We are obligated to occupy Afghanistan.

The people we are supporting, the "Northern Alliance," are corrupt, rapacious, and murderous. In fact, one of the reasons that the Taliban initially had great popular support is because they couldn't be bribed. And then they managed to unify the country, so that it was no longer divided into tiny, violent military dictatorships.

The Northern Alliance forces were responsible for several horrendous massacres, including the slaughter of hundreds of Taliban sympathizers, who were buried in mass graves, in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997.

"Taliban" means "students," because the leaders were at the time of their ascent students and teachers in small Islamic schools called "madrassas." They first gained wide attention in 1994 when two warlords were fighting in streets of Kandahar over a boy that both wanted to sodomize. The Taliban rescued the boy and hung the warlords.

One of the few economically significant sectors of Afghanistan is the trucking industry; Afghanistan is a route from Pakistan and India to Iran and the central Asian republics. When the warlords ran the country, they killed this industry. The failed to maintain the roads, but they "taxed" the truckers as exorbitant rates. It got so bad that truckers had to pay every few miles as they crossed through various fiefs.

Now the warlords are delaying or confiscating food aid, which is completely unacceptable. We need American troops on aid trucks.

A former a top official at the state department told me she met the warlord General Rashid Dostum, whom we are currently supporting. She describes him as a "pure thug."

The idea of turning the people of Afghanistan back over to the warlords is unacceptable. When we armed the warlords, signed them up as our proxies, and helped them conquer the country, we obliged ourselves to protect Afghans from them.

The Northern Alliance's claim that they can govern the country without anyone's help is ridiculous. They cannot even govern themselves. And they can never be the legitimate government of Afghanistan because there are essentially no Pashtuns in the coalition, and the Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic group in the country. If we leave the Northern Alliance in charge, the country will settle back into a state of bloody civil war.

That will be our fault. And it will be our fault, too, if terrorists set up shop again in Afghanistan because no one is in charge, or because the terrorists are paying off the venal and appealing to the fanatical.

The Northern Alliance has shown great resistance to the idea of a multinational peacekeeping force, and they have repeatedly, on one pretext or another, deferred the actual formation of such a force. And even if some such force is put into operation, it will likely be limited to Kabul, which is laughably insufficient maintain control of the country.

Know what? This is our war. We were attacked; we are responding. The Northern Alliance is in charge of much of Afghanistan now because we made it happen.

It's nice that we have assembled a "international coalition." However, "can you assemble a coalition?" is functionally synonymous with "do you have the biggest gun and the most money"? Asking the Moslem countries of the Middle East to assemble a peacekeeping force puts them in an untenable political position with regard to their own fundamentalist populations. But more to the point, it's asking them to do our dirty work.

We are the country who had reason to attack Afghanistan; we are the country that decided to attack Afghanistan; we are the country who did attack Afghanistan. It is our war and it will be our peace.

For that reason we need troops on the ground to prevent civil war, and eventually to supervise some sort of election process and to defend the new government. It will take tens of thousands of American soldiers. But if we are not prepared to send them, then we had no business starting down this road.

And we must send these soldiers now - *now* - not after the massacres begin anew. Then we'll just be claiming, ridiculously, that we didn't know this was going to happen.

And we had better be prepared to keep them there for some time, until our job is done.

We owe this to the people we claim to be "liberating." But perhaps more deeply, we owe this to ourselves. It is our moral as well as our practical duty.

______