WASHINGTON: As the Soviets conceded with their 1989 pullout and the British learned a century earlier, Afghanistan is a trap for unwary outsiders. Its very landscape - high mountains and isolated valleys - has helped create a nation of petty warlords, whose allegiances change daily or even hourly.

Add to this historic problem the new one of trying to deal with the Taliban - which is more or less in control of this uncontrollable landscape. Even the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, is a mystery despite his control over the organization. There are photographs alleged to be of him, but those claims are suspicious, and Westerners cannot be sure what he looks like. It is known that he is blind in one eye from a war wound in the fight against the Soviets.

Mullah Omar and the Taliban came to power as a direct result of the corruption and cruelty of the preceding Afghani regimes, installed as puppets of the Soviet invaders. In the Afghani tradition, they died violent deaths. The remote valleys remained in the grasp of regional warlords, but the Taliban gained national control by opening up and controlling the national highways and the major cities.

This is the kind of war, fought in difficult terrain, that foreigners have never been very good at, as the Russians and the British can testify. It is a region where allies and adversaries continually shift, causing, for example, an informal relationship between Iran and its former arch-foe, the United States.

Iran has promised to rescue and return any downed US airmen on its territory. The reason for Iran’s cooperation is its distaste for the Taliban, as well as a desire not to advance Afghanistan’s ambitions to become a competing oil producer and host for a pipeline between Central Asia’s petroleum fields and China’s growing economy.

US President George W. Bush says that the war he has declared against terrorism will last for years. One of the problems of this unconventional war, fought against an enemy whose track record of independence stems from 1,400 years ago, is that the enemy plays by different rules.

How and when will Bush know that his side has won? Or, as in the case of Vietnam, at what point would the US government decide that the war is unwinnable?—dpa