to know them and you find they really have a great sense of
humour’ (Mackenzie, 1998: 97).
The Clinton Administration’s position seems to have been driven
by an argument something like the following: ‘Afghanistan’s prob-
lem is the lack of order. The solution is to establish a common
national power. The Taliban are the right people to fill this void.
They are Pushtuns, from whose ranks Afghanistan’s rulers must be
drawn. They are Sunnis, and hostile to Iran. They are not anti-
Western, and may well invite the former King to return. And once
they restore order, the Taliban will withdraw from politics as they
have promised. US energy corporations can construct oil and gas
pipelines through Afghanistan, and rents from these pipelines will
fund reconstruction.’ At least some elements of this Hobbesian
thesis found supporters (Goldsmith, 1997; Magnus and Naby, 1998:
195), but as a whole it was spectacularly at odds with Afghan real-
ities. The belief that the Taliban would willingly relinquish political
power to anyone was mind boggling in its naiveté, as was the belief
that Afghanistan’s substantial non-Pushtun minorities would will-
ingly accept Taliban domination. The faith in energy companies as
engines of reconstruction – in the absence of a proper institutional
framework to receive and manage revenues generated by their
activities – was particularly absurd: such a situation is tailor-made
for spoiler activities, and is more likely to foster patronage net-
works than serious postwar reconstruction (Maley, 1998). Most ser-
iously of all, the argument entirely overlooked the brutality of the
‘order’ which the Taliban had brought. As Tacitus wrote in the
Agricola, they had made a wilderness and called it peace. It was
because of this last reality that the case for supporting the Taliban
was soon to fall apart. The Taliban by their own activities scared
the Administration away from any kind of embrace.
Military developments after September 1996
The events of late September 1996 left three main power centres
out of Taliban control. One was northeast Afghanistan, essentially
the area occupied by Massoud’s forces following their retreat from
228 The Afghanistan Wars