I remember watching the Taliban ride into Kabul on tanks, waving AK-47's and wearing neat and proper uniforms, and I asked my local experts, Afghan agricultural workers in the Central Valley, now constantly harassed by the FBI after peacefully sending their meager paychecks home to distant relations in Afghanistan for 40 years...

"Sayed, descendant of the Prophet, may peace be upon him, where did the Taliban get those tanks?"

"Scavenged from war-lords."

"And the guns and uniforms?"

"Scavenged from war-lords."

Sometimes an idea is more powerful than everything else, however much it may look like a very, very bad idea, from very, very far away.

Once you give people a shared history, they start building a nation. Often, when the external threat is removed, power struggles result. The Taliban overplayed their hand after the Russians were tossed out and were tossed out with external help in their turn. Karzai is busy overplaying his own hand. We shall see.

As far as the women in Afghanistan are concerned tossing out the Taliban may be more like tossing the KKK out of the defeated South.

Here's one thing, though, Rutabaga. After I read some of your comments, I wonder who you are and how old you are and whatnot. I know you are plenty smart, and creative, but there is some reason that you antagonize people purposefully, even those who sometimes reach out a hand to you. Like you will spit on someone, receive a bad reaction, and it just PROVES something to you. I wonder what the payoff is sometimes. Is there something satisfying about mean reactions to your meanness? We have a daughter with attachment disorder, and it is said that unnattached kids provoke negative reactions because a) that's what they're used to and b) at least shitstorms are predictably familiar.
The other thing I think about when I read some of the word-battles at the Cafe is how astounded I am by so much anger or rage, I always forget the difference in meanings. I used to get angrier than I do now; I think some of it has to do with experiencing Pain of the sort they say the Chinese have a word for: Pain that is so deep that no tears can come; pain that won't even let your body move, or a thought to come. Coming out of those times is a moment by moment experience; you pretend you have a life by doing some normal things until gradually you find tiny bits of meaning and comfort and solace somewhere. But for me, anyway, it burned out some of my rage.
I can't offer you any sunny scenarios of welcome or anything if you find it in you to change your way of communicating, but I for one will try. And those life-changing events are always potentially on our horizons. I send my goodwill to you. Today. Ain't guaranteeing about tomorrow. :-}

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0416/p06s10-wosc.html?page=1

There is most certainly an Afghan identity.

There is most certainly an Muslim identity.

There is most certainly not a uniform Taliban identity. This older article, which is more militant than the truth, bears out the rather shifting nature of what we erroneously label the Taliban.

In the average American Idol saturated mind, the following equation holds:

Taliban = Al Qaeda = Enemy

This equation was stretched to include Saddam and the Baathists, then the attempt was made to stretch this even further to include Persian Shia.

Of course, the endgame of the equation is all brown people must either prove their loyalty to the US of A in a Kafkaesque game enjoyed only by the perpetrators... or be declared an enemy combatant.

My gut reaction from my own research and my points of contact in Afghanistan (local and third country translators along with OEF veterans) is that Afghanistan is unified in proportion to the energy expended by its invaders. Even the popular myth that we should have taken the fight all the way into the caves and finished off AQ does not indicate that we would still not be facing a motley popular uprising funded by propaganda and opium.

There is no way to put the wrapper back on the pack of cigarettes. That is why I have stressed that as long as we are going to be there, we ought to transitioning away from what is truly creating the unstable nitro-basket in that region:

The Great Game of Drugs, Oil, and other Sundry Resources.

We either need to stop being stupid, or they're going to stop us.

Given what I have seen from Obama, expect a mild holding pattern that will drain the treasury enough to placate DiFi's husband until the inevitable breakdown forces him or his successor to either enact the next ur-fascist wave of GRUNCH government.

Thanks for your tireless efforts to bring Afghanistan into the TPM discussion in a hard-core way, Rootie. It is a hard-core subject. I think you need to work this material into something much more extended (essay? book with artwork? I don't know).

Have you ever seen Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul? It's difficult (he rewrote it 17 times, last I heard), grueling (the entire first act is a half-hour-long monologue by the "homebody" character), and not for everyone, but you could handle it, no problem. :-)

That play is sort of what I mean when I say you need to extend this material about Afghanistan into something longer and creative. Blogging is too restrictive a medium for what you have to say.