What, in Afghan-istan, are “warlords”? More precisely, how and when do warlords arise? This term was much bandied about in accounts of Kabul’s just finished Loya Jirga. With the press mostly excluded from actual proceedings, we’re unsure which delegates used which nouns in which language (Persian or Pashto). Confusion is compounded as ex-pat journalists craft their own word-bytes. Time for an attempt at clarity.

Warlords, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, arise in time of war, weak central government, and (nowadays) weapons supplied by outsiders. In Afghanistan, war began with a Marxist coup in April 1978 and intensified after the Soviet invasion of December 1979. Before those momentously awful events – Bush administration, please take note – there had been no warlords in Afghanistan for nearly half a century … and none, ever, on the scale that America helped create. Here’s how it happened:

Most hot parts of the Cold War consisted of surrogate encounters. Vietnam and Afghanistan were different in that each entailed direct superpower participation: troops of one side deployed massively – and vulnerably – on the ground. Afghanistan gave Reagan’s America a chance to get even for Vietnam. We poured billions into the effort, employed Pakistan as our trusted (but not so trustworthy) intermediary, and created an intentionally non-unified political structure for the Afghan Resistance. Each of its seven recognized “parties” had a “leader,” based in Pakistan, responsible for conveying weapons to his “commanders” inside Afghanistan.

Party politics lacked legal precedent in Afghanistan, and none of the seven leaders had formal political experience. Now most of those still alive have faded from power. Not so their commanders. Afghans may be neophyte nation-state politicians, but they understand all about guns.

Anti-Soviet weapons, once distributed, proved impossible to control. Some were used in the holy war; many were stockpiled for what the commanders realized would be a post-victory civil war. Thus armed and without political constraints and typically based in their own ethnic homelands, 1980s commanders became 1990s warlords. Their stockpiles continued to be enriched by this or that outside power. They routinely concluded alliances among themselves and, with equal ease, betrayed their allies.

Bushites seem to believe that it’s always been this way and, accordingly, that it can stay this way a while longer. And, in a sense, the pattern of these past two dozen years does recall local dynamics a century earlier: ambitious individuals, few central controls, endless petty squabbles. It was not until Abdur Rahman, the “Iron Amir” who ruled from 1880-1901, that a real semblance of order was imposed from Kabul.

But from then onwards – with a brief disruption in the late 1920s – there was gradual, steady progress toward centralized stability. By the 1970s, when I lived in a remote northern village, local leaders called khans still squabbled among themselves, but no such figure dared to challenge Kabul authority. Indeed much of rivalry dealt with who had best access to government largess. As for regional leaders, similar in geographical scope to today’s warlords, none existed.

If local leaders were pipsqueaks in the 1970s, by today’s standards their weaponry consisted of pea- shooters. Men had rifles, some of them a century old, but these were kept for household defense or small game hunting. The NRA would have loved that part. And yet the rural Afghanistan I knew had nothing like a Montana Militia.

Far from being historically typical, today’s warlords are the creation of recent war. Here’s why their ongoing presence offends so many Afghans, beginning with newly elected President Hamid Karzai who announced, “We want warlordism to end in Afghanistan by any means and we will use every method to achieve that. That is the first demand of the [Afghan] people.”

And yet what happened in the Loya Jirga itself? Listen to one Safar Muhammad, a delegate from Kandahar: “You said no one would be a delegate who was a murderer or criminal [in accordance with stated jirga regulations]. There are a lot of military people in this meeting. Is this a loya jirga or a military council?”

Klaus-Peter Klaiber, the European Union’s special representative for Afghanistan, concurred but also understood: “I was amazed to see in the first and second row yesterday practically all those who are called warlords sitting together. It tells me only one thing: that the interim administration has decided to try and integrate the former warlords in the policy-making here in Kabul. If they succeed, that would be a great achievement.”

Such appears to be Karzai’s strategy: to end warlordism by co-opting warlords. How is this approach supposed to work on the ground? Karzai hopes that by giving key Kabul posts to top warlords he can keep them occupied in town … and thus out of mischief at home. Hence his provision for five vice-presidents, each meant for a powerful regional warlord. Three of the invitees accepted. Demurring were Ismail Khan of Herat (Iranian border area) and Abdul Rashid Dostum, quintessential warlord and national champion side-switcher, who prefers to reside with his much-feared Uzbek militia up North.

Why their reluctance to be lured by bright lights and fine titles? Because in the current absence of central control, they can do much better as warlords down on the farm. Dostum, for instance, now collects income from three sources in his area: electricity distribution, natural gas production and customs revenue from the Uzbekistan border crossing. The latter enterprise alone is said to gross $100,000 a day.

Such pickings help explain the opinion of Halayat Amin Arsala, the outgoing finance minister: “It was not a good idea to bring commanders into these positions. The idea that they will come to Kabul and lose power outside is not the case.”

So who wants and needs the warlords? Only, it seems, the United States … to help exterminate Al-Qaida. That brand of pesticide may take a while. We appear stalemated down South along the Pakistan border. Attacks on ex-pat aid workers up North are on the rise. Meanwhile these questions: When have warlords ever wanted peace? Now on the U.S. payroll, are they not happier with ongoing, lucrative, low-intensity conflict? Is it in their interest for Operation Enduring Freedom to succeed … or simply to endure?

Time will tell. When it does, let’s all remember whence this Hug-a-Warlord strategy came. It was urged on Karzai by the U.S. … and virtually forced on him by U.S. refusal to take a lead role in the International Security and Assistance Force. Only ISAF, representing nearly 20 nations but not ours, keeps the peace in Kabul. A modest enlargement and – just as important – an American imprimatur could quite likely extend that peace to key provincial centers, such as Dostum’s Mazar-i-Sharif. He’d doubtless protest the subsequent transfer of profits to national accounts where they belong. If the United States were with ISAF, he’d protest in vain.

Such participation, for the Bushites, would smack of Clintonian multi-lateralism. And of “nation-building,” another no-no for those who cite precipitous failure in Somalia rather than patient success in Bosnia. Finally and absurdly, our rugged, go-it-alone administration is troubled by the fear that Afghanistan may become a kind of security welfare queen, eternally dependent on others to provide peacekeepers.

Are you kidding? Consider Afghan refugees in the United States. While some other newly arrived nationalities tend to scrounge, you’ll find few Afghans on American welfare. And in their own country, Afghans are the ultimate do-it-yourselfers. When it comes to personal responsibility and resourcefulness – cardinal virtues of modern Republicanism – they make Dubbya, Cheney and Rummy look like wimpy panhandlers. What Afghans do need now – temporarily and after a quarter century of chaos powered by superpowers – is a few more ex-pat peacekeepers.

Bottom line: We may agree or disagree with our government’s current warlord embrace, but let’s not fall for the rationalization that Afghanistan has always had warlords. They didn’t exist before the 1980s war. We helped put them there. And, as of now, we help keep them there.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.