affected, as was the flow of resources that could have been used to
bolster support. The Taliban’s religious backers in Pakistan were
unable to mobilise large-scale demonstrations in support of Omar
and his colleagues, of a kind that would bring real pressure to bear
on Musharraf. United States’ pressure on Pakistan effectively
denied the Taliban and their supporters any significant fallback
haven on Pakistani soil. But more significant was the weak
legitimacy of the Taliban movement. Had the Taliban been an
organic outgrowth of Afghan society, they would have survived
much longer, and a campaign of harassment of the new power
holders would have begun immediately. This simply did not hap-
pen. And most important of all was the sheer might of the USA,
which confronted the Taliban with an opponent formidable beyond
their darkest dreams.
The notion that Afghanistan would be a graveyard for the
Americans in much the way it unquestionably proved to be for the
Soviets was highly misleading. Afghans do not automatically resent
foreigners: much depends upon what foreigners actually seek to
do. ‘The intervention of foreign troops in any country’, said Zahir
Shah in an interview for the BBC, ‘is something that’s not easy to
accept. But if it’s an intervention such as we witnessed in Europe
with the Second World War when the British, the Americans and
the Canadians came down in France to get rid of the Nazis, this is
different’ (BBC Radio 4 Today, 25 September 2001). The internal
situation in Afghanistan on the eve of the US campaign was rad-
ically different from that which prevailed in late 1979. At the time
of the Soviet invasion, most of Afghanistan was notin crisis, and
inhabitants of the Afghan countryside united to resist what they
interpreted as a threat to a way of life which they valued. By con-
trast, in 2001, most of Afghanistan wasin crisis, as a result of two
decades of massive destruction and population displacement, aug-
mented by Taliban repression and the effects of drought. For many
Afghans, the only way left to go was up, and the US intervention
created an opportunity for the reordering of the political space.
Thus viewed, Operation Enduring Freedom was not an attempt to
destroy their religion or their culture, but rather a welcome
The Fall of the Taliban 267