The Afghan conflict, according to Elizabeth Rubin

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Four articles by Elizabeth Rubin that I highy recommend for those of you who want to understand what the conflict in Afghanistan is really like.



October 9, 2005
Women's Work
By ELIZABETH RUBIN
After bumping along five hours of potholes and rock-strewn mountain switchbacks on the main commercial artery from Kabul to Pakistan early last month, I was surprised as we entered the Jalalabad Valley to see an enormous campaign poster, the size of a Times Square billboard, featuring not the boyish face of Hazrat Ali - Jalalabad's most famous ex-warlord and a parliamentary candidate - but that of Safia Siddiqi. It's striking enough that a woman would appear so boldly in such a poster in a city where women still do not appear in public without a burka - more striking still that she was wrapped in a shawl made from the green, black and red of the Afghan flag. These colorful, patriotic images of Siddiqi also loomed over the streets of Jalalabad itself, offering a lush kind of hope for its residents. But Jalalabad is still a place dominated by Pashtunwali, the customary law that regulates life throughout the Pashtun belt (the eastern and southern half of Afghanistan). The Pashtun code is based on the values of honor, sanctuary, solidarity, shame and revenge, and it treats women as property. In such a place, how much difference can a few female politicians really make? Many Afghans question all the fuss over elections, and the $150 million expense, when, after three and a half years of American and international efforts, they still have few roads, unclean water and crumbling schools. And still every 30 minutes an Afghan woman dies in childbirth.
The image of Afghan women is easily reduced to stereotypes. At one extreme is the hidden, voiceless, blue-burkaed cloud floating through the dusty streets behind her turbaned man. At the other is the endangered young feminist firing off a tirade against warlords. Both exist, but reality is mostly between the extremes. If nothing else, perhaps women in Parliament - by law, 68 seats of 249 are reserved for women - will begin to demolish these caricatures.
In her rebelliousness, Siddiqi reflects a quality of Pashtun women that lives in the poetic memory of eastern and southern Afghanistan and was archived in a small book of women's poetry collected and edited by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, one of Afghanistan's most revered modern poets. A dean of literature at Kabul University, a former governor of Kapisa Province, Majrouh, at age 59 in 1988, was assassinated in Peshawar, Pakistan, where the various mujahedeen factions fighting the Soviet Union were based. Shortly before his murder, Majrouh went through refugee camps in Pakistan to collect landays: simple two-line cries of emotion, usually recited by women to women at the river or the well or at wedding parties. They are physical and brutal, passionate and direct. One that was recited to me on a few occasions last month was almost a threat to the beloved. It shows how embedded is the tribal sense of honor for both men and women: "If you do not have a wound in the center of your chest/I shall remain indifferent, even if your back is riddled like a sieve with holes."
The women who composed and shared these poems, Majrouh wrote, "feel repressed, scorned and thought of as second-rate human beings. From the cradle on, they are received with sadness and shame.. . .The father who learns of such an unwelcome arrival seems to go into mourning, whereas he gives a party and fires off a salvo of gunshots at the birth of a boy. Later, and without ever being consulted, the little girl becomes monetary exchange between families of the same clan." Majrouh, in exile among the hostile mujahedeen, seemed to identify with the anguish of Pashtun women. And he identified with their means of defiance - the landays. They could be cries of despair: "Cruel people, who see how an old man leads me to his bed/And you ask why I weep and tear out my hair!" They could also be bold and desirous: "Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields/So we can love each other or fall together beneath the blows of knives."
Safia Siddiqi has taken the boldness of the landays into both in politics and poetry. At a reading last year in Kandahar, attended more by men than women, she read from a poem of hers called "I Am Telling the Truth." In it the poet addresses her lover, saying she wants to "smother you with kisses/To put you in the swing of my lap/And to cover you/With the wings of my hair."
Siddiqi has always enjoyed the spotlight and ached when it dimmed. She was born to a family of judges and religious scholars. Reared in the village of Nazarabad, just outside Jalalabad, she was taught at home and in Koran classes next door at the corner mosque. The Soviet invasion destroyed Nazarabad's village tranquillity, and the family was uprooted to Kabul. Siddiqi began tailoring at night near her house to supplement her father's reduced income. By 11th grade she had published a poetry collection, "Veil," in which the chador became a metaphor for protection not just from strange men but also from the Soviet invaders. Siddiqi went to law school and was energized by the artistic and intellectual life of the university.
"It was the peak time for women's liberty," she told me. It all ended abruptly. The Communists were pressuring people like her to join the party. "They were afraid of me at my college," she said. "My education. My books." Her father decided to send the family to Pakistan. "And there I was accused by the Islamists of being a Communist," she said. "They wanted to kill me. It was Hekmatyar's party" - the Hezb-i-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - "with those women in Saudi black burkas. And I hate those black burkas to this day."
