Life unpredictable along the Afghan horizon Most of life… is unplanned. It’s banal, capricious, a frustration to any puppet master — which does not make it any less precious, of course, or fragile.

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Saturday, Dec. 29, 2007 | midnight

New York

On the outskirts of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, there's a junkyard of the Soviet empire. It's filled with the hulls of T-55 and T-62 tanks and the tubes of multiple-rocket launchers. Some of the tanks are intact. I guess high-explosive anti-tank missiles penetrated the turrets and coated the interior of the steel shells with blood.

I drove past this modest memorial to imperial hubris a couple of months ago on my way to a base of the nascent U.S.-trained Afghan army. The army needs money. It might sell those metal carcasses for scrap. Why not? The detritus of human events, and their constant ebb and flow, turn the head.

Military guys deal in worst-case scenarios. But no Soviet-era planner of the 1979 invasion could have imagined being humbled in the Hindu Kush by a bunch of Islamic holy warriors; and no American Cold War strategist could have imagined those CIA-funded Islamists turning on the United States and bringing down the twin towers in 2001.

Yet all this happened. Just as it happened that the Soviets were once our allies and communists from Central Asia raised the hammer and sickle on the Reichstag as Hitler's Germany burned in 1945.

And then the Soviets became our enemies while the Japanese, despite Pearl Harbor, became our friends. And, at last, the Soviets became Russians who were no longer enemies but rivals.

The mantle of enemy passed with the Cold War's end. It went to purveyors of another totalitarianism, haters of modernity, atavistic murderers of unbelievers (and their own), fanatics for whom free will and sexuality are so intolerable that a savage God must be raised up to suppress them in jihad's name.

The relationship of these jihadists to Islam is as twisted as Stalin's to Marx, or the Gulag's to the liberation of the masses, but the draw of absolutism has not abated.

The problem with liberal societies is that they are as dull as they are successful. The mortgage, the tax man, the lobbyist and the vote leave a thirsting. Revolutions are made for freedom, but its exercise is mundane, which can be intolerable. Only the terrorized -- from East Berlin or Baghdad -- understand that “Give me normality” is a rousing cry. For a Pole, the absence of drama feels like paradise.

But history lurches. Its strangeness prompts some to believe that there must be a hidden hand. Conspiracy theory is the refuge of the feeble-minded; that has not stopped its becoming rampant in an age where every voice has a digital loudspeaker.

Americans and Canadians training young Afghan recruits near Soviet junkyards in a faraway land must be the work of someone, a plot of international speculators, or perhaps Mossad agents who, for the grotesquely conspiracy-minded, planned 9/11.

Most of life, however, is unplanned. It's banal, capricious, a frustration to any puppet master -- which does not make it any less precious, of course, or fragile.

At a Kandahar airport, I overheard two U.S. soldiers:

“I don't wanna die,” the first said.

“Yeah,” the second concurred.

“Keep your head down.”

They parted. Their fear stayed with me. I've been thinking of them and other U.S. servicemen and servicewomen this holiday season. What we all want is pretty simple. Home about sums it up. The place they have to take you in.

I boarded a U.S. military flight to Kabul and some special-forces guys -- no uniforms, sniper scopes on their assault rifles -- got onboard too. One sat next to me. I asked: “What's your line of business?”

“Oh, doing some private work for the government, but it would be too long a story to tell you.”

I nodded. He was from Perth, Australia: a long story, indeed. Perhaps he'd been out in the badlands on the Afghan-Pakistani border battling the Taliban, or down in the southwest where the Iranian border area is said to be full of guys without uniforms.

Afghanistan, like Poland, is a small country flanked by larger ones. Unlike Poland, it has not found the means to contain those larger countries' interests. The “Great Game” goes on.

Its continuation may suggest that nothing changes or changes only to stay the same. But that would be a pessimistic view. On a train the other day, gliding through the mists of Belgium along pale lines of poplar trees, I thought of the slaughter at Passchendaele 90 years ago. European peace is a miracle; we forget too many miracles.

More recently, there was the Passchendaele-like slaughter of the Iran-Iraq war, with its 1 million dead for nothing, its Cold War fog and its Cold War intrigues. Openness is advancing, even in the Middle East. This is the age of empowerment. The back-to-the-Caliphate boys cannot resist it. Their own junkyard awaits them.

Roger Cohen is a guest columnist for The New York Times.