Unlike his daddy, George had better finish the job

So the battle has begun. The American air strikes complemented by Tomahawk missile strikes from a British submarine and cruise missiles from warships and an American submarine were no surprise. US President George W. Bush had been promising an assault on the Taliban and military targets in Afghanistan for weeks now – ever since the September 11 suicide attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Mr. Bush, Britain’s combative, eloquent Prime Minister Tony Blair, and George Robertson, secretary-general of America’s supporting countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), surely must know that bombings and missiles attacks won’t defeat the Taliban or winkle Osama bin Laden out of his lair. If you ask me, they’re mostly for show.

The Vietnam War, and the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1898, amply demonstrated the futility of using technology against primitive warriors fighting on their own terrain.

During the 15-year "American participation" in Vietnam (which US grunts used to refer to derisively as ’Nam), ten million tons of bombs and shells and 55,000 tons of defoliating agents were dumped on South Vietnam alone, severely damaging 32 percent of the total land area and totally devastating three percent. Yet, after 46,370 US servicemen died in battle, another 10,000 succumbed to non-combat related causes, and 300,000 were wounded, the Americans withdrew in 1973, and Saigon fell to the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces two years later.

V.C. and North Vietnamese losses between 1961 and 1974 have been estimated, of course, to add up to 900,000 killed. But the Vietnamese guerrillas in black pajamas won – that’s the long and short of it. When I visited Hanoi some years ago, they showed me the meager "effects" of the bombing by B-52s. "They only created more waterholes and wallows for our water buffaloes (carabaos)," one Vietnamese official said. This might have been just boasting – but the fact remains that they won.

Having spent some time on Pakistan’s Northwest frontier and southern Afghanistan, I have no words of wise counsel to offer our American and British friends, except that foreign troops – even elite special forces like Delta Force, the Rangers, or Special Air Service (SAS) commandos – will face terrible hardships in Afghanistan. But if they must go in, they’ll have to throw the textbooks away. There is no primer on fighting the Afghans, mostly fierce Pusthuns (the Brits used to call them "Pathans", a name they despite). A Pushtun is taught to fight from infancy. If the Pushtuns are not fighting a foreign "invader", they’re busy trying to wipe each other out in clan wars that have persisted through generations.

My suggestion – facetious, naturally – is to drop 10,000 tons of food supplies willy-nilly, and the starving Afghans will tear each other apart to get at it.

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The reason the Americans and their NATO partners have been courting the evidently geriatric 86-year-old exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, and asking him to head a coalition of Afghans to oust the Taliban is because His Exiled Majesty, who lives not far from Rome, belongs to the Pushtun majority which constitutes 88 percent of Afghanistan’s population. Zahir Shah, who had introduced a constitutional monarchy, had been a feeble and somewhat scorned king during his 40 years of rule and had to find refuge in Italy when he was toppled in 1973. It’s problematical whether, on the threshold of senility, such a mild-mannered and un-Pushtunlike former leader could head a coalition strong enough to eject the cruel Taliban – but never discount the power of nostalgia. Even if he had been a weakling, Zahir Shah had presided over an Afghanistan relatively at peace, its fields green, and its villagers – if not happy – at least more or less content. The king was overthrown, by the way, by his own cousin, Prince Mohammed Daoud, who styled himself "president."

His turn came in April 1978 when two tough-acting Communist agitators, Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, staged a coup in which Daoud was killed. The plotters had the backing of the Soviet KGB and Moscow. But they soon fell out. In September 1979, Amin had Taraki murdered, took power and started executing the followers of his slain rival. Eric S. Margolis, the contributing foreign editor of the Toronto Sun, in his revealing book, War at the Top of the World, commented: "In the finest tradition of baroque Soviet lies, and with delicious understatement, Radio Kabul announced the bullet-riddled Taraki had ‘resigned for health reasons.’ One version of events held that Amin had drawn a revolver in the course of a heated cabinet meeting and emptied it into Taraki. Another, that Taraki had been hustled from the meeting room and gunned down in the hall by Amin’s guards."

Anyway, this gives you a picture of what kind of people you’re dealing with when you fence with the Afghans.

It’s also no wonder the US and its Western partners are reluctant to openly support the rebel Northern Alliance which holds 10 percent of Afghanistan and has been fighting it out, tooth and nail, with the Taliban for five years. The Northern Alliance is composed mostly of Tajiks and Uzbeks, with very few Pushtuns in its leadership circle. The tall, fair-skinned Tajiks have a Persian heritage in their bloodlines. The Tajiks also formerly constituted the educated and "intellectual" class and looked down on the rude Pushtuns as uncouth and barbaric. The Uzbeks, for their part, come from the Turkish-Mongolian family.

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has warned the US that he and his people don’t want a Tajik-Uzbek dominated Afghanistan next-door. He wants Pushtuns heading any new government. If this condition is fulfilled, he pledged to support the US offensive, at least by keeping the Islamic radical mobs at bay. Thus far, Pakistan’s dictator has kept his part of the bargain, sending his police to quell, with teargas and clubs, the many anti-American rallies which erupted Monday in Islamabad (the capital), Karachi, Quetta, and Peshawar.

