Remember Afghanistan?

It was in the news again last week, briefly, when former NFL football player Pat Tillman was killed in a firefight there. But Tillmans death, however heroically portrayed, told us nothing about what's actually been happening in that troubled land.

No news has been bad news.

April was perhaps the worst month for the US forces and the fledgling Karzai government since the US and its rapacious Northern Alliance allies overran Kabul and took control of the country two and a half years ago. At that point, Osama bin Laden was the most wanted man in the world, "dead or alive," as Dubya told us. And the noble cause of replacing the religious dictatorship of the Taliban with peace and a flowering new democracy was the grand cause of the day. This time, George Bush told us, we wouldn't just cut and run. We'd stay the course in Afghanistan. We wouldn't forget.

Well, we did forget, of course--almost immediately. Bush neglected to put any money for Afghanistan aid in his next year's budget request, and the pledge that the brutal warlords who made up the Northern Alliance wouldn't have a seat at the table of the new government was quickly forgotten. At the loya jurga in 2002 that was supposed to be an open council of Afghan elders, but was instead a carefully orchestrated Washington show, CIA man Hamid Karzai was coronated as president, and all the evil old warlords were honored front row guests.

Fast forward two years, and the warlords, not Karzai, are now running most of the country. Their power is so great that militias of the most notorious and powerful, General Dostum, ran off the governors in two separate provincial capitals earlier this month. Dostum, the man whose forces were accused of leaving Taliban prisoners to suffocate in crates in 2001, and of mass rape and murder in the early '90s, controls Mazir-e-Sharif and much of the north of the country. Another warlord controls much of the west. In the east and south, along the mountainous border with Pakistan where Tillman was killed, the Taliban is resurgent and controls many of the rural villages and towns. Pro-Taliban violence has in recent months spread from those outlying areas to Kandihar and other cities. Really, the only part of Afghanistan Karzai's government controls is the capital city of Kabul, and that only during daylight hours.

How are the warlords maintaining control? With money, and the money is coming from drugs. We also learned this month that Afghanistan supplied a staggering 80 percent of the world's poppy harvest last year, after the trade had been virtually eradicated under the Taliban. Given that the US has a long history of dealing with thugs, and the CIA of dealing with drug money, it's hard to believe we don't have some of our own sticky hands in this mess as well. But that's no help to the soldiers still deployed in our forgotten war.

Why, exactly, are we fighting in Afghanistan? Why, to hunt down Al-Qaeda and Taliban "remnants," though it's not clear why it should have been an offense to be part of the Taliban, Afghanistan's governing party three years ago and an entity that, while brutal, was never at war with America. In any event, these are no longer "remnants"--after two years in which war-weary Afghans have seen no real improvement in their lives (sound familiar?), the Taliban is stronger today than it was in 2002. When the Taliban retreated to the mountains in the winter of 2001-02, it was with the pledge that they were going to regroup and reemerge, not go away, and that while invaders come and go, they would stay.

So far, they've held to their word. US soldiers, spread thin by the much larger war being fought in Iraq, are either trapped on their bases trying to avoid the cross-fire between competing militias, or engaged in fruitless searches of the rural mountains, walking into ambushes--like the one that killed Tillman--from an enemy that knows the terrain far better.

Then there's Pakistan, our valued military partner in the hunt for Al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives, and as dubious a partner as one could hope for. In embracing Pakistan after 9-11, the Bush Administration dropped economic sanctions put in place to penalize Pakistan for its nuclear program, and earlier this year it emerged that scientists under the Musharraf dictatorship have also been the primary source of the nuclear materials obtained by Libya, Iran, and North Korea. In other words, while we spent billions invading on the pretext of hunting down phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the real menace on this score is an ally we're arming and funneling countless additional millions to on our second war front.

Last month, Pakistan gave us yet another reminder of who we're dealing with: an operation in the tribal hinterlands along the Afghan border that was breathlessly announced as having cornered a "high value target" --presumably one of bin Laden's countless #2 men. But the fugitive escaped, and it later emerged that the "Al-Qaeda operatives" and "foreign terrorists" captured were largely former mujahadeen from the Soviet wars in the early '80s who'd come, intermarried with local tribeswomen, and stayed. Most of the dead weren't foreign fighters at all--they were tribespeople cynically killed by Musharraf's army so as to have bodies to show off. That's our boys.

How long will we be in Afghanistan? Indefinitely, it appears, because the "remnants" we're seeking are people who live there, and as the security situation degenerates and the lot of most Afghans--including most women--remains relentlessly grim, our presence will become more and more resented. Meanwhile, drug profits are buying more and more guns for the steadily growing warlord militias. As with Iraq, we took a bad situation and seem on the verge of having turned ourselves into targets and the country into a full-blown state of civil war.

It's one more war where it's not clear why we're there, what the objective is, or how well know if we've ever won. All that's clear is that while war criminals like Dostum enjoy a new prosperity and power, soldiers like Tillman--and the vast majority of Afghans--are continuing to lose.