Afghans, far more than Americans, guard their words. Lacking national institutions, they keep their options open but – at least in public – their mouths closed. Not for them our current impulse toward blabby self-revelation. On the contrary, parents teach the virtues of verbal self-restraint. Or, when something needs saying, of not having it broadly overheard. Hence this folk expression: “The walls have mice, and the mice have ears.”

Ordinarily unenvious of rodents, I’d have happily switched places the week before last with a mouse in the walls of Herat.

This ancient city in western Afghanistan hosted a three-day encounter that could prove pivotal for the nation as a whole. Exactly what was said – and what was meant – between an amir (commander) and a wazir (minister) remains unknown … except to mice. The outcome, however, may point the way toward either integrated development or increased fragmentation.

First this background: Herat is, for the Kabul-based central government, an embarrassing exception to an embarrassing rule. The rule has to do with problems of governance nation-wide. Economic recovery lags, political development falters, and physical security – still the basic concern after a quarter century of chaos – suffers from terrorist attacks (South) and warlord skirmishes (North).

The exception is Herat, embarrassing for the authority of President Hamid Karzai because the city’s prosperity, stability and peace have little to do with him. These enviable qualities result instead from the work – like it or loathe it – of a short, 50-something man with a fluffy white beard, an impressive track record, and a keenly calibrated sense of political scale. Ismail Khan, the area’s amir, has turned Herat into a thriving de facto city-state.

Consider this before-and-after. I visited Taliban-controlled Herat five months before 9-11. The populace was terrified. Services were virtually non-existent. Taliban gunmen, most of them from Kandahar in the Pashtun South, lounged on street corners with an air of lazy menace. That languor was prone to sudden explosion: When I tried, on behalf of an American NGO, to negotiate the purchase of supplies with Herat’s Taliban governor, he threw an un-Afghan fit, threatened deportation, and stomped out of his own guesthouse.

Now, under Ismail Khan, much has changed: paved roads, mostly clean water, and (soon) city-wide, round-the-clock electricity. (Our NGO’s voltage, barely two years ago, was siphoned from the generator of a nearby carpet-cleaning establishment. Every day was a new adventure in outages and surges.) Western watchdog groups complain about treatment of women and press reporters, but schools – including new girls’ schools – are open, the airport no longer resembles a Dumpster, and Herat even has a pair of swimming pools. Eat your heart out, Kabul.

These accomplishments result from two amir attributes: name and money. Ismail Khan is supremely credible – “has a name” – in terms of staying the course and getting things done. In 1979, even before the Soviet invasion, he led a first urban revolt against Afghan Marxism. He led the area’s anti-Soviet resistance during the 1980s. He led Herat in the early ’90s but – unlike other regional commanders – left the city rather than have it destroyed by the Taliban in 1995. He returned secretly, was imprisoned, and miraculously escaped. When the Taliban fell in the fall of 2001, Heratis welcomed Ismail Khan once again as their amir. He’d stayed the course.

Then, using money from customs, he got things done. The nearby border post with Iran yields close to $1 million a day. Ismail Khan has appropriated nearly all of it for local use. He pays his 25,000 troops, meets various civilian payrolls, responds to petitioners, upgrades existing services, and inaugurates more all the time. He sends a pittance to Kabul and, well, pockets the rest. Given greatly improved conditions, few Heratis argue. Their amir takes care of the city-state. For most of Central Asian history, cities and their immediate hinterlands have been the operative units. That pattern, at least for now, is again paramount.

But what about Afghanistan the nation-state? President Karzai demands, with modern legality on his side, that the vast customs take (and other “national” revenues) be sent to government coffers in Kabul. Two weeks ago, he threatened to quit if warlords like Ismail Khan don’t comply. And the week before last he sent his top minister to confront the previously uncompliant top boss of Herat. It’s that encounter – between two razor-sharp brains, hyper-developed egos, and very different worldviews – that my mouse ears would like to have heard.

In terms of life experience, Minister of Finance Ashraf Ghani is as modern as Ismail Khan is medieval. Likewise in his mid-50s but with roots (like Karzai) in Afghanistan’s traditional Pashtun elite, he did a Ph.D. at Columbia, taught at Johns Hopkins, joined the World Bank, became a U.N. special adviser after 9-11, and now holds government purse strings … even if the purse is empty. Newsweek describes him as “surpassingly erudite and surpassingly fond of displaying it.”

I admire Ghani and ran into him briefly in Kabul a year ago. He looked ill, harried and determined. Some say that he’s come back, after 24 years in exile, to die in harness. Certainly no other Karzai cabinet minister has such a sophisticated CV. (Perhaps the closest, by way of illustration, is recently named Interior Minister Ali Jalali, who spent his decades in the Western wilderness jawboning over shortwave for Voice of America.) And so it was recently that Karzai chose Ashraf Ghani, his no. 1 man, to deliver a “Pay Up” message to the no. 1 regional deadbeat Ismail Khan.

What transpired within the Herat walls? If mice could speak, they’d probably report two entirely different conversational styles. Ismail Khan would have been genial, expansive and evasive. The conduct of business in that part of the world is famously time-consuming. How many cups of sugared green tea were pushed on the government minister? How often was he invited to pray by the religious- minded amir? As for how much was being collected each day in customs revenue, Ismail Khan most likely shrugged, stroked his beard sagely, and observed, as Afghans often do, “Only God knows.”

Ashraf Ghani, on the other hand, is known to be impatient with frivolous chit-chat. (Once the two of us and former U.S. ambassador Robert Neumann were asked to speak at a memorial service for dean of Afghanistan scholarship Louis Dupree. Two of the eulogies – Neumann’s and mine – evoked Dupree’s much-missed sense of fun. Ashraf stuck to earnest academia.) In Herat, with no beard to stroke or time to waste, the finance minister would have been his blunt self. And yet, with no enforcement capacity, Ghani could hardly threaten.

So what to make of last week’s amazing news? Ghani has come back to Kabul with no less than $20 million of customs revenue, money that otherwise would have stayed in Herat. Why this turnabout? Who said what to whom?

My guess: Not much needed to be said. For all his rusticity, Ismail Khan is utterly rational. It’s in his well-reasoned interests for “Afghanistan” to survive but only as a cripple. Any stronger, and he loses autonomy. Any weaker, and chaos ensues. Either way, the amir’s revenues decline. Better to give Ashraf Ghani some money, write it off as a business expense, and send the finance minister back to distant Kabul. As for next month – by which time another $20 million will have accumulated – wait and see.

What would tip the balance once and for all in Kabul’s favor? Only a centrally based enforcement capacity. The U.S.-sponsored Afghan National Army is years away from comprehensive effectiveness. And the United States has squelched hopes for extension of ISAF – the International Security and Assistance Force – beyond Kabul.

And so, amid much uncertainty, this tidbit of mice advice from the walls of Herat: Pray for the brave, new Afghanistan of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. But don’t discount – or entirely condemn – the time-proven, pre-modern structure of Ismail Khan. The amir gets things done … and knows exactly what he’s doing.

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.