LONDON: The Taliban turned tail and fled so fast they left their dinner still hot on the front line. There was not even time for the eating of words between the first and last editions of newspapers as Kabul fell. Television reporters would have blushed to hear re-broadcast words of foreboding they spoke so recently. Never in the field of human conflict have so many experts of the highest renown been so thoroughly wrong. Never have so many old war horses of right and left been so embarrassingly trounced.
That must be why the news passed abruptly from dire warnings of a bloodbath ahead, to dire warnings about the make-up of the Kabul government, with no pause to contemplate the enormity of what happened in between. So on it goes, seeking out the next possible source of trouble, not stopping for an instant to ponder this deeply embarrassing good news.
To be sure, no one can know how good the final outcome will be. A stable multi-ethnic government has not flown in to Kabul on a magic carpet to transform the stone age into a fully-fledged democracy overnight. Anarchy threatens in any sudden power vacuum: savage warlords may resume their old wicked ways unless firmly checked. The Taliban may rally in its heartland. Osama bin Laden may flee and commit worse atrocities from some other cave. The large UN aid convoys now at last flowing across the border to the most famine-stricken areas may not arrive soon enough for all. Such anxieties follow victories everywhere - in Serbia or at the fall of Nazi Berlin. Ah, the word slipped out. Victory? Did anyone say victory?
Just remember what they said: the Taliban was different, this was not war as we knew it. Romantic Victorian paintings of British defeats were dusted down to warn of the mythic Pakhtoon warrior spirit. Old film of Russian conscripts dying in the Afghan snow was shown to foretell the worst. The Pakhtoons were not men, but a rare breed of fighting machine, welded to their guns and tanks, hard as their rocky land. The jihad martyrs would fight to the terrible end. Defeat was not in the vocabulary of martyrs heavenbound for their 70 celestial virgins. Fractious rogues of the Northern Alliance could never beat the maniacs. Bombing would do no good, as the crafty guerrilla army would flit from cave to cave. Bombing would kill thousands of civilians without touching this elusive foe.
They were ordinary men after all. Religious delirium may seize small groups, but faced with a choice between this life or the next, even the devout cling to their mortal coil. So they fled. A rollcall of names of doomsters what would fill pages. Most carefully added that the Taliban might succumb eventually to the Great Satan’s airpower - but only after slaughter on a hideous scale in prolonged battles: Vietnam. If foreign troops were drawn in, all sides would unite against the intruders. Even when Mazar-i-Sharif fell, they said Kabul would be another story, but it was not: crowds cheered foreign special forces and TV cameras entering the capital.
There may still be a bloody battle for Kandahar, or maybe not. James Meek’s sharp and witty front line account of Taliban fighters morphing effortless into Northern Alliance men tells the story. This is less about the death of men, more about the death of an idea. Just as Nazism vanished as Hitler’s body burned outside his bunker, so the Taliban brand of insane radicalism may now ebb away.
Even if they fight a bloody last stand, the Taliban myth is dead. Fleeing so far so fast with barely a shot fired, their mystique is gone. Victory has a psychological trajectory of its own which will speed across the Muslim world. It cauterises what went before, creates a new beginning, forces people to think again. The ideal of the perfect Muslim state guided absolutely by a book revealed centuries ago drew hot-headed Muslim youth from Arabia, Indonesia and Luton. This was a last stand against modernism - encompassing any discontent any Muslim boy felt about the current order in his country. For many the dream might have faded when they saw the brutal reality of Taliban barbarism. For others this rout will puncture the romance. Al Qaeda terrorists may keep fighting indefinitely but without a firm geographical base they lack the authority given by the unvanquished Osama-Taliban regime. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
