How the Taliban Will Go
Jalalabad’s fall foreshadows the Taliban’s finale.

hat happened last week in Jalalabad (and other Taliban strongholds) is a good indication of the next act in the Afghan drama.

Muddled news reports claimed a lethal power struggle between the geriatric, fundamentalist mullah Maulavi Muhammad Younis Khalis, and pro-Northern Alliance commander, Haji Abdul Qadir, former governor of the Eastern province of Nangarhar of which Jalalabad is the capitol. Only Tim Weiner of the New York Times got it right, reporting the handover of power as a picnic complete with guards dressed in slightly ludicrous, Ruritanian uniforms that had been in mothballs since the abdication of the king 30 years before.

Post-Taliban Nangarhar, strategically situated on the main road between Pakistan, the Khyber Pass, and Kabul, fell in a classic example of how tribalism can short-circuit war in Afghanistan and hasten the end of the conflict elsewhere.

Haji Qadir, the moderate, pro-Western, and fiercly anti-drug governor of Nangarhar until ejected by the Taliban in 1996, comes from an important local family that ran the province as country squires since the mid-19th Century. Maulavi Khalis, once head of the mujahideen party to which Qadir belonged, is the family's old preacher who presided at the weddings of Qadir and his brothers. The commanders united under them are all either relatives, relatives by marriage, or in some other ways allied.

In 1996, Taliban outsiders from Kandahar armed and funded local fundamentalist upstarts, driving Qadir from the province and forcing him to take sanctuary with his own war-time enemies, Ahmed Shah Massood's Northern Alliance. Meanwhile the then-75-year-old Khalis, a conservative cleric of unimpeachable honesty, was to old to be a threat and too respected to attack.

With his flaming red, henna-dyed beard and worry beads made of bullets, Khalis is something of the Judge Roy Bean of Afghanistan. He stalled a White House meeting with President Reagan for five minutes discussing the etiquette of removing one's sandals before entering the Oval Office, and dissolved his resistance party when the Soviet regime collapsed, insisting that only elected people should run his country.

Then 18 months ago he wrote at least one provocative letter to Osama bin Laden, explaining that if he really understood Islam then Osama would personally welcome American troops in Saudi Arabia as invited guests. While Qadir was temporarily driven off, Khalis remained an untouchable irritant to the Taliban and an amusement to the rest of the province.

Khalis and other supporters represented moderacy in Qadir's absence, and as Taliban leadership began to crumble, tribal elders throughout the province saw the wisdom in backing the Old Guard. More accurately, they saw an opportunity to bring back the ancien regime that had not been possible since the Taliban armed and paid off local disgruntled, pro-Pakistani elements in 1996.

Pushtun tribal assemblies were held informally, the worst of the Talib factions were sent packing, and alliances shifted almost overnight and almost bloodlessly.

Power transferred in a similar fashion when the Communist regime collapsed in 1991. Within days, Pashtuns used their unique tribal structure to shift support to the mujahideen, leaving the Communists who were also ethnic minorities stranded far from home. The pro-Communist Pashtuns seemed to evaporate. Similarly, last week a tiny handful of local Pashtuns who were too closely tied to the Taliban were forced to retreat from the province along with the pro-Taliban Pakistani and Arab volunteers. Behind, and still in power, remained either the neutral local people or locals whose Taliban backgrounds could be whitewashed with a Nixonian degree of "plausible deniability."

This is how conservative, traditionalist Pashtun tribal society always survives the ebb and flow of empires and ideologies. Similar negotiations are now underway in Kandahar, between the Taliban there and the well-organized southwestern tribes led, in part, by the urbane and charismatic Hamid Kharzai. There, as in Jalalabad, plenty of former Taliban supporters will be reabsorbed into the tribes to which they have belonged all along. The only problems will be determining how many Pashtuns will "take the fall" along with the ghastly Mullah Omar, and of course where to drive the irritating clique of Arab terrorists and Pakistani cannon fodder accumulated by the Taliban.

After that, Russian premier Vladimir Putin's strategy will likely be shattered by the same phenomenon. Backers of Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance since the early 1980s, the Russians demand that there be no Taliban representation in any postwar government, hoping either that their ethnic-minority allies get to run the entire country or that Afghanistan be divided into a northern, non-Pashtun half and a southern Pashtun section guaranteed to destabilize Pakistan.

Now, once the Taliban disappear, nobody will be able to find them apart from the remains of Mullah Omar and a few of his unlucky henchmen. The rest will play their other tribal roles as local elders or commanders or leaders. As a Jalalabad resident told Tim Weiner: "they are still here…they just cut their hair and trimmed their beards." It may not be what the Pentagon expected, but it is a workable recipe for peace.