were not the only missing persons. There were also no U.S. officials or representatives of the international community visibly present, certainly, in part, because of the security risks involved in such gatherings. As a result, there was little dialogue.

A colorful gentleman named Faisal Muhammad, 60, the malik of Ihtiram, a village in the Surkh Rod district of the Nangarhar Province, stole the show. Representing the province, he delivered a speech that combined poetry and humor. He played off the theme of “eradication,” the buzz word in Afghanistan for the government and international community’s effort to destroy the bumper crop of poppy, which was in full harvest as he spoke. The profits from the crop often end up funding the Taliban resurgence.

“Yes, we must eradicate so much,” noted Muhammad. “We must eradicate poppy. But we also must eradicate senseless bombing,” he said to thunderous applause in the auditorium. “We must eradicate the killing of civilians. There is so much we must eradicate,” he added as the maliks clapped and nodded with knowing approval and appreciation for Muhammad’s tone of dissent and honesty.

Over a lunch of Afghan bread baked over a fire and accompanied by rice and mutton and eggplant, Muhammad, a college graduate and long-time headmaster at a school in his province, said he had been a malik for the last twenty years. Speaking through an interpreter, he had a lot more to say, as well: “We have 5,000 years of history. We have our own civilization and our own institutions. Look around you: this is our democracy. We will only have success if it is our own democracy, with our own customs. We will not have success if it is a Western view of democracy. For us, democracy is not sending us movies from Hollywood with sex and bringing alcohol. These are things against our culture and tradition. We do not want that kind of democracy.” He added, “But before we can bring in our own democracy, we have to have security. You cannot have one without the other.”

After the meeting, the journey back to Kabul led down a newly constructed highway, funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The highway, which, during my previous visit more than five years earlier, was a potholed dirt road that was nearly impassible at many points, was now smooth as glass as it rolled through a pleasant river valley. But it was still dangerous. Police checkpoints along the way were being targeted by insurgents with rocket-propelled grenades. The police held up the convoy I was traveling in and then ran to hide behind small mud-brick posts. They looked up at a mountain ridge from which the attacks appeared to be coming. Finally, after a half hour of waiting to see if there would be more rocket attacks, the police waved the convoy through, though it was clear that we were now traveling at our own peril.

Back in Kabul, inside the wall of security that surrounds the central government buildings, Dr. Farooq Wardak, the head of parliamentary affairs, agreed that Afghanistan was indeed at a “major turn in the road” during the spring of 2007. The Taliban offensive had been persistent. The violence and the death toll were mounting.

For many in Afghanistan, there was—and is still—a raw wound caused by the aforementioned March 2007 deaths of civilians brought about by U.S. Marines who had defied rules of engagement and fired indiscriminately after a roadside bomb in the Nangarhar Province. As of this writing, the U.S. military had referred the case for possible criminal inquiry. In May 2007, a U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Colonel John Nicholson, apologized for the incident, saying he was “deeply ashamed.”

Wardak is one of Karzai’s closest cabinet members and he was candid in his assessment of where things stand at the moment in Afghanistan, particularly in light of the killing of civilians and several false arrests and imprisonments in the rural provinces that have caused an uproar. He agreed with the assessment of others that such mistakes threaten to undermine the successes of the international community in Afghanistan, and he warned that such incidents could easily spark a brushfire of resistance that will catch the Americans by surprise.

Said Wardak, “The Americans are making a lot of mistakes. Many of the insurgents are Taliban, but many are not. They are people who have simply gone to the side against American forces because they want security.”

In relation to what he described as scores of cases of false arrest and imprisonment that have come to his attention, Wardak said, “The American troops are relying on bad intelligence reports and falling victim to tribal rivalries, with one tribe providing bad information against another. There are scores being settled and the Americans are oblivious to this…They will have to gain a more complex understanding of this place if they are going to help us make it work.”

As an example, Wardak discussed the very word “democracy.” He explained that for Afghans, particularly in remote provinces, “democracy,” as a word, is suspect. After all, it was the Soviet-backed government that changed the official name of the country in 1978 from the Republic of Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

To this day, in the minds of many Afghans who fought so hard—and lost so many fathers and sons—to force the occupying Soviet military from their land in the 1980s, the word “democratic” has a very negative connotation. Instead, the Pashto phrase “wolas waki,” or “rule of the people,” is preferred, said Wardak.

Confronted with the sense that Afghanistan is indeed at a tipping point, a U.S. official said that the balance between providing security and developing democracy was a complex equation. “It is like a Rubik’s Cube,” the official offered, adding, “All of the pieces need to fit together, and they need to fit together all at once.”

The same official ended a briefing by quoting from memory Rudyard Kipling, who understood the challenges of the presence of empire in Afghanistan perhaps more than any writer since: “And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’’’

Charles Sennott is a veteran foreign correspondent and author who has covered the Middle East and Central Asia for most of the last 15 years. Currently, Sennott is a staff writer on the Special Projects team of The Boston Globe. Previously, he has served as Middle East bureau chief (1997-2001) and Europe bureau chief (2001-2005.) Sennott was among the first reporters on the ground to cover the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and has traveled and reported on the region extensively.