Last month, President Obama outlined his timetable for US military withdrawal from Afghanistan: 10,000 more troops home by year’s, and all 30,000 “surge” forces back by September 2012. By 2014, the Western-trained Afghan military will be all that stands in the way of whatever vestige remains of Afghan democracy and a revanchist Taliban. Not that we need worry since the Taliban’s incorporation into the Kabul government now appears to be only the thinly veiled policy of Washington.

The CIA and US State Department have reportedly met three times in the last several months with Tayeb Agha, a former aid to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Islamist movement America went in to flush out in October 2001. In a speech Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently gave in Kabul, he acknowledged, “Peace talks are going on with the Taliban. The foreign military and especially the United States itself is going ahead with these negotiations,” which have allegedly been held in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and a tropical resort in the Maldives. In July, the UN Security Council, acting at the behest of the US, bifurcated the sanctions list that had previously lumped Taliban fighters in with Al Qaeda agents in a move widely seen as a preliminary toward what Karzai is quaintly calling “reintegration and reconciliation.” Reintegration means encouraging mid-level Taliban defections, probably through bribes; reconciliation means what it sounds like -- cutting a deal with the enemy. Karzai has been referring to Taliban militants as “brothers" since 2004, but now he really means it.

However, some stalwart Afghans want nothing to do with such a bent-knee approach to the scrofulous acid-throwers who lorded over their country. The Massoudist movement is leading the campaign against Karzai and the Yanks. They derive their political and moral legacy from the fallen Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, known in life and death as the Lion of Panjshir because of his skillfulness in keeping Islamist riffraff out of a sensitive valley region 100 kilometres north of Kabul. Massoud was only killed by Al Qaeda agents masquerading as journalists a few days before 9/11.

The best account of this principled yet embattled opposition was written by Michael Petrou in his June profile of the Massoudists for the Canadian journal Macleans. Petrou quotes Faheem Dashty, an Afghan reporter and a former member of Massoud’s anti-Taliban army:

“There are two extremes coming together. On this side, we believe in human rights, women’s rights, freedom, justice democracy. From that side, they are fundamentally against these values. They believe in an Islamic system, which doesn’t actually have anything to do with the teachings of Islam. If we reconcile, one side has to sacrifice its values, either this side or their side. President Karzai may want to sacrifice his values, but the people of Afghanistan will not accept that. Their side will never sacrifice its values either.”

The political higher-ups of Massoudism include Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister and a presidential candidate in 2009 whose true poll numbers may never be known thanks to widespread voter fraud in that election. Another is Amrullah Saleh, the former head of Afghan intelligence and once a comrade of Massoud. Saleh mistrusts Karzai’s closeness to Pakistan (one reason for his resignation a year ago) and believes that another bloody civil war is inevitable if a Pashtun supremacist party like the Taliban are legitimised. He’s warned in print against the impending Hezbollah-isation of Afghanistan if “reintegration and reconciliation” come off.

Terry Glavin, another Canadian journalist who’s traveled extensively through war-torn Afghanistan, emailed me at the weekend: “We are now expecting Afghans to fight a war that is not worth fighting. For Afghan democrats, the options are narrowing -- fight on and risk decapitation, retreat and maybe you’ll be allowed to live. The options available to the Taliban are no longer ‘surrender or die.’ The Obama White House has presented the Talbs and their affiliates with a far more favourable option: ‘the harder you fight, the more concessions you’ll win.’ Do these seem like conditions for anything vaguely resembling victory, or even a retreat with honour?”

But don’t worry. Civil society, the rule of law and gender equality are at least going to be sacrificed for the sake of a lucrative energy deal.

Indeed, one of Karzai’s main motives for rapprochement with the Taliban is that the Taliban may decide between two competitive projects for a natural gas pipeline running through Central Asia: the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) line and the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) line. Karzai, for quite obvious reasons, is keener on TAPI, which is why Kabul and Islamabad recently inked a transit trade agreement.

The big commercial question is which gas pipeline is more susceptible to terrorist attacks. Karzai wants to prove that the Taliban are a non-issue, and he’s been preying upon Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s Sunni pride to see the wisdom in cutting off the Shi’ite Iranians. Meanwhile, Iran has been reassuring India that the only terrorist threat the IPI pipeline would face, giving its planned trajectory, is from Balochi nationalists in Pakistan who have historically been quashed by the Pakistan military. The mullahs know that, with a unreconciled Taliban on the loose in Kandahar and Helmand, theirs is the better deal by far.

So yes, in case you’re wondering, the future of Afghanistan may well hinge on a bidding war between a mafia narco-state headed by a corrupt manic-depressive and Khomeinists looking to skirt international sanctions and pay for their over-budget and behind-schedule nuclear bomb.

Can ten years of American warfare and geopolitical maneuvering end more squalidly than this?

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