The Devil You Know; It is often assumed that Afghanistan's warlords are choking off any chance at progress. In fact, they may not be all bad.

Byline: Radek Sikorski (Sikorski, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, was Poland's deputy minister of foreign affairs.)

When I first met Ismail Khan in 1987, he had been living in the saddle for years, leading thousands of mujahedin against the might of the Soviet Army. I traveled through occupied Afghanistan with him for several weeks, and was present at the first-ever commanders' conferences, which Khan organized in remote caves in the central region of Ghor.

A leader of the original Afghan anti-communist rebellion in 1979, Khan was later captured by the Taliban when they took control of the country in 1995. He escaped from a Taliban prison in 2000, and rallied his troops in support of the U.S. invasion to topple that repressive regime in 2001. Although Khan is a hero of the resistance by almost any definition, he is now most commonly known as a warlord. But what I found in Herat last month suggests the picture is far more complex.

Ten years ago the Western suburbs of Herat were a Hiroshima-style sea of ruins, where burned-out tanks littered empty streets full of mines and unexploded ordnance. Today it's a busy commercial area transected by a new ring road, with hundreds of shops and businesses. The airport road--once a string of potholes, which I crossed in 1987 with guerrillas avoiding Soviet tank patrols--is a busy commercial thoroughfare. An industrial park has risen on one side. Modern apartment blocks and hotels with Internet access stand on the other. And Herat, Kabul, has a steady electricity supply and streetlights with orange, energy-efficient sodium bulbs. Thanks to the ...