The Swinging Pendulum

When Afghanistan's resistance against Russian occupation resulted in Soviet forces finally assembling itself for removal from the country, it was clear that the mujahadeen had prevailed. No invading country has ever managed to conquer Afghanistan. With the connivance of the U.S. and of Pakistan the Islamist militias that had been armed and trained and directed toward battle with the Soviets saw victory, and enemy withdrawal and in the resulting vacuum left by warlord-civil war the Taliban became the government.

The Taliban in their mullahs' great wisdom invited the newly established fighting force of al-Qaeda foreigners - whose members had fought bravely against the invading Russians alongside the local mujahadeen - to remain in Afghanistan, to be honoured and to enable them to regroup. And to plan their attacks against the very government and country that had armed and trained them. The country that represented all that fanatical Islam found reprehensible, corrupted, obscene.

The monumental attack on New York's Twin Towers sent shock waves all over the world. Some of the waves represented huge geographic celebrations of triumphant accomplishment of an Islamic underdog against the world's sole superpower. Although a strike was gathering momentum to punish the planners and celebrants, the Taliban refused to surrender their al-Qaeda allies to the insistent Americans.

The result is history, albeit a failure of full intent. Still, the Taliban was ousted, and al-Qaeda sent to survive in the North West Frontier Provinces, and it was the lack of attention of the Americans to the matter at hand that ensured their survival, thanks to the surreptitious assistance of Pakistan's ISI and national army, all the while the Pakistan government of General Musharraf claimed to be a partner with the U.S. in the war on terror.

And then terror turned around to snarl menacingly on its protector and supporter, and the Pakistan national army found itself directed to battle its own NWF Taliban. And Afghanistan, having had to cope with restructuring itself as a fledgling Islamic democracy edging back toward Islamism with full Sharia law, saw U.S. attention diverted elsewhere, and the insurgents regrouped.

The ADD-afflicted U.S. eventually noticed, pulled troops out of Iraq, brought them back to Afghanistan and in the process advised Hamid Karzai that they would be available for mop-up duty until 2011, greatly cheering the Taliban and making for a morose Afghan president. Foreign western troops, all in the process of gradual withdrawal, are still engaged in training an inept, underpaid Afghan army and police.

"But stay, please stay", pleaded Hamid Karzai, while insisting that it is his right and his duty to bargain with the Taliban, and re-surrender Afghan women to harsh repressive laws they saw release from with the arrival of ISAF and NATO. And then, to prove that the United States of America is not really the only game in town, Hamid Karzai has approached Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to collaborate in the interests of battling terrorists.

It is a regional headache now, of immense proportions, an ever-growing juggernaut of intolerantly brutal Islamist fanatics whose version of Islam is quite unlike anything that existed for a thousand years. Russia and all of the 'Stans are in an companionable league against the looming spectre of an Islamist conquest.

History having a penchant to repeat itself, and human nature seeking to recapture that which once was, in emotional embrace of traditions and fond memories of a world that never was.