In a major upset, the Afghan national soccer team defeated India, the major soccer power in the region, by 2-0 Wednesday night, winning the South Asia Cup in the process. As the New York Times reports, the people of Afghanistan erupted in a jubilant celebration of the unlikely victory:

"Thousands of tracer rounds lighted up the sky here in Kabul and drowned out everything else for half an hour as the game ended on Wednesday night. A plea by the Kabul police and the National Directorate of Security not to shoot into the air to celebrate went unheeded. In fact, many of the most intense salvos were coming from police station compounds....

When the team arrived home at Kabul International Airport on Thursday afternoon, the traffic jams put to shame the vast ones that occur when President Hamid Karzai travels by convoy through the streets. Several square miles of the city were mobbed with fans, heading for the Olympic Stadium on foot.

Many of the celebrators were quick to note that for once they had something to be proud of that had nothing to do with war.

“Our victory showed the international community that we are not the nation of war,” said Sara Rana, 18, a high school senior. “We can do it, no matter how hard the job.

... many noted as well that ethnic rivalries and political differences were all forgotten as people cut Afghan flags into tunics and sewed them into shirts; painted their faces with black, red and green stripes; and climbed onto any vehicle that was moving — half a dozen to a motorcycle, 20 to a small car, 100 to a minibus.”

The celebration converged on Kabul's Olympic stadium, where soccer team members had assembled and later had to be evacuated by the police to protect them from their gleeful fans. During the Taliban days, that same stadium had been used for mass executions, either by stoning or firing squad, with thousands of spectators force-marched into the stadium as witnesses. But this week, at least, it was the site of something far more joyous.

Back when they ran Afghanistan, the Taliban had banned soccer outright, along with games, music and other forms of entertainment because, as the Times reports, "they divert young people from prayer and religious studies." Those bans were enforced with torture, disfigurement, imprisonment and bullets fired from the hot barrels of AK-47s.

Given that brutal history, this week's glorious celebration was heart-warming, and also heart-breaking. Most Afghanis do not want to return to the days of the Taliban, when even a soccer match was considered an affront to Allah punishable by death. U.S. intervention freed them from those days, at least temporarily, but we cannot and will not stay there forever. We cannot and will not stay there in large numbers beyond 2014, which will be more than a dozen years after first invading in search of Osama bin Laden.

If the millions of Afghanis who celebrated this week are to maintain even the small modicum of freedom that allows their children to play soccer in the street or a nearby field, they're going to have to fight for it. But there's reason to fear that too many won't, and that, with the Americans gone, the Taliban will eventually return to power in much of the country, if not all of it, making events of this week a distant memory.

That would be a tragedy, but a tragedy only they have the capacity to avert.