It was in Peshawar that I set up my quarters during those long-ago days, in the crumbling Green Hotel, a relic of British colonial times. For part of the year, I was also based in"Flashman’s" hotel in Rawalpindi, a place also redolent of Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads, Kim and Gunga Din. I recall the waiters in Flashman’s famous grill were all resplendently turbanned and dressed like maharajahs. It was important to order only very hot soup, because otherwise your soup would be handed to you with the waiter’s dirty thumb in it.

Those were the good old days. Islamabad, where I stayed for a while in the "Sheharazadh" hotel, was a bore. But Peshawar was exotic. It was inhabited by Pushtuns, the first cousins of the Afghan Pushtuns, and straddling the frontier was Landi Khotal (better known to English readers as the fabled "Kyber Pass"). The Khyber or Landi Khotal was the center of all contraband trade, from opium to silks and locally-manufactured rifles. The Pushtuns, as skillful as our Cebu paltik-makers in Danao, used to fashion their own home-made rifles. These were elegant weapons made to duplicate British Enfield rifles down to their fake serial numbers, as well as old-fashioned, brightly-damascened and decorated long rifles, like you saw the Arabs on horseback and camel-back brandishing and firing off in Lawrence of Arabia.

Gunmaking among the Pushtuns is, today, a lost art. This is because during the 1979-89 anti-Soviet war, they acquired the latest in AK-47s, M-16s, Katyushka rockets, "stinger" missiles, and RPG rocket-launchers. "Civilization" has begun to destroy the Pushtun (Pathan) way of life.

In Peshawar, every street had its specialty. There was a street for copper-mongers, a street for sellers of gold and jewelry, a street for pots and pans, a street for swords, cutlery, and the wicked Kyber knife which every warrior carried in his belt and is passed on from one generation to another. My favorite was the "Street of the Story Tellers." (You needed an interpreter with you, of course, fluent in the Pushtun dialects or at least Urdu, which is Pakistan’s national language.) Elderly men used to wait, sitting on their haunches by the side of the road, and for a few coins they would spin for you tales of bravery, "raids" and other stories of the Northwest Frontier. In an oral tradition, they were the keepers of history – the saga of the Pushtun people. Pushtuns or Pakhtuns belong to the Sunni sect and regard Muslims from the south as infidels or ungodly kufir, the same derisive term in which they refer to Christians. The major tribes are divided into sub-tribes, then further into clans (khels). The most renowned, or infamous, are the Afridis who populate the region around the Khyber Pass. On them, Kipling penned those well-remembered lines on his poem, The Young British Soldier.

Said Kipling: "When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains . . ."

In the 19th century, British soldiers were told to save the last bullet for themselves, rather than be taken alive by the cruel Afridi "Pathans," especially their women.

Then there are the equally famed Yusufzais, the Shinwaris, the Orakzais, the Mahsuds, the Bangash, the Wazirs and the Mohmands.

Although particularly ferocious in attacking each other, all Pushtuns were bound by a tribal code called Pushtunwali. This code includes, among other things, the admonition that if an enemy seeks refuge under your roof, and in your home, you are sworn to defend him as if he were an honored guest.

In a way, the Pushtuns and the feudal Ilocanos would have understood each other very well.

* * *

What’s the next step in the American "Enduring Freedom" offensive? President Bush says that there are operations you can see, and others you cannot see. How Western troops can move in stealth through the dusty deserts, and the snow-bound mountain passes and tricky trails of the Hindi Kush, or hunt bin Laden from cave to cave, is beyond my imagination. In November, next month, winter will set in, making moving around Afghanistan difficult and sometimes fatal – even for Afghans. Americans and Brits, however, for all the reverses they have suffered, have done amazing things – once they got going.

We’ll know in the weeks to come whether they can rally enough Pushtuns to their side to assure them of victory. For they can pulverize the Taliban’s airfields, military installations, tanks and APCs, and level their "cities", but in the end they will have to wage an anti-guerrilla war, in far different terrain, but with the same type of cunning and relentless foe they encountered in Vietnam.

The mujahideen, by the very fact that they come from a more primitive society, deem themselves defenders of Islam and soldiers of Allah. Throughout history, the most merciless conflicts were those fought in the name of religion. Alas, the Taliban (who started out as Koranic scholars and students) subscribe to the unbending creed that the Americans are chieftains of an Israeli-Crusader conspiracy to destroy Islam, just as the crusaders of the past laid waste to the "Holy Land" in their drive to capture Jerusalem.

Surely, the Taliban can be defeated, but not without the help of their fellow Afghans.

The mistakes the elder ex-President George Bush Sr. made when he mustered the triumphant coalition that defeated Iraq and drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait is that he stopped "Operation Desert Storm" at the Iraqi border and didn't punch in to Baghdad to topple and arrest (or kill) Saddam. Thus he managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

George W. Junior had better learn from that – and finish the job. Finish off the Taliban, Mullah Omar and his terrorist friends for good. Otherwise, they'll keep coming back, again and again.