At A Lose End

Washington received the news about the Taliban's disappearance from Afghanistan's cities with apprehension. There's this feeling that the retreat could be only the beginning of a longer war that would continue to involve the US. An optimist or two were predicting that there would be no Taliban left in a month, though most think that the Taliban vanishing for ever might be too soon to be true.

Diplomats pondered the future of Afghanistan and what shape Washington could give to it. But on the US streets they seem to be waiting only for the capture, or killing, of Osama bin Laden. Very few outside the decision-making circles in Washington really care what happens to Afghanistan afterwards. A cartoon earlier showed a map of Afghanistan called "Lake America, former Afghanistan". All over the US, kids and adults have been playing computer games that lead to the killing of bin Laden. That seems to be coming to a happy end soon.

But the diplomatic game in reality isn't going to be easy to win. Sobering reminders followed the unexpected success of the Northern Alliance (NA). The US doesn't yet have bin Laden, leaders were acknowledging. Even defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned: "It's Al Qaeda they are really after, and Al Qaeda has 40, 50, 60 cells." Control of Afghanistan's cities is one thing; control of Afghanistan another. The Russians controlled Afghanistan's cities for 13 years and still lost the Afghan war.

Rumsfeld reminded Americans that the Taliban had been targeted only for harbouring terrorists. The military campaign will now only go for the leaders. Driving out the Taliban was only a setting of the scene for this to have a chance. The Taliban had become the proxy enemy just as the NA became proxy American troops. That enemy has vanished from the sights but it was never the primary enemy.

Rumsfeld hinted that the Taliban might be retreating to Pakistan and that the NA sweep didn't necessarily mean the end of the Taliban. "They can go across a border and wait and come back," he said at a Pentagon briefing. "They can drop their weapons and blend into the communities. They can go up in the mountains, in the caves and tunnels. They can defect, change their mind, go back." But the Taliban are on the run, he said. "It is not a good time in Afghanistan to be part of the Taliban."

Gen Tommy Franks, commander-in-chief, US Central Command, who accompanied Rumsfeld at the briefing, said: "The Taliban is not destroyed as an effective fighting force from the level of one individual man carrying a weapon until that individual man puts down his weapon. And so there still is a capable fighting force on the side of the Taliban."

Washington is uncertain whether the Taliban fled chaotically or are in strategic retreat. Stephen Cohen, author of The Pakistan Army and, more recently, India: Emerging Power, feels the Taliban are dissolving "very, very quickly". But he does point to the danger of a Taliban force finding refuge in Pakistan. This presents it with a dilemma, he says. "The notion of American bombers flying over Pakistan and bombing Pakistani territory is out of the question, yet the notion of the Pakistan army going and fighting these people is also out of the question."

Cohen says the danger of Taliban elements within Pakistan "hunkering down for the long haul" is an unlikely possibility. The Taliban will "evaporate and disappear" and Al Qaeda will most likely "disappear to the Gulf". Bin Laden is likely to be killed by the Pakistanis". In some village somebody is going to say, you know, we have him, come and get him, and there will be a corpse of Osama bin Laden." The Pakistanis, he says, "probably would not want him to talk about where he got his assistance for Al Qaeda". (All this is good news for India, says Cohen, because Afghanistan has been cleaned up as a base for training terrorists.)

Other experts were cautioning that it's still a long war ahead. The victory against Al Qaeda may not come soon and may never come, says Mike O'Hanlan, a former advisor on national security matters. Says O'Hanlan: "My assumption is that we will never be in a position to declare Al Qaeda thoroughly gone and certainly even if it is, we'll have to worry about the emergence of other possible copycat organisations." The US will have to be on constant watch, he cautions. "We have to pursue this homeland security agenda and spend $20 billion or $30 billion a year on it from now into the indefinite future."

The US is grappling at the moment with problems immediately on hand. There is little headway in working out the shape of a new government in Kabul. "The basic question is how do you get the Pashtoon to start defecting," says O'Hanlan. "If they don't, I fear that one way or another this war will still bog down."

There's a gap in Afghanistan that's getting hard to fill without proper Pashtoon representation, says O'Hanlan. "Because without their population, without their fighters, without their raw numbers and also their knowledge of the southern part of the country, I don't see how 15,000 NA forces can consolidate control over this country."

Signs of chaos over formation of a government in Kabul followed just as fast as the NA's sweep through Afghanistan. Washington is seeking to play the decisive role in this "and to route that decision through the UN", one official said. The US special ambassador on Afghanistan, James Dobbins, held talks in Islamabad with Pakistani leaders after meeting former king Zahir Shah in Rome. But there were signs that the NA might not be led as willingly by American diplomats as they were by its bombers. Zahir Shah will be welcome back in Afghanistan but as a private citizen, its leaders say.

Both Indian and Pakistani envoys made frantic moves to push their views with the US government in the wake of the rapid developments. India is strongly supporting a move to bring back NA leader Burnahuddin Rabbani to lead an interim government. Pakistan is opposed to it, and the US is evidently keen to accommodate Islamabad's interests in the formation of a new Afghan government.

Several influential leaders in Washington want a Bosnia kind of government with a weak central structure and local power with local leaders—a kind of government that has always been a fact of life in Afghanistan. But with events moving faster than the most quick-minded diplomats can anticipate, nobody is predicting what shape a new government takes or in what shape it remains.