A Mullah Dies, and War Comes Knocking

In fact, just a day or two before, the Khakrez district chief -- a friend of the Karzais' -- had struck a deal with the Taliban, according to numerous Khakrez residents, a deal reportedly sealed with a transfer of some weapons and some wheat. They could go where they liked, as long as they didn't attack the police.

On Monday, Oct. 29, I had a missed call from Zmarai on my cellphone. I rang him back. The Taliban were in Chahar Ghulba, his racing words announced, Mullah Naqib's home village. They were in his very house. Their commanders were meeting in the village mosque, and they were thick in the country all around.

All through that day, the battle lines were drawn: the Taliban north of the Arghandab river bed, government forces to the south. Cars ferried women and children away from the scene of the impending fight. Others, on foot, drove the animals that sustained their families ahead of them as they moved south, toward the city of Kandahar. It was the scene that has come to characterize the tragedies of recent years: poor people, innocent of the decisions that brought about violent events, fleeing ahead of their unfolding.

Only that night was a general council of war convened on the NATO military base outside Kandahar. All the actors were there: the chief of police; the head of the army corps; a representative of the governor, who was away on vacation; the Canadian battle group; the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team; U.S. police trainers and Special Forces officers; the untried son of Mullah Naqib. What a strange task it must have been for the Canadian commander to try to wrest a concerted plan from this company.

On the base the next day, I found a quietly exultant mood of work well done: NATO troops had responded, the Afghan National Army had responded, and some villages had been retaken, with significant Taliban casualties. The beginnings of a noose had been arrayed around the rest.

And yet I knew that the significance of this event could not be weighed in the usual quantitative metrics dear to journalists and military men. The number of bodies, the number of houses vacated, the inches of terrain occupied or retaken did not add up to the full reality of what had taken place. That reality was in the hearts of the people, the sinking sense of impending tragedy.

What had in fact transpired, in my view, was a deft, successful psychological operations action by the Taliban. Their attack on Arghandab was designed to communicate, and it did -- eloquently. It said that they are here. It said that, despite the likelihood that they would attack after the death of Mullah Naqib, no obstacle was thrown up to oppose them, and they were able to walk into the district. The targeting of the mullah's house was a deliberate affront. It said: "You see, o men of no honor? You can't even protect his house. You are nothing now." The sum of these messages was aimed at the ordinary people who are the prize in any insurgency: Our encroachment is inevitable, the Taliban said. You should align yourselves with the inevitable.

In the end, after three days of fighting, the Taliban were not crushed in the jaws of a closing trap, as we had been led to expect. They executed a disciplined, fighting withdrawal -- one of the most difficult maneuvers on a battlefield. Even their retreat emphasized their message.

Now, Kandaharis fear, they will quietly capitalize on this psy-ops victory. They will visit the villages and the mosques in tiny groups. They will instill their poison, a savant dose of seduction ("Brother, we have nothing against you; you are a Muslim, and we love you. Our fight is with the infidels. Let us pass") and terror: a "collaborator" tracked down and cut into pieces, a suicide bomber at a normally tranquil village crossroads. They will work to turn the people toward the inevitable.

All of this is a pattern familiar from other districts. What troubles me more is evidence that the battle for Arghandab may have been a piece of psy-ops mounted by a different set of actors, aimed at a different audience, against a backdrop of diplomatic initiatives that would have been unthinkable a few short years ago. There is suddenly this backbeat -- persistent references in the media, unchallenged pronouncements by Karzai -- that the only way to end the "insurgency" is to negotiate, to invite the Taliban back to share power.

This is a seductive refrain. After all, wasn't the IRA brought to the table? Didn't Yasser Arafat win a Nobel Peace Prize? Isn't it true that insurgencies are never defeated, that they are always accommodated in the end through negotiations?

Except these Taliban are not home-grown insurgents. These Taliban, I have become convinced by evidence gathered over the past six years, were reconstituted into a force for mischief by the military establishment -- in other words, it seems to me, the government -- of Pakistan, as a proxy fighting force to advance Pakistan's long-cherished agenda: to control all or part of Afghanistan, directly or indirectly.