Yet she had to wear one herself. In Pakistan, she had no name, no degree, no poetry. She was just a poor refugee, and it made her crazy. She began to work at an entry-level job for an N.G.O., forced herself to learn English and rose in the ranks. Prominence attracted more threats, particularly from the Taliban after they captured Kabul in 1996. She wrote poetry of angry self-assertion and exploration. "Who am I?" begins one poem. "Am I a nomad?. . . No I'm not a nomad, nor a refugee/ They are much better than me." Siddiqi also wrote: "When I'm walking down the street, the people watch me/Disrespectfully and surprisingly/Watch me,/They are talking and saying/'Who is this lout?/Who is she?/Whose daughter is she?/Whose sister is she?/Whose wife is she?' Oh! Allah, is it honor?"
"We had such a bad life in Pakistan as educated women because they never accepted our raising our voice," she told me. She formed a small group of activist women and eventually emigrated to Canada, where she met - quite late by Afghan standards - her husband, Asif Safi, an artist and journalist. He cuts an unusual figure in the Afghan landscape in his goth get-up: black wool pakool, black tunic, black baggy trousers, black shoes and long black hair. He's in charge of Siddiqi's security, and he is paranoid, with good reason. Already last year, when she and Safi were consulting for the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, Siddiqi was attacked in a tough tribal region. Now that she was campaigning, she would have to go back.
t the end of 2001, just after the Taliban scattered from their Kandahari stronghold, I received a strange proposal from Mullah Abdul Salaam, known as Rocketi, a neckless barrel of a Taliban commander. He was hiding in a remote village in Zabul, a province of sand dunes, camels and abandoned mud forts, peopled by suspicious men with thick kohl painted around their eyes and a taste for burning down girls' schools. Rocketi was wanted by the Americans. He had been the Taliban corps commander of Jalalabad - not because he was in love with the Taliban but because all he really knew how to do was wage jihad and fire rockets (thus the nickname). He showed me his Stinger missiles, stashed away in a barn, and asked me to help him deliver them to the Americans in exchange for amnesty. I told him it was impossible. The next day he was forced to trust a man he didn't trust, Ismail Gailani, who is from one of the most respected religious families in Afghanistan. Rocketi tried to hide out in the mountains for a time but eventually landed in an American-run prison.
That is why I was so surprised when I found him in Kabul this summer, in a fine black tunic and a long silver-and-black turban, on his way to the Afghan television studios to record a campaign ad for himself. He was running for Parliament, he said, on a simple platform: "I say that I love all God's people." That's it? "If you promise a lot and do a little, that is not delicious," he told me. "But if you promise a little and do a lot, it will be very, very delicious." His smile soon turned to a frown, however, as he contemplated his chief misfortune: "No matter how much I respect humanity and how great a person I am, my name still misrepresents me."
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, his nickname, Rocketi's chances for winning a seat in Parliament were excellent. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission tried to force the adoption of an affidavit whereby candidates would have to pledge that they were never involved in any war crimes or drug dealing. "It was never included," said Ahmad Nader Nadery, one of the commission's more outspoken members, when I went to see him shortly after meeting Rocketi. "All that was left in the affidavit is that 'you are not in an armed group now.' " So any commanders under suspicion simply turned in some weapons. Ultimately just a few dozen candidates were disqualified on the basis of arms. Nadery said that although warlords are a small proportion of the candidates, they were overshadowing the process. Which makes sense. Who, after all, has been running Afghanistan for the past 25 years? Many Afghans understandably wonder whether such elections aren't intended to show "progress" in nation building - and give the United States a way out.
On the western outskirts of Kabul, in a neighborhood still scarred by the mujahedeen rockets that tore apart Kabul during the civil war 10 years ago, Shukria Barakzai stepped from a silver Mercedes to greet a few dozen women waiting for her in the garden of a neighborhood elder. Though she's one of Kabul's higher-profile women - she started a newspaper called Women's Mirror shortly after the Taliban fell and often appears on political talk shows in bright, translucent headscarves and high-heeled, pointy pink or ivory shoes - on this day she had the air of a schoolgirl breaking taboos. A few days earlier, at the official start of campaign season, she took an unprecedented move for Afghan women and went wading through a crowded bazaar to address men and women, shopkeepers and taxi drivers and the police. She was thrilled by it. She also must have enjoyed the fact that it irritated her husband, and that there was nothing he could do about it.
Like an Afghan version of a Tracy-Hepburn movie, both Barakzai and her husband were running for Parliament. And the tension was palpable between them - two years ago, when she was battling warlords as a delegate to the loya jirga, or grand assembly, convened to agree on a constitution, she heard that he had taken a second wife. Her friends at women's organizations wanted to take to the streets to protest the laws that allow men to take up to four wives. Barakzai refused. She decided to ride out the change, instead, and in the process grow more familiar with the lives of ordinary Afghan women. During the campaign she mocked her husband's tactics. As a millionaire, she said, "he doesn't have to do anything except have big lunches for people in trade halls." (He made his fortune as an exporter.) She teased that he liked it that way because he is uncomfortable with public speaking. So, unlike Shukria - who had not hung up any posters yet, preferring radio and TV appearances and the woman-on-the-street approach - her husband had his team plaster a photograph of himself in a suit and tie, with a horse as his voting emblem, all over the trees and billboards and shop windows of Kabul.
