DISQUS

Stan Wright · 11 months ago

What's usually ignored in the US is that when we say "Taliban", what we're talking about is the political vehicle of large parts of the Pashtuns, the dominant tribe of southern Afghanistan. The Taliban was their vehicle, and in that region, tribe trumps ideology and has for millennia.

The other thing that tribe trumps is government. We persist in pretending that Afghanistan is a nation at war with an ideology. That's not what's happening to afghan eyes. To them, it's one more round in the thousands of years to tribal power struggles. As long as our ideological blinders prevent us from even seeing what's happening as it is, not what our ideology needs it to be, we're going to go on failing.

Karzai will be talking about splitting up the power pie. Who's going to rule which districts. Who's going to get paid, and how much. Other markers include the heroin trade, access to 'development' funds, and lip service to which alien model of government. Just as the present Afghan 'government' carefully laundered the warlords of the Northern Alliance by naming them regional governors, etc., so too is the Taliban going to have to be laundered in a similar manner.