"We think a guerrilla war will be started now. I think this is the beginning of the war" Abdul Aziz Khan Khilji, a representative of radical Pakistani religious party Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam said as Kandahar fell without a fight to the Northern Alliance. "They have shifted to the hills," he said.
He's wrong, of course. Successful guerilla wars start in the hills, with small units sheltered and supported by sympathetic civilians. They build their strength there, then form larger units and take the cities. Stragglers from defeated armies take to the hills and try and save themselves. If there had been any popular support for the Taliban within Afghanistan -- rather than in Pakistan, Riyadh, Berkeley and MIT -- this would have been an impossible campaign for the Northern Alliance to win, even with heavy US bombing.
How did the Taliban lose that support? The burkas helped. The beards and turbans helped. Men seeing their wives beaten by religious police helped, as did the public executions and mutilations. Outlawing music, laughter and normal human actions was a big part of it. And the fact that the country was seriously in danger of starving had a lot to do with it; when a government is spending its time on religion and culture it's not concentrating on groceries.
Overlaying it all was Brigade 55, the Arab praetorian guard of Osama bin Laden. It was a symbol of cultural imperialism that must have been galling to any Afghan with any pride -- and it's a truism that all the tribes making up the country are prideful people. And finally there were the truckloads of Pakistanis crossing the border, waving swords and brandishing guns to keep someone else's country following the Wahhabi hard line.
The Northern Alliance actually held together -- and this was the posthumous gift of the martyred Masood -- as a military force. Had the war not started when it did, the alliance probably would have fallen apart, just as the government that will follow the United Front's victory may fall apart. But it remained a military force, as opposed to the Taliban, which was a militia more in the style of the PLO. There is a profound difference between a soldier and a man with a gun. In an alley, the man with the gun probably has more chance of winning a fight. On an actual battlefield, all things being equal, the soldier will win every time. It's a matter of discipline and teamwork. If the United Front is lucky it will remember always that it was thrown out of power when it became disunited.
What kind of government will follow the United Front's victory? Who knows? Already Pakistan wants to insert a heavy hand. Saudi Arabia intends sending "aid." Hekmatyar, who introduced the disunity the last time around, could even come back. But it's not really the concern of the USA. Afghanistan isn't our country; if they'd like to set up a secular government and a free market we should help them do it, but we're under no obligation to do so. Our original intent was to flush out Osama bin Laden and his Arabs. The Arabs appear to be broken and Osama is in hiding, but likely to either be flushed out or killed -- if he hasn't already deserted his supporters.
