When the Iranian army massed on the western border of Afghanistan in 1998 and prepared to storm across the frontier to avenge the Taliban slaughter of its diplomats – and its Afghan allies – in Mazar-i-Sharif, it received a message from the Taliban leadership in Kandahar.

"You will decide the date of your invasion," came the two-sentence communiqué from Mullah Omar's men. "We will decide the date of your departure." The Iranians wisely held their fire. It may have been a reply from the Taliban – but it was a very Afghan reply. The US and Britain – or the "coalition" as we are constrained to call them – are now getting similar treatment. The Northern Alliance watched the American bombers clear the road to Kabul. They were grateful. Then they drove into Kabul and now they are asking the British to leave. Poor old Jack Straw had trouble contacting the Afghan foreign minister to sort things out. The Afghan satellite phone was not switched on. You bet it wasn't.

The mystery is why we ever expected these people to obey us. Afghan rules don't work that way. Ethnic groups and tribes and villagers don't take orders from foreigners. They do deals. The West wanted to use the Northern Alliance as its foot-soldiers in Afghanistan. The Alliance wanted to use the American bombers to help it occupy the capital. For the Tajiks and Uzbeks and Hazaras, it was all very straightforward. They destroy the Taliban – and then take over Afghanistan, or as much as they can swallow. And if they indulge in a little revenge here and there – 500 or 600 Pakistani fighters massacred in a bloodbath at Mazar, a possible human rights atrocity in the making in Kunduz – what's so surprising?

Even now, faced with the bitter fruits of our coalition with the Northern Alliance, we are reacting with an odd replay of our Bosnian adventure: calling for restraint while at the same time reminding the world that the Afghans are a warlike, cruel people.

As the Alliance gunmen prepare to storm into Kandahar, Mr Blair calls for "restraint". Yet the western media are now set upon informing their readers and viewers that nothing more than a massacre could have been expected of our foot-soldiers. An Irish journalist came on the line to me last week with a familiar complaint. Wasn't I being a bit finicky, getting upset about a little slaughter in Mazar? Weren't the Afghans steeped in age-old traditions of warfare? Wasn't it a bit much to be asking the Afghans to behave in a civilised way?

I tried to remind my interviewer that Afghanistan's civilisation predated Ireland's – and indeed much of Europe's – and that the missiles, tanks, artillery pieces and rocket-propelled grenades with which the Afghans were destroying each other had been provided by the civilised outside powers. Hadn't I listened to this same nonsense about "age old traditions of warfare" peddled by the British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind when he was trying to wash his hands of Bosnia?

The real point, however, is that we cannot adopt someone's army as our own and then deny responsibility for its behaviour. We didn't allow the Germans to do that after the Second World War. And when our Northern Alliance boys go on a killing spree, we have to take responsibility for the bloodshed that results.

Take the case of Kunduz. More than 50 US planes have been bombarding the Taliban lines around the area in a deliberate attempt to break the morale of the defenders and allow the Northern Alliance gunmen to capture the district.

The Alliance has given the Taliban a deadline. It's pretty clear what will happen if the Taliban ignore that deadline. They are going to be killed in cold blood. I hope this is not true. I fear it is. But are we going to shrug our shoulders when the knives come out? Are we going to admit we helped the Alliance to gain the upper hand but then eschew all interest in the results? Isn't there even a faint, horrible parallel with Osama bin Laden? If he merely inspired murderers to commit the crimes against humanity of 11 September, surely he was guilty of the death of 5,000 people. But if we facilitate Alliance murderers, it seems we are innocent of the crime.

Meanwhile, outside Kabul, the familiar Northern Alliance anarchy is falling into place. The warlords of Jalalabad are feuding over who rules which part of Nangahar province. The Pashtu tribal leaders around Kandahar are threatening to fight the Northern Alliance. Hazara elements of the alliance are threatening their Tajik and Uzbek comrades if they do not receive a sufficient share of power in Kabul.

Amid all this, in clops the poor old UN donkey, dragged into the pit to undertake the most impossible task ever faced by statesmen in the history of the modern world: to sort out Afghanistan. Would the Alliance please be kind enough to allow the Pashtuns to have a proportionate share in the government? Could we have a few moderate Taliban – perhaps with shorter beards – in a broad-based administration? I can just see the Afghan delegates to these talks when they hear the phrase broad-based. Broad-based?