The women waiting to hear Barakzai beneath the grapevine canopies were illiterate. The neighborhood still had no power, no roads and no buses to take anyone to work if there was any work to be had. The odor of open sewage wafted through the streets and gardens. Some women told Barakzai that their husbands wouldn't let them get their voting-registration cards. One said to me, "This is Afghanistan, and the men are rotten-natured," and a chorus of laughter ensued. Unimaginable cruelty had been meted out in this neighborhood just 10 years ago. The women remembered it vividly. One woman had lost 17 members of her family. These women were mystified that the same people who "fried us in oil and pounded nails in our heads" were in power, running for Parliament. Even worse, said one woman with a laugh, "people will vote for them."
Barakzai told them to vote for women instead. Otherwise, "the Mujahedeen leaders will suffocate us," she said. "But they won't be able to oppress you with a strong female voice in the Parliament." This was campaign-trail chatter, though; in private, she admitted that everything depended on the quality of the women elected. Many female candidates were put up by husbands whose records, even by Rocketi standards, were too tarnished. Others were put up by the Islamist parties.
Barakzai hauled herself up onto the bed of a pickup and addressed a crowd of young men. When one of them told me he was going to vote for the mullah Sayyaf because he had served his country all these years, an old woman from behind the mesh of her burka said: "Oh, you're a good one. We're waiting like beggars for wheat because of the service of people like him."
Having lived through the civil war, through Taliban rule, through the complicated compromises she observed and participated in as a delegate to the constitutional loya jirga, Barakzai was realistic about the composition of Afghan society. And she was realistic about an American policy that still supported the old commanders in the belief that inclusion was the best way to preserve stability in Afghanistan. "Of course, 75 percent of our Parliament will be commanders and drug lords," she told me. "But, on the other hand, it's a kind of pluralism of the last three decades. And some people say it's better they are all coming together."
When a news report said that U.S. soldiers were desecrating the Koran at Guantánamo, thousands of enraged men marched through Jalalabad's streets, torched government buildings, the Pakistani consulate and foreign aid agencies, chanted "death to America" and burned an effigy of President Bush.
In the parliamentary campaign, this same spirit manifested itself in a political allergy to the rhetoric of human rights, women's rights and all Western-sounding values. Anti-human-rights rhetoric also makes for good old-fashioned politicking, the kind that easily rouses the emotions of men, reminding them of the simpler days of jihad against the Soviets, when the mujahedeen were somehow heroes of both the Islamic and the Western worlds, and even seen as fighting for human rights - not as war criminals or the followers of war criminals.
At a sunbaked rally for the ex-commander Hazrat Ali, a white-haired, long-bearded blind mullah energized the crowd when he took to the podium and began cursing human rights. "The Koran says women cannot ask for divorce," he cried, "whereas human rights say women should ask for divorce! In the name of human rights we are told to release fornicators and thieves from prison. We know anyone who steals should have his hand cut off. Human rights says, 'No.' You should vote for someone who can fight all those who want to bring human rights law in Islamic law. We need a Moses to save us, and that is Hazrat Ali." A great rumbling and clapping ensued.
The women of Jalalabad understand the mentality they are up against. Safia Siddiqi and her leading female rival, Saima Khogiani, do not pepper their speeches with talk of women's rights or changing traditions. They speak of the honor of the Pashtun woman, and of how the Pashtuns respect their women. They warn the men of the dangers of succumbing to the bribes of old warlords and rich, lying candidates. They offer the service of their clean past. And they play on the pride of the Pashtun.
When I first met Saima Khogiani, a 34-year-old former schoolteacher, she was sitting cross-legged, curled over herself, on the floor of the crumbling Jalalabadi house she'd rented for her campaign offices. She peered at me from beneath the brown embroidery of a black wool scarf. She was rough and defensive, armored with a sardonic smirk. Khogiani faced the ire of her local mullahs when she first decided to run for office. Her uncles wouldn't speak to her. But she insisted and - despite the curse of one mullah, who warned that the people would be sending 12 generations of their ancestors to hell if they voted for her - the men were turning up to check her out and offer support in return for assistance. She had a small army of some 15 male cousins who stayed with her and decided where she could campaign. She was the only woman in the entire family who was allowed to meet with men. "This one," a cousin said, pointing to Khogiani's gregarious young niece, "will be banned from the men's room in two years." The young niece pouted. Then she said she didn't care because she was going to become a doctor.
But at a campaign stop up in the mountains, in a settlement of salmon-colored mud-and-straw houses, the women were uninterested in women's rights. After reciting a landay about perpetual poverty, one woman was urged by the others to tell Khogiani about their opium problem. "We know it's not good for Afghanistan, but it solved all our problems," she said. "It grows in drought, with almost no water. And it sells for a good price." The men vowed that they would plant poppies again this autumn, even under the threat of death. As Khogiani said, "The people lost their poppy, and the Americans and the government have not fulfilled their promises of an alternative-livelihoods program." The United States Agency for International Development has begun financing short-term projects - like clearing ditches - that local communities would have done anyway. It is not a true alternative, and while the farmers will lose their opium income, the governors, police chiefs and smugglers will simply traffic in opium grown elsewhere.
