Afghanistan Reconstruction was the stated topic of a recent international teleconference. While waiting for connections among Islamabad, Washington, New York, London, and a Spanish village, participants were treated to a muzak rendition of the mid-’50s ditty “Young at Heart.” It begins: “Fairy tales can come true/ It can happen to you.” Another couplet: “You can go extremes/ With impossible dreams.”

I winced: All such material from that Wonderbread, pre-Elvis era still sounds to my ears like drivel. (Music, on my hit parade, started with “Heartbreak Hotel.”) Would the next two hours, I wondered, consist pathetically of fairy tales and impossible dreams?

Actually not. Nor did the talk deal initially with the announced topic of Afghan Reconstruction. Instead – and correctly – it went at once to the pre-requisite for any sort constructive enterprise in Afghanistan: Security. And a debate ensued as to how that security could best be achieved: From the outside in or from the inside out?

But why, some teleconference newcomers asked, worry so much about security? They wanted to talk about education and irrigation and a dozen other sectors desperately in need of assistance. These well-intended folks, God willing, will have their day. Meanwhile a word from Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, the last truly successful leader of Afghanistan, who died in power and in peace 101 years ago: “The first and most important advice that I can give to my successors [currently and promisingly Hamid Karzai] and people … is to impress upon their mind the value of unity: Unity, and unity alone, can make it a great power.”

Rest easy, Pakistan: No one is talking “great power” status for the new Afghanistan. Instead everyone needs to talk unity. Hence the relevance of Abdur Rahman, known to history as the Iron Amir. (“Amir,” by the way, is a pre-nation state Muslim title of territorial leadership. There were no “kings” in Afghanistan until Amanullah in the 1920s … or in music until Elvis in the 1950s.) Abdur Rahman, a century ago, was the last Afghan ruler to walk the whole walk. All 14 rulers since then (excluding Karzai) have tried – and failed – to hold power until a peaceful death. Box score: 5 assassinated, 4 exiled, 2 executed by quasi-legitimate authority (including the last Soviet puppet, Najibullah, who tried to recast himself as a non-ideological Afghan patriot but who was castrated and then hanged from a lamp post, his mouth stuffed with Russian money, by the Taliban), 2 shoved aside unwillingly (but unfatally), and 1 disappeared (Taliban “amir” Mullah Omar).

Hamid Karzai sits on a hot seat. Back to the question: How to make it cooler for him? How to make Afghanistan secure for comprehensive reconstruction? Abdur Rahman – correctly – advises Unity. How to achieve it?

The teleconference was divided. One side said that the United States should, yes, supply Karzai in Kabul but should continue to work with – and thus, inevitably, to continue empowering – the warlords elsewhere. Only by getting those warlords on board, so this side believes, can Afghanistan come together. This side, not surprisingly, includes some veteran Cold Warriors – diplomats and intelligence agents (a.k.a. “dips ‘n’ spooks”) – who worked with warlords to help Afghans win their 1980s holy war against the Soviets. (That’s good.) Some of this same crowd, being “realists,” did that work by way of ISI, Pakistan’s rogue intelligence service, which later – with the knowledge and acquiescence of these same U.S. officials – enabled the Taliban to take hold. (“Realists,” take note: That’s not so good.) These vets know the warlords and, supposedly, can work with them. Their assumption: That there’ve always been warlords and always will be … so let’s “work with them.”

The other side (mine) recognized the contribution of our Cold War vets – Kabul is not, after all, a Soviet-bloc capital today – but begged to differ on how to achieve unity and security in the 21st century Afghanistan. Our Abdur Rahman-style advice: Empower the center (Karzai & Co.), starve the warlords, and let Afghan people choose. They’ll choose the comparatively peaceful, comparatively non-predatory center.

Specifically, I challenge the other side’s basic assumption of “always have been, always will be” warlords. True, warlords were powerful in the 1980s. They were powerful in the 1880s. The great (if never quite consolidated) achievement of Abdur Rahman and his successors in the intervening century – until 1978 – was that, bit by bit, they concentrated power in the center and then projected it outward over the hinterland. Sometimes their projections were brutal, but no more so that what locals already suffered from warlords.

Let’s invoke some jingly-jangly Victorian poetry to describe the situation which confronted Abdur Rahman when he first came to power in 1880. Here’s an excerpt from “The Amir’s Soliloquy” by Sir Alfred Lyall: “And far from the Sulieman heights comes the sound of the stirring tribes/Afridi, Hazara, Ghilzai, they clamour for plunder and bribes/And Herat is held but by a thread; and the Uzbek has raised Badakhshan/And the chief may sleep sound, in his grave, who would rule the unruly Afghan.”

That was 1880s tribal warlord-ism. By the time of his peaceful death in 1901, the Iron Amir had broken its back. Its body twitched frequently over the subsequent seven decades, but (except briefly in 1929) never recovered … until the Marxist coup of 1978 discredited central authority and provoked warlord-ism anew.

And how did Abdur Amir break the warlords’ back? Recognizing the feckless record of his immediate predecessors, he made a deal with the devil – the British – whereby Queen Victoria’s government would provide him with a substantial annual subsidy in return for control over Afghan foreign policy. That cash purchased weapons and loyalty sufficient to start the true consolidation of Afghanistan. Other foreigners – i.e., the Russians – were excluded as part of the British deal. Warlords were crushed. Abdur Rahman began growing Afghanistan from the inside out.

Here’s what must now happen again. Sir Alfred’s poem explains an ancient but now impermissible dynamic. “They clamour for plunder and bribes” is exactly how warlords have always operated: the old “spoils system” familiar from U.S. machine politics. Warlords want spoils (currently the imminent influx of international aid) to distribute to their followers, thus to ensure their followers’ support, and thus to remain warlords. No spoils (outside aid), no followers, and ultimately no warlords.

It is true that, in the short run, the suddenly unsupported warlords may – probably will – raise overt and covert hell. This quarrelsome cast includes Dostum in Mazar, Ismail Khan in Herat, Gul Agha Shirzai in Kandahar – all of whom, by the way, profess loyalty to Karzai’s central government. It may be true that some gradualism in the weaning process is advisable.

But not much. Cut the warlords off. Accept the fact that they’ll yowl and even, perhaps, declare some sort of de facto independence. Let them do so. Cut them off.. And make sure, as Abdur Rahman did, that no other outsiders (Iran, Pakistan, Russian-backed Uzbekistan) intervene.

Create exemplary zones of security and human welfare, beginning with Kabul. Extend the multi-national peace keeping force, as Karzai has requested, outward from the center. Support the development of national institutions rather than the persistence of autonomous individuals.

Then let Afghans – those most pragmatic of people – notice the difference between center-sponsored well-being and localized, anarchic warlord-ism. Let them decide which to embrace. They’ll make that choice, to paraphrase New Yorkers, “in a Kabul minute.”

Sufi mystics (see “Another Islam,” BDN, Feb. 6) tell us to “work from the inside out.” Good advice for the human psyche. Good counsel for those who wish to help Afghanistan…and to advance American interests. Intended consequence: Good, secure conditions for the many dedicated humanitarian organizations who are now ready and eager to begin reconstruction. They’re positively itching to do so. As Elvis the King sang – second line of “All Shook Up” – they’re “itching like a man on a fuzzy tree.”

One of the great similes in American literature! I shall try it on our dips ‘n’ spooks in the next teleconference. Meanwhile, let’s work from the inside out.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.