Herat, the main burg in what’s called western “Afghanistan,” has a new look but an old significance.

Urban renewal is everywhere, beginning with an airport now almost cleared of wrecked planes. I counted only two as we touched down.

Amazing. Most Afghan airports still feature aeronautic boneyards, post-conflict testimony to a quarter century of chaos. Back in Kabul, capital city of this wishfully conceived nation-state, one vast field next to the landing strip has become a mass grave for mangled Ilyushins and Boeings.

And Herat’s terminal building itself is swept and sprucely painted. Security personnel are unobtrusive because unnecessary. Again how different from Kabul where uniforms are ubiquitous because so much is up for grabs – especially for the mobile elite. The Afghan minister of civil aviation was gunned down at his own main airport in 2002. Kabul’s only “luxury” hotel was bombed this past weekend.

The comparisons continued, badly for Kabul, as we drove last week into downtown Herat. With each widened boulevard and newly landscaped park, I became more historically mystified. Here was an almost modern city in terms of organization and services. And yet its political significance is pre-modern and, indeed, contrary to the flow of world events since the mid-17th century. Herat is once again a city-state.

Remember all those city-states in ninth-grade ancient history? The Mesopotamians had them, then the Greeks. The Maya had them for a while in Central America until, as elsewhere, they were consolidated into empires. And, for nearly two thousand years, empire became a dominant mode of political entity.

But then, in 1648, Europe put its stamp of approval on an essentially new form. The Treaty of Westphalia, one of history’s seminal agreements, effectively dissolved the Holy Roman Empire. In place of that ramshackled, cumbersome hodge-podge was born, for better and worse, a gaggle of politically independent units (states) that represented more localized identities and populations (nations). Hence the nation-state, of which there are now nearly 200.

Nation-states have fixed and recognized (if often porous) borders. They have capital cities, heads of state, and seats at the United Nations. They print their own stamps, passports and currencies. They boast their own flags, anthems and armies. Some, like Afghanistan, have a national airline, in this case called Ariana (after the original Aryans, who gave us Indo-European language, but locally known as “Scariana” because of scared-speechless passengers).

Nation-states are now regarded as standard. They provide, so we moderns tell ourselves, structure and stability. All too often, however, their associated sentiment – nationalism – gives us too much of a good thing. An excess led to two world wars in the 20th century. And now, embellished by Bush neo-cons, nationalism is leading America toward madness in the 21st.

But the nation-state is still new to Central Asia. For millennia, its main political unit has been the powerful city surrounded by as much hinterland as its ruler could control.

In medieval Muslim times these city-states were run by “governors” in the vague name of a far-off caliph. Sometimes they were loosely absorbed within empires – Persian, Moghul, British, Czarist Russian, Soviet Russian – but their own urban identities and loyalties remained paramount. The enduring geographical names of this region all belong to cities: Samarkand, Kandahar, Bokhara, Lahore, Herat.

With the death of empire came the dubious birth of Stans – first Afghanistan, then Pakistan in 1947, then five new Stans when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Stan means homeland or, when recognized internationally, nation-state. Thus, in modern poly-sci parlance, “Afghanistan” signifies nation-state of the Afghans: less grandiose than an empire but more extensive than a city-state.

Give it borders (which make no ethnic or topographical sense). Give it a flag (the fifth, by my count, since 1973). Give it an anthem (whose words no one knows and whose language is in dispute). Give it a new Afghan National Army (when the same U.S. tax dollars could far more usefully be spent on building police capacity). Give it a president (a nice guy with good intentions but little authority outside Kabul and no real power beyond our B-52s). Then settle back in the currently fashionable assumption that you’ve got a nation-state.

Trouble is, not everyone shares the current fashion.. Enter Herat and its a roly-poly, workaholic leader Ismail Khan. Enter – or rather re-enter – the autonomous city-state.

“He works,” we were told everywhere in Herat, “until two or three every morning.” Then, people say, Ismail Khan prays, sleeps briefly, gets up shortly after sunrise, and goes back to work. “Look at his works,” they say. “Look, for instance, at the streets.”

The streets differ from those of Kabul in three ways: clean, tree-lined, and free of motorized mayhem. The first and third speak to Ismail Khan’s administrative capacity here and now. The trees tell an older story.

They were planted in the time of ex-King Mohammed Zahir whose four decades of comparative peace (1933-1973) resulted from a policy of gradualism. Rather than force the issue of political centralization, the king bided his time, sowing the seeds of national unity rather than insisting on a pre-mature harvest. Some called the king lazy and unprogressive. Maybe so, but trees began lining roadways all over Afghanistan.

Not anymore. Most Afghan towns and cities have lost their leafiness since 1978, the foliage destroyed by savage ambition. Herat, on the other hand, remains wonderfully shady. Its long rows of pines still exist because of Ismail Khan. Rather than have his city bombarded by a superior Taliban force in 1995, he conceded temporary defeat and withdrew. Yes, Herat fell to the religious barbarians, but its trees, mosques, markets, houses, historical monuments – and, most of all, people – survived.

By then, he’d already emerged as Herat’s authentic, up-from-the-ranks hero. It was army Capt. Ismail Khan who, in March 1979, led Afghanistan’s first military uprising against Communist rule. And Ismail Khan who organized the region’s ensuing decade of anti-Soviet resistance. And Ismail Khan who resisted the efforts of other outsiders, notably Pakistan, to control post-Soviet Herat. When Pakistan betrayed him to the Taliban in May 1997, he managed a spectacular escape. When the Taliban fell in 2001, Ismail Khan again took charge – with enormous popular acclaim and support.

That’s called legitimacy. Contrast it with the ascension of Hamid Karzai, who – no criticism intended – spent most of the bad years in Pakistan and the US. Karzai became America’s choice to lead “Afghanistan.” Ismail Khan is his people’s choice to lead Herat – which requires no quotes because for centuries it too has been legitimate. A legitimate city-state.

Even legitimate regimes need money. Ismail Khan gets most of his from customs revenues on imports from Turkmenistan and, especially, Iran. The take is said to total a million dollars a day. According to modern nation-state principles, that income belongs to Afghanistan and should go to Kabul. As things stand, Ismail Khan keeps most of it closer to home. Much, say his many international detractors, goes into his own pockets. Outsiders also gripe at his conservative position on gender and intolerance of media criticism.

Here’s why a U.N. Security Council mission came to town while we were there. And, likewise, why Ismail Khan chose that moment to be in Europe. He knows that the modern deck is stacked against him – that nation-states, not city-states, are the name of the modern game. He’ll evade and wriggle and squirm as long as he can.

Meanwhile his officials come to work, keep appointments, and issue concise directive. Electricity and water flow the clock. People can and do walk the streets at all hours. Opium poppy cultivation, rampant elsewhere, is firmly suppressed. Herat’s hospital has a state-of-the-art CAT scan. All within an old-fashioned and supposedly outmoded city-state.

History has gone into reverse in Herat. We brave, new nation-staters don’t like it. Even so – and at least for now – Ismail Khan runs the best government in “Afghanistan.”

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