After returning to Afghanistan, Safia Siddiqi, like Shukria Barakzai, was a delegate to the constitutional loya jirga, where she spoke up to defend a young woman who had condemned the jihadis for their crimes against ordinary Afghans - then, for the sake of peace, urged the same young woman to apologize. Siddiqi understands politics well, as I saw when we drove out to her home district of Surkhab, a 40-minute drive from Jalalabad. The village elders had all gathered in a leafy outdoor meeting ground and dragged along their young men, who could be heard grumbling on the sidelines about how bored they were of political campaigns. Siddiqi appealed to them as Pashtuns, pressing them not to accept money or food in exchange for their votes. She appealed to the male elders, recognizing the suffering of their community and the uselessness of succumbing to warlords. She was in the village of her uncles and cousins. They all knew her father, knew that she's the daughter of a judge. This was a village still without television, where all the children gather at night to hear an elder tell them the love story of Saiful Maluk, son of the king, and Badri Jamal, a fairy girl. The story can take three nights or longer. When Siddiqi invoked the elders, she was signaling that she understood that they will decide who gets the votes; most likely it would be her. This is how politics works in the countryside. Siddiqi wrapped up her speech with another effort at tribal bonding: "You and I are Pashtuns. We appreciate and respect women more than the others. And I will not be able to talk as freely to others as I do to you."
Still, when she did speak to others - for example, educated women in Jalalabad at the government's Department of Public Works - her tone was markedly different. "Our men are uneducated," she told them. "Our women don't have jobs. And when you go out, everyone stares at you. If you remove your chador, everyone will call you a bad woman. The girl who should go to school is getting tailoring education because she has to make money for her family. Our kids should go to school, have teachers even at home. Should we vote for someone who intimidates or stops women from going to school? They want to make us scared of everything so we stay at home and out of politics. But we want to help the culture. Who was Malalai?" Siddiqi was referring to the 19th-century Pashtun heroine who braved British guns to raise the Afghan flag. "She was a woman. A hero of our country. The reason we don't have any other Malalai is because we have people who won't allow us to go to school."
As if on cue, a teacher interrupted and said: "Prove to us that the rights of men and women are the same in Islam. Because the men are saying: 'Don't vote for women. It's not Koranic. It's only the command of Bush's wife, Laura, that women are candidates.' "
A few days later, Siddiqi made the mistake of accepting an invitation to the most remote region of Khogiani, Saima Khogiani's tribal base. It's a place of lurking Taliban, where roadside bombs are now commonplace and people joke that the women have to do most of the work because the men are all hiding from blood feuds. Siddiqi delivered her speech to hundreds. Then, just as they were rolling out of the village, rockets and grenades and rifle fire hit her convoy. A few of the police officers in the leading car were wounded. Siddiqi lay with her brother on the ground and then walked for hours to escape from the village.
Yet a week later, when most of the female candidates were lying low, ordered by their families to campaign only at home by receiving visitors, Siddiqi rallied for one last splashy trip through the bazaar of Jalalabad. In a coasting S.U.V. she popped out of the sunroof and addressed the crowd through a loudspeaker. Men followed her progress in mild horror. "Look at this cow out of the car," one shopkeeper said. "Isn't she ashamed to wander through the bazaar?" another said. But no, she wasn't, and as she passed though Pashtunistan Square she confronted the people of Nangarhar with her promises and her questions. "This was the second attack that happened to me here" - the first was last year. "Did I kill someone? Did I steal something? Are my hands red with blood? Why did you take the weapon to kill me? It is not in our culture to kill a woman without reason." She thanked the crowd for their support. Then her husband jumped in to dispel the rumors that he was in fact a Hollywood actor, not a real Afghan Muslim. Children read poetry. The Koran was recited. And on election day, Siddiqi donned her Afghan flag chador and voted.
It was a strange day. The turnout in Nangarhar, as elsewhere, was very low. One Afghan woman I met, who worked for an N.G.O., told me that when she tried to urge women to decide for themselves, not to be under the influence of their men, they told her, "Why shouldn't we listen to our husbands and brothers? You are a kafir" - an infidel - "you've been with all these foreigners so long!" A woman who was voting for Siddiqi explained, "My owner told me to." "Your owner?" I asked. "Yes. Mullah Abdul Rahim. Our husband is our owner."
Early returns showed Siddiqi, Khogiani, Barakzai and Rocketi all headed for Parliament. Although the returns were incomplete, initial counts even had Siddiqi ahead of Hazrat Ali.
few days after the elections, I drove out of Jalalabad along the Kunar River through acres of brown sea-turtle-size stones that gave way to unexpectedly lush fields. I was looking for the father of Khalida, a young woman I'd met in a hospital. She had thrown kerosene from a lamp upon herself, lighted a match and tried to die. She was reed-thin, with burns from her face to her toes. She had little feeling left. But she was upset by what she saw in the little mirror her sister gave her. She wanted to speak and managed to get a few words out in spurts: "My father is an old man"; "We are poor"; "I have two little brothers, one is mad"; "My husband was 35, and he was good to me at first." She was 15 when they were married. Her price was small - 50,000 rupees, just under $1,000. For whatever reason, perhaps poverty, perhaps jealousy or frustration, her in-laws began to beat her while her husband was away working as a driver in Saudi Arabia. They complained to her husband that she was doing bad work - and when he returned to their home, he began to beat her, too. After five years, with a 3-year-old daughter, she couldn't bear it any longer. "That day my father-in-law hit my head with a brick"; she crawled away and found the kerosene lamp.
