"While there remains a single warlord in the northern provinces, we will never return," said one of the elders, Abdul Malik, who fled the fighting in Faryab Province seven years ago.
By downing one dictator, by deposing a single warlord, we might have set an example that would have made all the others think twice.
That is why the military is paying so much attention to the small numbers congregating in southeast Afghanistan, which they have been able to do apparently because there is no single powerful warlord who has been policing that area.
After 12 years in existence and costing a billion dollars, the ICC has, because of bureaucracy and delays, secured just a single conviction, that of Congolese warlord Germain Katanga.
For all its deficiencies, the I.C.C. — which in 10 years has achieved just a single conviction, that of a Congolese warlord last year — has a global reach and responsibility as the world's first permanent war-crimes tribunal.
Promising up to 56,000 troops in a single battle, and a choice of nine factions, armchair warlords should flex their mouse fingers now.
Until last month (when it found Thomas Lubango Dyilo, a Congolese warlord, guilty) it had failed to secure a single conviction.
In future elections, the chance of a single seat in an ineffectual parliament will surely fail to persuade warlords to give up their guns.In this election, as another example of Mr Karzai's weakness, few were obliged to give them up: of 207 "commander-candidates" identified before the poll, merely 32 were disqualified.
So at first glance the story of the Balkan warlords from the 1990s being held to account is satisfying: every single one faced justice.
Europe's bureaucrats have succeeded where the warlords of previous eras had failed: the enduring creation of a single, undivided Europe.
But rather than blaming bandit policemen, Taliban troops, drug barons, insurgents, warlords and Pakistan, shouldn't the real blame be placed on the single greatest reason for the problem — the drug consumer?
