These would at first be known as thugs and street gangs, then as warlords.
He visited the West African state last year, nervously pointing a hand-held camera at former warlords with nicknames such as General Bin Laden and General Butt Naked.
A month after his announcement in Kabul, Mr. Rumsfeld's aides presented a strategy to the White House aimed at weakening warlords and engaging in state-building in Afghanistan.
In the breaks between brandishing historical maps at Serbian warlords and politicians, proving that this territory or that land was Serbian, the general would surface to smoke, drink coffee or plum brandy, and banter with we reporters.
Another exhorted, in broken syntax: "Democracy Go To The Hell". Yet in interviews, Mogadishu residents expressed far more anger at the secular warlords than at the United States.
Afghan warlords, at best a fractious bunch and at worst a mortal threat to Afghanistan's democracy, have armies that dwarf the national government's forces.
Many of them previously carried guns at the behest of warlords such as the recently imprisoned former president, Charles Taylor.
[This week, a high-ranking United Nations delegation warned after visiting Afghanistan that the country remained at high risk from warlords and their followers.] "It's been like this ever since the Communist revolution" in 1978, said Abdul Hakim, 78, keeper of the 15th-century Timurid shrine, which lost some of its dazzling turquoise tiles in a mortar hit.
In 2002, officials with the C.I.A. used a drone to fire a missile at a warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, outside Kabul, but missed.
Instead he pointed at the Warlord and said, "He's the future," and I was like, OK, thanks, man, kind of blowing him off but in a polite way?
All of which suggests to me that the fact that certain U.S. allies in Afghanistan, in the war against our former allies (the Taliban), were wont to abuse local children sexually was not overlooked out of some screwball sensitivity to Afghan, or at least warlord, culture, but was cynically disregarded as irrelevant to the goal of defeating the enemy.