When her father-in-law discovered her, he kept her for some 20 days on a bed without a mattress next to the cows. The filth and the flies infected her wounds. Her suffering and her story, told in the stifling heat of the hospital, was like so many others and would end, a week later, with her death.
In his collection of women's landays, the poet Majrouh wrote that in the face of a life of perpetual inferiority and humiliation - "even her husband does not stoop so low as to eat with her" - what is the Pashtun woman's reaction? Submission. Duties performed like clockwork. Acceptance and suffering. "Yet," he wrote, "if one takes a slightly closer look, it turns out that in her innermost self the Pashtun woman is indignant and skeptical, feeding her rebellion. From this deep-seated and hidden protest that grows more resistant with every passing day, she comes out with only two forms of evidence in the end - her suicide and her song."
He wrote that the tribal code of honor considers suicide a cowardly act, and the Pashtun male will never resort to it. In his time the two methods women used were poison or drowning. Today, Sharifa Shahab, a tireless young woman from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, who has worked in Herat, Kabul and now Jalalabad, has found that women tend to choose poison or self-immolation. It was Majrouh's conviction that the songs of Afghan women challenge the society in a similar way as their suicides, by glorifying three themes that taste of blood - love, honor and death. "By eliminating herself in such an accursed way," he wrote, "a woman thus tragically proclaims her hatred of the community's law."
I don't know what exactly I hoped to find by tracking down Khalida's father out in his wind-swept village. He was a short way from the cemetery where he buried his daughter and, before that, his mad son, whom Khalida never knew was dead. Certainly I did not expect the depth of the man's wretchedness. "I thought a mullah" - Khalida's father-in-law - "would be a good person to take care of my daughter," he said. "I was wrong. He had no sympathy." He wept so hard I thought his fragile frame would snap.
What I did find in this man, who had spent most of his life as a shoe-mender in Pakistan and now, in his old age, would often travel the eight hours to Kabul to seek work in the bazaar as a laborer, was precisely what Majrouh had surmised lay in the innermost self of the Pashtun woman - a wild rage and hatred of the community's law.
I also found a surprising belief that telling the story of his daughter's demise and her in-laws' malevolence might somehow help prevent such things from happening again and prevent Khalida's husband from getting another wife. What the father wanted was justice. He didn't know how a jirga - the assembly of elders who settle disputes - could deliver that, given the many months that his in-laws, who were also his cousins, had been able to get away with torturing his daughter. "By the human rights commission," he said, "we will find them and bring them to court."
Sharifa Shahab has less faith than Khalida's grieving father that the government will be the place to resolve the issues of abuse of women. As she said to me one night: "How can we trust the government to do anything when all the warlords are in government? Dostum" - an indestructible warlord from Mazar-i-Sharif - "burned my house down during the civil war because my father was against the Communists. Ismail Khan" - formerly governor of Herat, still power broker there and minister of water and power - "had his men assault my son because I tried to set up a women's council without his permission. Khalili" - Abdul Karim Khalili, currently a vice president - "captured all my father's lands. And in Jalalabad, I had an official letter that we are sure is from the old governor saying I better leave Jalalabad because I was trying to change the religion of the people by working on women's issues."
And then Shahab told me the story of two wives who were recently killed. Two men exchanged their sisters so they could avoid the high price of a proper bride. One of the men killed his wife the first night, accusing her of having had sexual relations before marriage. When the news arrived in the other village, the other man brought his wife - the other man's sister - and made her walk around the grave; he cut her hands and feet off and killed her on the grave of the other girl. "Why? I asked him, and he said, 'He killed my sister; I had to,' " Shahab told me. "The government forgave the murderers because the jirga forgave them, and the jirga is higher than the law." So she will not wait for the government or any electoral miracle to intervene. Instead, she's creating women's jirgas, using Afghan traditions to bring about change. "Otherwise, I am totally alone here," she said.

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October 22, 2006

In the Land of the Taliban
By ELIZABETH RUBIN
Correction Appended

One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20’s fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition of Georges Seurat’s “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” — middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys flying a kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight pattern of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction. He had just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque.
He was now looking forward to taking a logic course at a madrasa, or religious school, near Peshawar during his holiday. Pakistan’s religious parties, he told me through an interpreter, would lodge him, as they did other Afghan Taliban fighters, and keep him safe. With us was Abdul Baqi’s mentor, Mullah Sadiq, a diabetic Helmandi who was shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan auditing Taliban finances and arranging logistics. He had just dispatched nine fighters to Afghanistan and had taken wounded men to a hospital in Islamabad. “I just tell the border guards that they were wounded in a tribal dispute and need treatment,” he told me.
