But when al Qaeda used this territory as its base for attacking the Twin Towers in New York, it drew the United States into the Afghan story. The United States quickly toppled the Taliban, but what did this portend for Afghanistan? Would Kabul stage a comeback? Would the urban elite now come back from exile? Would the old technocracy rise again? Was Afghanistan back on course to becoming a centralized modern nation-state with a democratic, constitutional government? Such were the questions Afghans were facing now.
