Even if you don’t have a map of Afghanistan on the refrigerator door, you can’t help but follow events in that small country for a long time as it remains a key site in America’s campaign against international terrorism. And the excellent columns by Whitney Azoy will continue to offer facts and history and insights not available anywhere else.

Dr. Azoy began his series of substantial commentaries for the NEWS soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, relying on his 30-year background in the affairs of Afghanistan and the Muslim world and his close following of events since then.

He started off with a bang. He chose Afghanistan’s national sport, buzkashi, as his continuing analogy for the American-led drive against the terrorist network. He had studied it as an anthropologist in the ’70s and had written a book about it. Buzkashi (literally “goat-grabbing”), he says, may be the world’s wildest game, a sort of rugby on horseback. Hundreds of riders compete, each trying to seize the carcass of a goat or calf off the ground and carry it off as all the others struggle to take it away for themselves.

The sponsor, who organizes the game, invites other rich horse owners, and provides expensive hospitality for several days of equestrian mayhem, can wind up a prestigious hero or a discredited wimp, depending on how things turn out.

Same with President George W. Bush, sponsor of the military equivalent of a buzkashi tournament. As Dr. Azoy rated the campaign in a recent column, President Bush has held the guest list together and supervised a successful scramble for the goat carcass (control of the country). He handed out prizes, such as money and winter clothing for the Pashtuns who searched (unsuccessfully) the caves of Tora Bora for Osama bin Laden, selection as interim head of state for Hamid Karzai, and serious favors for leading members of the coalition. But Mr. bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar are still missing, and the new Afghan government is still taking shape, so the game is still far from over.

Striking nuggets of wisdom stand out in the 33 columns (including one on today’s op-ed page) Dr. Azoy has written thus far. He saw early on that Pakistan’s changing leadership in its ISI was a sign of that government’s sincerity in fighting terrorism. He called attention to the United States’ shameful distancing from the courageous Abdul Haq and by mid-December had stated flatly in a one-word headline (“Gone”) what others were only beginning to suspect about Mr. bin Laden. Some other examples:

. Remember how most pundits and some officials sneered at the northern alliance as evil, bumbling ne’er-do-wells who couldn’t possibly organize an offensive-and how they later blew away the Taliban forces at Mazar-e-Sharif and went on to conquer northern Afghanistan? But not Dr. Azoy.

He knew their strength.

. Remember how most authorities blamed the Northern Alliance for the destruction of Kabul in 1992? Not Dr. Azoy. He explained that the Northern Alliance did not yet exist and that the destruction was by the Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as an agent of Pakistan.

. Remember how Pakistan denied reports that Pakistani planes were sneaking beleaguered Taliban troops safely out of the country. Dr. Azoy told why the reports were true and the denials false.

. Finally, remember all the hand wringing about wholesale killing of civilians during the U.S. bombing? Dr. Azoy coolly totaled up the civilian death toll at fewer than 15,000 and probably half that figure. He contrasted that with the millions who had died in a quarter century of civil war, which now may have been ended by “three fairly bloody months” of allied intervention.

Dr. Azoy (A Spanish Basque name pronounced A-thoy), writes from his home in a 15th-century castle in Barcelona. After a year as a U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, he spent more years there as a Fulbright scholar, refugee relief worker and National Geographic film maker and has made frequent visits to Afghanistan ever since. When the terrorists struck in September, he decided to write a running commentary. The New York Times didn’t return his query. A friend at Maine Public Radio steered him

to the NEWS.

He has a big advantage over most American specialists on Afghanistan affairs – diplomats, humanitarian workers and some press reporters. Most of them were based in Pakistan in he 1980s and 1990s, especially in the border town of Peshawar. Whether they recognized it or not, they acquired a bias in favor of the Pakistan government and the Pushtun ethnic group and against the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, who later composed the northern alliance. As he puts it, “Americans wanted to believe – and did believe – that Pushtun Hekmatyar and Taliban were good, that Northern Alliance was not good.”

Let’s hope that Dr. Azoy keeps writing commentaries for a long time – we will gratefully keep running them. And it might be a good idea to stick that map of Afghanistan to the icebox door if you haven’t done so already.