The only broad-based phenomenon the Afghans know about are ceasefires. And even then, only for Afghans. The most sinister element of the Kunduz ceasefire offer is that it only applies to Pashtuns – not to foreign (ie Arab) fighters – trapped in the area. They, presumably, are to be massacred or – in the chilling words of a BBC reporter with the Alliance yesterday – "given no quarter".

My own experience of armies that give no quarter is that they intend to commit war crimes – as has already happened in Mazar – and that this will only stiffen the resolve of those men who escape the bloodbath. For it is worth remembering the moral basis upon which we are prosecuting this war. This is, remember, a war "for civilisation". It is a war for "democracy". It is a war of "good against evil". It is a war in which "you are either for us or against us".

So when we see the pictures of the next massacre, let's ask ourselves whose side we are on. On the side of the victims or the murderers? And if the side of good happens to coincide with the side of the murderers, what does that make us? We're hearing a lot about the Allied success in the war. But the war has only just begun.

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Robert Fisk: Forget the cliches, there is no easy way for the West to sort this out
War on Terrorism: Rival Factions
17 November 2001

Afghanistan – as the armies of the West are about to realise – is not a country. You can't "occupy" or even "control" Afghanistan because it is neither a state nor a nation.

Nor can we dominate Afghanistan with the clichés now being honed by our journalists. We may want a "broad-based" government, but do the Afghans? We may regard cities as "strategic" – especially if reporters are about to enter them – but the Afghans have a different perspective on their land.

As for the famous loya jirga, a phrase which now slips proudly off the lips of cognoscenti, it just means "big meeting". Even more disturbingly, it is a uniquely Pashtun phrase and thus represents the tribal rules of only 38 per cent of Afghan society.

The real problem is that Afghanistan contains only tiny minorities of the ethnic groups which constitute its population. Thus, the 7 million Pashtuns in the country are outnumbered by the 12 million Pashtuns in Pakistan, the 3.5 million Tajiks in Afghanistan are outnumbered by the 6 million Tajiks in Tajikistan. The 1.3 million Uzbeks are just a fraction of the 23 million Uzbeks in Uzbekistan. There are 600,000 Turkmens in Afghanistan – but 3.52 million in Turkmenistan. So why should the Afghan Pashtuns and Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmens regard Afghanistan as their country? Their "country" is the bit of land in Afghanistan upon which they live.

Indeed, Afghan Pashtuns have long disputed the notorious Durand line – the frontier which divided Afghanistan from British India and which now forms the Afghan-Pakistan border. In 1897, Sir Mortimer Durand took no account of the fact that the Afghan Empire once included much of what would become present-day Pakistan.

Hence, today, the constant fear for Pakistan's leader, General Pervez Musharraf, is not so much an Islamic revolution but a rebirth of the notorious demand for "Pushtunistan" in the North-West Frontier province.

A remark by a victorious Northern Alliance official – that his men might push on to "the Pashtun city of Karachi" – caused a minor political heart attack in Islamabad. In similar fashion, the journalistic idea that Taliban leaders might "flee over the border into Pakistan" seems a lot less odd to the Taliban themselves – who would merely be moving across an artificial British-made border into another part of the Pashtun tribal area.

Of course, it's not difficult to see how we Westerners like the idea of a loya jirga. All we have to do is supervise a massive congress of Afghan tribesmen – forgetting that the loya jirga is totally unrepresentative because women are banned – in order to produce a power-sharing government of the kind that the British created in Northern Ireland.

Only it's not like that. The loya jirga became part of Afghan tradition when, in 1747, Ahmed Abdalli took 4,000 soldiers to Kandahar – which was then just two small towns – and brought together the leaders of the eight major Pashtun tribes. They chose Ahmed Durani as the king. But since then, despite the inclusion of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, Pashtuns have ruled Afghanistan for all but three brief periods of the 20th century.

It's easy to see why. The Uzbeks never had loya jirgas. The Tajiks are an urban, non-tribal group. How can they obtain equal or proportionate weight in such a meeting when they do not have tribal leaders? Will the Tajiks have one representative for the Pashtuns' eight or more?

Nor can history be excluded. The Shia Muslim Hazaras – who may or may not owe their origins to Genghis Khan's invading hordes – were the victims of savage repression at the hands of Pashtun forces under the "Iron Emir", King Abdur Rahman, in 1880. Abdur Rahman, it should be added, repressed his own Pashtun people as well. He had been invited to rule Afghanistan by – you guessed it – the British government.

 http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=105385

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