An Afghan Tale

Once upon a time there was a country, more a space than a nation, landlocked, mountainous, impoverished and windblown.

There resided many peoples, including Pashtuns and Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmen, and a new tribe called the Americans.

They had come, the Americans, after 30 years of bloodshed, to bring peace to this land called Afghanistan. But what did they know - what could they know - of life behind burkas, or beyond mud walls, or inside minds made mad by war?

Past goat herds and yellowing almond trees, the helmeted Americans drove their armored Humvees. Beside lurching piles of battered tires, children gathered in villages and, unlike those in another broken land called Iraq, they smiled and waved.

The Americans talked about empowering Afghans. Sometimes they took to Blackhawk helicopters and swooped along the dun-colored river beds and sent goats scurrying for cover.

The 26,000 U.S. troops meant well. They wielded billions of dollars. They calculated "metrics" of progress. They had learned, to their cost, how this faraway place - abandoned to pile rubble on rubble - could nurture danger.

Not only was it once home to the American-funded Islamists who humbled the Soviet empire. It also housed their jihadist offspring, who, like sorcerers' apprentices, turned on a distracted sponsor and brought the dust of two fallen towers to Manhattan.

To help forge a better Afghanistan, or just an Afghanistan, the Americans involved their NATO friends. An alliance forged to defend the West against the Soviets was transformed into an agent of democratic change in southwest Asia.

How strange! The enemy now was Taliban Islamofascists rather than Kremlin totalitarians. On a hillside in southeastern Afghanistan rose "Camp Dracula," a garrison housing 700 Romanian soldiers on this NATO mission.

The process will be very slow. The West's stomach for investing blood and treasure here for another decade is unclear. But I see no alternative if Afghanistan is to move from its destructive gyre and the global threat that brings.

The children's smiles suggest hope still flickers. To lose Afghanistan by way of Iraq - and to do so on the border of an explosive nuclear-armed Pakistan - would be a terrible betrayal and an unacceptable risk.

That, alas, is no fairy tale.