And though Mullah Sadiq said they had lost many commanders in battles around Kandahar, he and Abdul Baqi appeared to be in good spirits, laughing and chatting loudly on a cellphone to Taliban friends in Pakistan and Afghanistan. After all, they never imagined that the Taliban would be back so soon or in such force or that they would be giving such trouble to the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai and some 40,000 NATO and U.S. troops in the country. For the first time since the fall of 2001, when the Taliban were overthrown, they were beginning to taste the possibility of victory.
As I traveled through Pakistan and particularly the Pashtun lands bordering Afghanistan, I felt as if I were moving through a Taliban spa for rehabilitation and inspiration. Since 2002, the American and Pakistani militaries have focused on North Waziristan and South Waziristan, two of the seven districts making up Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas, which are between the North-West Frontier Province and, to the south, Baluchistan Province; in the days since the 9/11 attacks, some tribes there had sheltered members of Al Qaeda and spawned their own Taliban movement. Meanwhile, in the deserts of Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is just a few hours’ drive from the Afghan city of Kandahar, the Afghan Taliban were openly reassembling themselves under Mullah Omar and his leadership council. Quetta had become a kind of free zone where strategies could be formed, funds picked up, interviews given and victories relished.
In June, I was in Quetta as the Taliban fighters celebrated an attack against Dad Mohammad Khan, an Afghan legislator locally known as Amir Dado. Until recently he was the intelligence chief of Helmand Province. He had worked closely with U.S. Special Forces and was despised by Abdul Baqi — and, to be frank, by most Afghans in the south. Mullah Razayar Nurzai (a nom de guerre), a commander of 300 Taliban fighters who frequently meets with the leadership council and Mullah Omar, took credit for the ambush. Because Pakistan’s intelligence services are fickle — sometimes supporting the Taliban, sometimes arresting its members — I had to meet Nurzai at night, down a dark lane in a village outside Quetta.
My guide was a Pakistani Pashtun sympathetic to the Taliban; we slipped into a courtyard and behind a curtain into a small room with mattresses and a gas lamp. In hobbled a rough, wild-looking graybeard with green eyes and a prosthetic limb fitted into a permanent 1980’s-era shoe. More than a quarter-century of warring had taken its toll on Nurzai’s 46-year-old body but not on his spirit. It was 10 at night, yet he was bounding with energy and bombast about his recent exploits in Kandahar and Helmand. A few days earlier, Nurzai and his men had attacked Amir Dado’s extended family. First, he told me, they shot dead his brother — a former district leader. Then the next day, as members of Dado’s family were driving to the site of the first attack, Nurzai’s men ambushed their convoy. Boys, cousins, uncles: all were killed. Dado himself was safe elsewhere. Nurzai was mildly disappointed and said that they had received bad information. He had no regrets about the killings, however. Abdul Baqi was also delighted by the attack. He would tell me that Dado used to burn rocket casings and pour the melted plastic onto the stomachs of onetime Taliban fighters he and his men had captured. Abdul Baqi also recalled that during the civil war that ended with the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul, Dado and his men had a checkpoint where they “grabbed young boys and robbed people.”
Mullah Omar and his followers formed the Taliban in 1994 to, among other things, bring some justice to Afghanistan and to expel predatory commanders like Dado. But in the early days of Karzai’s government, these regional warlords re-established themselves, with American financing, to fill the power vacuum that the coalition forces were unwilling to fill themselves. The warlords freely labeled their many enemies Al Qaeda or Taliban in order to push the Americans to eradicate them. Some of these men were indeed Taliban. Most, like Abdul Baqi, had accepted their loss of power, but they rejoined the Taliban as a result of harassment. Amir Dado’s own abuses had eventually led to his removal from the Helmand government at United Nations insistence. As one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity out of personal safety concerns, put it: “Amir Dado kept his own prison, authorized the use of serious torture, had very little respect for human life and made security worse.” Yet when I later met Amir Dado in Kabul, he pulled out a letter that an officer in the U.S. Special Forces had written requesting that the Afghan Ministry of Defense install him as Helmand’s police chief and claiming that in his absence “the quality of security in the Helmand Province has dramatically declined.”
One Place, Two Stories
I went to Afghanistan and Pakistan this summer to understand how and why the Taliban were making a comeback five years after American and Afghan forces drove them from power. What kind of experience would lead Afghans to reject what seemed to be an emerging democratic government? Had we missed something that made Taliban rule appealing? Were they the only opposition the aggrieved could turn to? Or, as many Afghans were saying, was this Pakistan up to its old tricks — cooperating with the Americans and Karzai while conspiring to bring back the Taliban, who had been valued “assets” before 9/11?
And why has the Bush administration’s message remained that Afghanistan is a success, Iraq a challenge? “In Afghanistan, the trajectory is a hopeful and promising one,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote on the op-ed page of The Washington Post earlier this month. Afghanistan’s rise from the ashes of the anti-Taliban war would mean that the Bush administration was prevailing in replacing terror with democracy and human rights.
