Three locales of enduring difficulty for Operation Enduring Freedom: first Tora-Bora, then Shah-i-Kot, and now the town of Khost where American forces were attacked in a dark-of-the-moon raid March 19. All three are located in a southeastern border area that Afghans call “Yaghistan,” the Land of the Unruly.

For Afghans to call one specific region “unruly” says a lot. Afghans generally may be the world’s least “ruly” people in terms of obedience to centralized authority. How does it feel to be Hamid Karzai, the able and well-intentioned head of Afghanistan’s Interim Authority? Listen to “The Amir’s Soliloquy” by Victorian poet Sir Alfred Lyall: “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.” Karzai, for now anyway, is that “chief.”

This poem was written from the perspective of Amir Abdur Rahman whose extraordinary 21-year rule ended with his natural death, while still in power, in 1901. Extraordinary in that no Afghan ruler since then has died peacefully in the palace. Half a dozen “sleep sound” after going violently to their graves.

Some bibliographical background: Abdur Rahman, the “Iron Amir,” discussed Yaghistan is his memoirs. Wisely and realistically, he let it go its own way. My mentor Louis Dupree began his magnum opus with the word “Yaghistan.” And Dupree’s mentor, Harvard anthropologist Carlton Coon, identified “Yaghistan” as a generic concept across much of the Muslim world: territory beyond the control of centralized government. Other glosses include “Land of the Free,” “Land of Rebels,” and (my personal favorite from among Coon’s options) “Land of Insolence.”

Yaghistan exists wherever government can be mocked with impunity. The key test is taxes: Can the government collect them or not? Tunisia (my venue this week) used to include a tax-defiant Yaghistan before French “pacification;” Yemen (last month) still does. Tea Party participants in 1773 turned Boston, briefly, into an American Yaghistan. The Montana Militia is still at it.

(Romantic anarchism lingers in America’s psyche. Our distrust of government and disdain for taxes – by far the lowest in the “developed” world – is mirrored in folk memories of life “West of the Pecos.” We find it even in supposedly dispassionate anthropology. Carlton Coon clearly relished inaccessible landscapes and intractable people: “Geography permits independence, technology defeats it. This is why the idea of One World, into which technical science is forcing us, leaves some people uneasy. If the world is to be one, what place will there be in it for rebels, and without rebels, who will keep the rest of the world on its toes?”

Afghanistan is nowhere more rugged and rebellious than in two southeastern provinces of Paktia and Paktika. The “Pak” here has nothing to do with bordering Pakistan. Rather it stems from the same root as Pushtun or, as pronounced in these provinces, Pukhtun. Either way, these people constitute Afghanistan’s most famously fractious ethnic group. The area used to be a single province (Paktia) but was divided in an attempt, notably unsuccessful, to enhance centralized administration. (Professor Jon Anderson of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., did his fieldwork among Pushtuns and offers a joke-paraphrase of Rene Descartes’ famous dictum. The Pushtun version: “I have enemies, therefore I am.”)

Here – and across the arbitrary, unenforceable Pakistan border – is the heart of autonomous Pushtun society and, thus, Yaghistan. The March 19 fire fight calls to mind another night in Khost exactly 30 years ago. As a new and free-spirited diplomat (not yet fully aware of that temperament/occupation mismatch) I’d wangled an official excursion into the heart of Paktia. Two colleagues and I would show the flag in an area which, after four decades of Zahir Shah continuity, seemed on the brink of domestication and full incorporation into peaceful, tax-paying Afghanistan.

Maybe, but only in daylight. Our driver got lost in a wasteland of dusty tracks and then, as night fell, became noticeably nervous. “Just a bit further,” he kept saying. We told jokes and sang songs and tried not to think too graphically of the pre-Zahir Shah past. A lifetime-frustrated country music singer, I warbled a tune first made popular by Hank Thompson and the Brazos Valley Boys. It was written by another Texan (William Warren) about his runaway wife who, as the last line goes, “went back to the Wild Side of Life.” The dark landscape around us felt like Texas a century earlier. Sagebrush and cactus jumped at the car. Several times armed figures motioned for us to stop. Terrified and low on gas, the driver kept going. For those few hours we were in Yaghistan, a.k.a. the Wild Side of Life.

At the (sort of) hotel in Khost, I felt relieved to see Zahir Shah’s standard portrait on the wall. Someone asked how often the king visited. “He’s never been here,” said the receptionist. Why not? “Because he’d be killed.” Killed? Are you kidding? Would you kill him? “Not me. I was sent here from Ghazni [back on the paved road, secure in 1972, less so in 2002] and want to return ASAP. It’s the local people who’d kill him. They’re Pushtuns, like Zahir Shah and me, but they don’t want a government telling them what to do and making them pay taxes.”

(Overstatement? Maybe … but maybe only in daylight. Yaghistan shrinks at dawn, and grows again at nightfall. It also grows, by definition, when central government is weak. Zahir Shah’s return to Kabul – never mind Khost – was initially scheduled for mid-March. It’s been postponed at least three times and now probably won’t happen, at the earliest, until April. I called “the palace” in Rome last Thursday to wish the royals a happy Persian new year. They were not happy. The ex-king’s life has been threatened and, until further notice, even Kabul is Yaghistan for him.)

Pushtuns juxtapose qalang and nang. Qalang translates as “tribute” or “taxes.” By extension, it speaks to the feudal structure characteristic of the Pushtun flatlands around, say, Kandahar. Settled hierarchies imply at least a semblance of central authority. Nang, on the other hand, means “honor” and relates to the more egalitarian society in alpine regions such as Khost. Here disputes are kept in check not by government or even local big men but by self-help and the fear of revenge. Men of “honor,” furthermore, don’t pay taxes. No one tells them what to do.

Here’s why defeat in Kandahar didn’t finish the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The loss of their spiritual home (in qalang) didn’t mean the lack of safe haven (in nang). Most of the hard core headed southeast to Yaghistan.

Our Victorian poet could have predicted as much. Sir Alfred specifies this region in the same 1880s poem: “And far from the Suleiman heights comes the sound of the stirring tribes/Afridi, Hazara, Ghilzai, they clamour for plunder and bribes.” Exactly those “heights” – the Suleiman Mountains – contain or command all of America’s most recent military operations: Anaconda, Harpoon, etc. How best to anticipate the enemy? Memo to CENTCOM General Tommy Franks: To all the new spy gizmos, add some British imperial poetry.

As for recently “concluded” Operation Harpoon, grandiose names and claims make us look like Ahab searching for Moby Dick. Each time that we get close, the bad guys get away. Our task is made still more difficult by the 1893 British-drawn border with Pakistan, notoriously porous, and Pakistan’s autonomous “Tribal Areas” on the other side. Yaghistan, in effect, straddles the line. Generals Franks (U.S.) and Musharraf (Pakistan) assure us that this border is now under control and that the baddies have nowhere to go. Let’s hope.

Meanwhile at least we’ve got some idea where they’ve gone. Ask Sir Alfred Lyall. Ask Hank Thompson and the Brazos Valley Boys. Our enemies have gone to Yaghistan – “back to the Wild Side of Life.”

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