February 14, 2002	Thursday	Zilhaj 1, 1422

LONDON: Never was victory so bitter. Those liberals who supported the war in Afghanistan, and so confidently declared that their values had triumphed in November, must now be feeling a little exposed. Precisely who has lost, and what the extent of their loss may be, is yet to be determined, but there can now be little doubt that the dangerous and illiberal people who control the US military machine have won. The bombing of Afghanistan is already starting to look like the first shot in a new imperial war.

In 30 years’ time we may be able to tell whether or not the people of Afghanistan have benefited from the fighting there. The murderous Taliban have been overthrown. Women, in Kabul at any rate, have been allowed to show their faces in public, and readmitted into professional life. Some US dollars three billion has so far been pledged for aid and reconstruction. But the only predictable feature of Afghan politics is its unpredictability. In the absence of an effective peacekeeping force, the tensions between the clan leaders could burst into open warfare when the fighting season resumes in the spring. Iran, Russia and the US are beginning to tussle over the nation’s future, with potentially disastrous consequences for its people.

Seven million remain at risk of starvation. Some regions have been made safer for aid workers; others have become more dangerous, as looting and banditry fill the vacuum left by the Taliban’s collapse. Already, some refugees are looking back with nostalgia to the comparative order and stability of life under that brutal government. For the Afghan people, the only certain and irreversible outcome of the war so far is that some thousands of civilians have been killed.

Other interests in Afghanistan are doing nicely. On Jan 29, the IMF’s assistant director for monetary and exchange affairs suggested that the country should abandon its currency and adopt the dollar instead. This would, he explained, be a “temporary” measure, though, he conceded, “when an economy dollarises, it takes a little while to undollarise”.

The day before, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development revealed that part of its aid package to Afghan farmers would take the form of GM seed.

Both Hamid Karzai and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special envoy, were formerly employed as consultants to Unocal, the US oil company which spent much of the 1990s seeking to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.

Unocal appears to have dropped the scheme, but smaller companies (such as Chase Energy and Caspian Energy Consulting) are now lobbying for its revival. In October the president of Turkmenistan wrote to the UN pressing for the pipeline’s construction.

The temporary US bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Caspian states appear to be putting down roots. US military ”tent cities” have now been established in 13 places in the states bordering Afghanistan. New airports are being built and garrisons expanded.

In December, the US assistant secretary of state