Meanwhile, a counternarrative was emerging, and it belonged to the Taliban, or the A.C.M., as NATO officers call them — the Anti-Coalition Militia. In Kabul, Kandahar and Pakistan, I found their video discs and tapes in the markets. They invoke a nostalgia for the jihad against the Russians and inspire their viewers to rise up again. One begins with clattering Chinooks disgorging American soldiers into the desert. Then we see the new Afghan government onstage, focusing in on the Northern Alliance warlords — Abdul Rashid Dostum, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Karim Khalili, Muhammad Fahim, Ismail Khan, Abdul Sayyaf. It cuts to American soldiers doing push-ups and pinpointing targets on maps; next it shows bombs the size of bathtubs dropping from planes and missiles emblazoned with “Royal Navy” rocketing through the sky; then it moves to hospital beds and wounded children. Message: America and Britain brought back the warlords and bombed your children. In the next clip, there are metal cages under floodlights and men in orange jumpsuits, bowed and crouching. It cuts back to the wild eyes of John Walker Lindh and shows trucks hauling containers crammed with young Afghan and Pakistani prisoners — Taliban, hundreds of whom would suffocate to death in those containers, supposedly at the command of the warlord and current army chief of staff, General Dostum. Then back to American guards wheeling hunger-striking Guantánamo prisoners on gurneys. Interspliced are older images, a bit fuzzy, of young Afghan men, hands tied behind their backs, heads bowed, hauled off by Communist guards. The message: Foreigners have invaded our lands again; Americans, Russians — no difference.
During the period from 1994 to 2001, the Taliban were a cloistered clique with little interest in global affairs. Today they are far more sophisticated and outward-looking. “The Taliban of the 90’s were concerned with their district or province,” says Waheed Muzhda, a senior aide at the Supreme Court in Kabul, who before the Taliban fell worked in their Foreign Ministry. “Now they have links with other networks. Before, only two Internet connections existed — one was with Mullah Omar’s office and the other at the Foreign Ministry here in Kabul. Now they are connected to the world.” Though this is still very much an Afghan insurgency, fueled by complex local grievances and power struggles, the films sold in the markets of Pakistan and Afghanistan merge the Taliban story with that of the larger struggle of the Muslim umma, the global community of Islam: images of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Israelis dragging off young Palestinian men and throwing off Palestinian mothers clinging to their sons. Humiliation. Oppression. Followed by the same on Afghan soil: Northern Alliance fighters perching their guns atop the bodies of dead Taliban. In the Taliban story, Special Forces soldiers desecrate the bodies of Taliban fighters by burning them, the Koran is desecrated in Guantánamo toilets, the Prophet Muhammad is desecrated in Danish cartoons and finally an apostate, Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who was arrested earlier this year for converting to Christianity, desecrates Islam and is not only not punished but is released and flown off to Italy.
It is not at all clear that Afghans want the return of a Taliban government. But even sophisticated Kabulis told me that they are fed up with the corruption. And in the Pashtun regions, which make up about half the country, Afghans are fed up with five years of having their homes searched and the young men of their villages rounded up in the name of counterinsurgency. Earlier this month in Kabul, Gen. David Richards, the British commander of NATO’s Afghanistan force, imagined what Afghans are thinking: “They will say, ‘We do not want the Taliban, but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life that that might involve than another five years of fighting.”’ He estimated that if NATO didn’t succeed in bringing substantial economic development to Afghanistan soon, some 70 percent of Afghans would shift their loyalty to the Taliban.
Nation-Building, Again
In the middle of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, a metal sign tilts into the road advertising the New York English Language Center. It is a relic of the last American nation-building scheme. Half a century ago, this town, built at the confluence of the Arghandab and Helmand Rivers, was the headquarters for an ambitious dam project partly financed by the United States and contracted out to Morrison-Knudsen, an engineering company that helped build Cape Canaveral and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Lashkar Gah (literally, “the place of soldiers”) was to be a model American town. Irrigation from the project would create farms out of the desert. Today you can still see the suburban-style homes with gardens open to the streets, although the typical Afghan home is a fort with walls guarding the family’s privacy. Those modernizing dreams of America and Afghanistan were eventually defeated by nature, culture and the war to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980’s. What remains is an intense nostalgia among the engineers, cooks and farmers of Lashkar Gah, who remember that time as one of employment and peace. Today, Lashkar Gah is home to a NATO base.
Down the road from the base stands a lovely new building erected by an N.G.O. for the local Ministry of Women’s Affairs. It is big, white and, on the day I visited, was empty except for three women getting ready to leave. “It’s so close to the foreigners, and the women are afraid of getting killed by car bombs,” the ministry’s deputy told me. She was a school headmistress and landowner, dressed elegantly in a lime-colored blouse falling below the knees and worn over matching trousers. She weighed the Taliban regime against this new one in terms of pragmatic choices, not terror or ideology. She said that she had just wrapped up the case of a girl who had been kidnapped and raped by Kandahari police officers, something that would not have happened under the Taliban. “Their security was outstanding,” she said.
Under the Taliban, she said, a poppy ban was enforced. “Now the governors tell the people, ‘Just cultivate a little bit,”’ she said. “So people take this opportunity and grow a lot.” The farmers lease land to grow poppies. The British and the police eradicate it. The farmer can’t pay back the landowner. “So instead of paying, he gives the landowner his daughter.”
