Taliban now coming to a guerilla war theatre near you

But Pakistan’s real economic interest lay in the export of manufactured goods via the Kandahar-Herat route to Turkmenistan and other newly oil-rich republics in Central Asia. Some 40 roadblocks, however, had choked off this commerce.

To solve this problem, the late Benazir Bhutto dumped the Hekmatyar mafia and switched Pakistani support to the Taliban.

The Taliban, like the Mujahideen factions before them, ended up as a one-man show with no political structures, Mullah Omar dispensing cash from a tin trunk that served as the Taliban Treasury.

The Afghan Arabs, for their part, segregated themselves in their relatively luxurious camps. Their extreme Wahhabism and failure to complete the development projects they committed to alienated many Afghans.

Before the Taliban takeover, Masud had observed, “Bin Laden does more harm than good.”

In 1998 the Taliban brutalised his northern stronghold, Mazar-e-Sharif. A unit under Mullah Dost Mohammed entered the city’s Iranian consulate, herded 11 diplomats into the basement, and shot them dead. Thousands of slain Tajik fighters and civilians were left to rot in the streets for six weeks — dogs who fed on the corpses went mad.

Masud continued to oppose the Taliban from his Panjshir Valley stronghold — until Al Qaeda assassins posing as an Arab TV crew blew him up two days before the World Trade Towers attack in 2001.

But 9-11 proved to be the Taliban’s undoing.

It is important to recognise that the Taliban were a mainly Pashtun affair. If Bin Laden and friends provided a valuable alternative source of cash after the Saudis cut off their funds, the Taliban also saw Al Qaeda as a bargaining chip with the West, the marriage between Osama Bin Laden’s son and Mullah Omar’s daughter notwithstanding.

It is also important to acknowledge the seriousness of the Pashtunwali cultural code, and the principle of nanawateh, which mandates protection of those (even enemies) who petition the tribe for sanctuary.

Faced with the ultimatum, expel Al Qaeda or suffer the consequences, the Taliban Loya Jirga replied that although they could not forcibly make them leave, they had invited their guests to exit of their own accord.

In contrast to the civil war and violence ravaging Mogadishu during the mid-1990s, an Ogaden Somali warlord allied with the Al Ittihad movement established a semblance of stability in the environs adjacent to the Kenya border by imposing a severe religious order. Hassan Turki and his Ikhwan (the brotherhood) banned cigarettes and miraa (khat), and made bearing firearms subject to his approval.

Based in the historic settlement of Bur Gao, in 1996 the Sheikh invited agents of Al Qaeda to set up a training camp six kilometres from the Kenya border in Ras Kamboni. Reports of alien combatants operating in the open and even training on the beach filtered across the border with Lamu.

The Ras Kamboni training camp continued to operate despite the international attention focused on the region by the 1998 US embassy bombings; the “light-skinned” foreigners went underground, moving in with local residents.

As was the case in Afghanistan, the jihadis were unpopular and disliked by their local hosts, and their presence a magnet for American military intervention.