The 19th cen­tu­ry strug­gle for dom­i­nance in Afghanistan was dubbed “The Great Game’.
The 21st cen­tu­ry ver­sion is look­ing increas­ing­ly like ‘The Grotesque Game’;  summed up neat­ly by an Afghan proverb: “While the butch­ers were argu­ing, the cow dropped dead.”

The tragedy — among many — is that any­one is sur­prised that the rag-tag Tal­iban is ascen­dant and the U.S. and NATO-trained and equipped Afghan forces are either bare­ly hold­ing on, or in retreat.
In his thriller “The Afghan”, Fred­er­ick Forsyth wrote: “There is an apho­rism that you can­not buy the loy­al­ty of an Afghan, but you can always rent it.”
As of 2020 the U.S. alone had spent an esti­mat­ed two TRILLION dol­lars fight­ing the war and shoring up suc­ces­sive Afghan governments.
Much of it dis­ap­peared into “the mas­sive finan­cial malfea­sance, fraud­u­lent con­tracts and a gar­gan­tu­an bank scan­dal that have been the sub­ject of numer­ous U.S. inves­ti­ga­tions of wast­ed and stolen mon­ey in Afghanistan.”
Not what even a com­mit­ted opti­mist would call val­ue for money.

By com­par­i­son, the Tal­iban cuts bar­gain base­ment deals. Sev­er­al dozen pris­on­ers in Badghis province were freed ear­ly July in a jail break the provin­cial gov­er­nor said was facil­i­tat­ed by prison employ­ees who were paid off by the Taliban.
Reports that ‘arrange­ments’ with gov­ern­ment forces allowed the Tal­iban to take dis­tricts with lit­tle to no resis­tance make Forsyth’s apho­rism read more as fact than fiction.

                              A HISTORY OF HORRORS

The U.S. and Britain have accused the Tal­iban of mas­sacring civil­ians and com­mit­ting oth­er atroc­i­ties that may amount to war crimes. Again, why would any­one be surprised?
The most-fre­quent­ly quot­ed lines in Rud­yard Kipling’s 19th cen­tu­ry poem “A Young British Sol­dier” are:
“When you’re wound­ed and left
On Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out
To cut up your remains
Just roll on your rifle
And blow out your brains,
And go to your Gawd
Like a soldier.”

A review of “The Great Gam­ble: The Sovi­et War in Afghanistan”, (by Gre­go­ry Feifer) not­ed that the muja­hadeen some­times flayed cap­tured Sovi­et sol­diers alive by cut­ting the skin around the belt, yank­ing the loose skin up over the prisoner’s head and tying it off like a pota­to sack. Oth­er reports quote West­ern wit­ness­es as hav­ing seen Sovi­et cap­tives staked out, sliced open and left to die slow­ly in the hot sun.
And the “muj” were “the good guys”, cheered and armed by the West.

It’s become an arti­cle of faith that the only hope for Afghanistan is a peace deal between the Tal­iban and what­ev­er gov­ern­ment remains viable in Kab­ul. Nego­ti­at­ing one remains more wish­ful think­ing than prob­a­bil­i­ty. The Tal­iban aren’t an all-for-one-and-one-for-all entity.

                                     A BRIEF GLIMPSE

 Short­ly after the war began, a small gag­gle of for­eign jour­nal­ists was tak­en across the Pak­istan bor­der to Spin Boldak, where the Tal­iban was born. We were locked into a walled com­pound that looked like a dis­used sports field. Some of our “hosts” were cold to the point of hos­tile, oth­ers bor­der­line friend­ly. One of them, who spoke good Eng­lish, asked if he could use our satel­lite phone to call his cousin, who had a restau­rant in Seat­tle. We often let U.S. sol­diers and refugees call rel­a­tives, so I fig­ured, why not?
The sub­se­quent con­ver­sa­tion was in Pash­tun, and our trans­la­tor wasn’t to hand. I sud­den­ly had seri­ous mis­giv­ings. What if I just hand­ed a Tal­iban the means to pass a code word that would trig­ger a ter­ror­ist operation?
Thank­ful­ly, I was being para­noid. The Tal­ib said his cousin was doing well and loved Amer­i­ca, and he hoped to go and vis­it him when the busi­ness to hand was over. 

                                     FRACTIOUS FACTIONS

Overnight, our hosts split into two fac­tions; one was will­ing to take us on to Khan­da­har, the oth­er want­ed to send us back to Pak­istan. The walls around the com­pound were lined with beard­ed young men squat­ting on their haunch­es, with seem­ing­ly noth­ing bet­ter to do than stare and occa­sion­al­ly toss peb­bles at us. The cou­ple of hours it took to pack up and cross the bor­der were tense, to say the least.
That the Tal­iban is fac­tion­alised is part and par­cel of their being Afghans. The country’s pop­u­la­tion of 38 mil­lion is splin­tered by more than 50 eth­nic or sub-trib­al groups, riv­en and  com­pli­cat­ed by clan­nish rival­ries and feuds.

But that is by no means immutable. The Afghans I was priv­i­leged and pleased to have as col­leagues in the post-inva­sion offices CBS News estab­lished in Kan­da­har and Kab­ul were prime exam­ples of the best Afghan traits. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it will be no sur­prise if their antithe­sis ends up run­ning the country.

The Afghans have a proverb to sum up that, too: “The world will not find rest by just say­ing ‘peace’.”

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