For more than a year, President Hamid Karzai has pushed to reduce warlord control over Afghanistan’s hinterland. The United Nations has pushed. Non-governmental organizations – on the front lines of Afghan reconstruction – have pushed. All, thus far, to little avail. With Karzai’s threatened resignation last week, push may be coming to shove.

The threat, broadcast nationwide, was comprehensive in scope: “regarding incomes, regarding administration, regarding other affairs that are directly linked with the destiny of the Afghan nation and with peace, stability, security, respect, and honor.” If these don’t improve soon, Karzai warns, he’ll convene a new national assembly (Loya Jirga) and dissolve his own government. He’ll do something no power-hungry Afghan leader ever has. He’ll just plain quit.

The real issues: monies and armies. We take these in turn.

“Regarding incomes,” let’s be honest: No functional Afghan government has ever paid its own way. It’s not because these folks are improvident or poor in math. Rather it’s because Afghanistan evolved as a buffer state, inherently broke and dependent on support from the Powers it kept apart, rather than as a viable nation-state. Even Abdur Rahman, the “Iron Amir” who consolidated central authority (1880-1901), counted on annual subsidies paid by one empire (Victorian Britain) to block another (Czarist Russia). Cold War handouts kept Afghanistan going in mid-20th century. The Soviets built roads running north-south (suitable for tank traffic); we built an airport in Kandahar as an east-west prop-era hub (just before jets). After the Marxist take-over in 1978, bankrolling Afghanistan became an exclusively Soviet task. When the USSR itself collapsed in 199X, Afghanistan was left financially on its own. Result: government collapse, civil war, the Pakistani-backed Taliban, and the Arab-backed al-Qaida.

And now? Follow the money. Not for more than a century has the central government – currently Karzai’s US-allied government – been so unable to tap its own territorial revenues. Reason: a gaggle of warlords who pocket taxes and other credits rather than sending them to Karzai in Kabul. We’re talking big bucks, hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

The bulk of these funds comes – or should come – from import duties collected at border points. Karzai claims, not unrealistically, that customs receipts last year totaled more than half a billion dollars. That figure alone would sustain basic Afghan government expenses. Problem: Those border crossings and customs officials – with one notable exception – are far from Kabul. Less than 20 percent of the take found its way to central coffers in 2002.

The exception concerns what traditionally has been Afghanistan’s main route of entry and exit: with Pakistan via the Khyber Pass. Notoriously unruly, this area was deemed impossible to control for customs purposes. Instead, sensibly, the Afghans opted to locate the Khyber route’s checkpoint near Kabul … and to concede inevitable revenue losses between there and the border. Now, however, the other principal customs posts (another with Pakistan and one each with Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan) even less productive from Kabul’s standpoint. Duties are collected, in some cases more efficiently than in the pre-conflict past, but simply not transferred to the national treasury. Instead the loot stays with warlords who, until last week, Karzai felt compelled to appease by naming them “governors” or “special representatives.”

Other errant monies include proceeds from natural gas sales to Central Asia, local electricity production revenues, and municipal taxes that vary at warlord whim from city to city. In the words of Ashraf Ghani – former Johns Hopkins professor, now Finance Minister, and Karzai’s multi-purpose eminence gris – “We have to break the relationship where directors of finance think that they can be compelled by a [warlord] governor not to remit revenue to the centre.”

As with money, so with armed men. Karzai’s Afghan National Army, trumpeted by US policy makers as the key to future security, can field perhaps 4,000 hastily prepared soldiers…until someone makes them a better offer. Several warlord militias, regularly paid from sources described above, number more than 25,000 troops apiece. When you travel outside Kabul, as I did two months ago, you move at the pleasure of the local commander – or his bigger-league boss known as the “amir” – rather than under the protection of Hamid Karzai.

For three days in March I lived in the guesthouse of Mohammed Atta, for all practical purposes the amir of Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan’s leading northern city. (Atta himself makes no claim to this title. Like most ethnic Tajiks and members of the political movement Jamiat-i-Islami, he reserves the honorific amir for their dead leader Ahmad Shah Masood, who was assassinated [“martyred”] two days before 9-11.) The furnishings were a mix of barely functional and heavily ornate. The food was plentiful and tasty if the amir happened to be there. The company consisted of his “cabinet” who rose, as if spring-loaded, when he entered the room, sat when he sat, laughed when he laughed, ate when he ate, and otherwise were utterly inanimate in the great man’s presence.

Atta’s a big-leaguer, one of the half dozen or so top “provincial authorities” or “principal commanders” – Kabul euphemisms until the presidential ultimatum last week – in all Afghanistan. He’s physically big and looks even bigger with his dark beard, dark suits, and extravagant headgear (one day a white fox-fur cap, the next a sort of knitted turban reminiscent of Moammar Gadhafi). He professes loyalty to the central government, and a nominal picture of President Karzai sits on one corner of his desk. He agrees – “of course” – that central government resources should be enhanced. “Why not enhance them?”

I asked. “Why not send your revenues to the national treasury and your men to the national army?”

“I will,” he said, “as soon as the others do.”

Has that moment now come?

Will Karzai’s resignation threat now bring the warlords to heel? On the face of it, nothing seems less likely. They don’t fear him (no power). They don’t much respect him (not enough personal toughness, at least not until now). And, because Karzai’s a Pashtun from the South, Northerners like Atta and the Herat warlord Ismail Khan regard him as ethnically alien.

And yet when Karzai called the warlords to Kabul 10 days ago, they all came. When he stripped them of multiple titles – no one henceforth may simultaneously hold both civilian and military office – they acquiesced. When he demanded their pledge to remit customs duties, they pledged. What’s going on?

Whatever their private disdain for Karzai, the warlords need him in place. He represents a kind of peace – maintained in Kabul by an international force and in much of the countryside by Americans troops on call – at a time when even the warlords, at least rhetorically, are weary of war. (“I’m so tired,” one of Atta’s chieftains told me. “I’m nearly 40. I’ve been at war since I was 16. All I want now is the peace and quiet to run a small business.”) If Karzai quits, everything’s up for grabs all over again.

Don’t count on the warlords transforming themselves into ardent centralists. They’ve left Kabul and gone back to their power bases where they’ll make every effort to resume business (by no means “a small business”) as usual.

But Karzai’s ultimatum may have some effect, some increase of central control over provincial affairs. Threatened resignation represents an odd sort of shove, unprecedented in power-hungry Afghan political culture. Lacking conventional power, Karzai’s tried everything else. This new ploy may yield more results than all the past year’s pushing.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.