We have just had the sixth anniversary of the start of US air strikes against al Qaeda and its Taleban hosts in Afghanistan.

It was a very clever politico-military operation, and by December of 2001 all of Afghanistan was under the control of the United States and its local allies for a total cost of 12 American dead. Then, for no good reason, it fell apart, and now the war is lost.

In the days after 9/11 George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency's chief, came up with a bold proposal. Why invade Afghanistan with a large American army, deploying massive firepower that kills large numbers of locals and alienates the population?

Why give Osama bin Laden the long anti-American guerrilla war that he was undoubtedly counting on? Instead, Tenet proposed sending teams of CIA agents and special forces into the country to win the support of the various militias, loosely linked as the Northern Alliance, that still dominated the northern regions of the country.

Although the Taleban had controlled most of the country since 1996, they had never decisively won the civil war.

So why not intervene in that war, shower their opponents with money and weapons, and tip the balance against the Taleban?

It worked like a charm. Pakistan, whose intelligence services had originally created the Taleban, withdrew its support, the regime fled Kabul, and most of the Taleban troops melted back into their villages. The Government of a country of 27 million people was taken down for a death toll that probably did not exceed 4000 on all sides.

By mid-December 2001 the United States effectively controlled Afghanistan through its local allies, all drawn from the northern minority groups: Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara. There had not been the mass killing of innocent bystanders that would inevitably have accompanied a conventional US invasion, so there was no guerrilla war.

The traditional ruling group and biggest minority, the Pashtun, who had put their money on the Taleban and lost, would have to be brought back into the game somehow, but the usual Afghan deal-making would suffice.

Washington had the wit to make Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from a clan that never had much to do with the Taleban, its puppet President in Kabul, but it didn't carry through. It froze out all the prominent Pashtun political and religious leaders who had had dealings with the Taleban - which was, of course, almost all of them.

The Taleban had been the Government of Afghanistan for almost five years, and were at the time the political vehicle of the Pashtun ascendancy in the country. If you were a traditional Pashtun leader, how could you not have had dealings with them?