A few weeks before I arrived in Helmand, John Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told reporters that Afghan authorities were succeeding in reducing opium-poppy cultivation. Yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars being allocated by Congress to stop the trade, a United Nations report in September estimated that this year’s crop was breaking all records — 6,100 metric tons compared with 4,100 last year. When I visited Helmand, schools in Lashkar Gah were closed in part because teachers and students were busy harvesting the crop. A prosecutor from the Crimes Department laughed as he told me that his clerk, driver and bodyguard hadn’t made it to work. They were all harvesting. It requires a lot of workers, and you can earn $12 a day compared with the $2 you get for wheat. Hence the hundreds of young, poor Talibs from Pakistan’s madrasas who had flocked to earn that cash and who made easy converts for the coming jihad.
Walters had singled out Helmand for special praise. Yet just a short drive from the provincial capital, I was surrounded by poppy farmers — 12-year-old boys, 75-year-old men — hard at work, their hands caked in opium paste as they scooped figlike pulp off the bulbs into a sack tied around their waists. One little boy was dragging a long poppy stem attached to a car he had made out of bulbs. Haji Abdul, a 73-year-old Moses of a man, was the owner of the farm and one of those nostalgic for the heyday of the Helmand Valley project. He had worked with Americans for 15 years as a welder and manager. He was the first to bring electricity to his district. Now there was none.
“Why do you think people put mines out for the British and Italians doing eradication when they came here to save us?” He answered his own question: “Thousands of lands ready for harvest were destroyed. How difficult will it be for our people to tolerate that! You are taking the food of my children, cutting my feet and disabling me. With one bullet, I will kill you.” Fortunately he didn’t have to kill anyone. He had paid 2,000 afghanis per jerib (about a half acre) of land to the police, he told me, adding that they would then share the spoils with the district administrator and all the other Interior Ministry officials so that only a small percentage of the poppy would be eradicated.
When I asked Manan Farahi, the director of counterterrorism efforts for Karzai’s government, why the Taliban were so strong in Helmand, he said that Helmandis had, in fact, hated the Taliban because of Mullah Omar’s ban on poppy cultivation. “The elders were happy this government was coming and they could plant again,” Farahi told me. “But then the warlords came back and let their militias roam freely. They were settling old scores — killing people, stealing their opium. And because they belonged to the government, the people couldn’t look to the government for protection. And because they had the ear of the Americans, the people couldn’t look to the Americans. Into this need stepped the Taliban.” And this time the Taliban, far from suppressing the drug trade, agreed to protect it.
A Dealer’s Life
The Continental Guest House in Kandahar, with its lovely gardens, potted geraniums and Internet access in every room, was mostly empty when I arrived, a remnant of the city’s recently stalled economic resurgence.
To find out how the opium trade works and how it’s related to the Taliban’s rise, I spent the afternoon with an Afghan who told me his name was Razzaq. He is a medium-level smuggler in his late 20’s who learned his trade as a refugee in Iran. He was wearing a traditional Kandahari bejeweled skull cap, a dark blazer and a white shalwar kameez, a traditional outfit consisting of loose pants covered by a tunic. He moved and spoke with the confident ease of a well-protected man. “The whole country is in our services,” he told me, “all the way to Turkey.” This wasn’t bravado. From Mazar-i-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan, he brings opium in the form of a gooey paste, packaged in bricks. From Badakhshan in the northeast, he brings crystal — a sugary substance made from heroin. And from Jalalabad, in the east on the road to Peshawar, he brings pure heroin. All of this goes through Baramcha, an unmanned border town in Helmand near Pakistan. Sometimes he pays off the national soldiers to use their vehicles, he said. Sometimes the national policemen. Or he hides it well, and if there is a tough checkpoint, he calls ahead and pays them off. “The soldiers get 2,000 afghanis a month, and I give them 100,000,” he explained with an angelic smile. “So even if I had a human head in my car, they’d let me go.” It’s not hard to see why Razzaq is so successful. He has a certain charm and looks like the modest tailor he once was, not a man steeped in illegal business.
Razzaq’s smuggling career began in Zahedan, a remote and unruly Iranian town near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is filled with Afghan refugees who, like Razzaq and his family, fled after the Russian invasion in 1979. Razzaq apprenticed as a tailor under his father and eventually opened his own shop, which the Iranians promptly shut down. They said he had no right as a refugee to own a shop. He began painting buildings, but that, too, proved a bureaucratic challenge. He was paid in checks, and the bank refused to cash them without a bank account, which he could not get.
Razzaq was newly married with dreams of a good life for his family. So one day he took a chance. “I had gotten to know smugglers at my tailoring shop,” he told me over a meal of mutton and rice on the floor of my hotel room. “One of them was an old man, so no one ever suspected him. The smugglers asked me to go with him to Gerdi Jangel” — an Afghan refugee town in Pakistan — “and bring back 750 grams of heroin to Zahedan. The security searched us on the bus, but I’d hidden it in the heels of my shoes, and of course they didn’t search the old man. I was so happy when we made it back. I thought I was born for the first time into this world.”
So he took another chance and managed to fly to Tehran carrying four kilos in his bag. Each time he overcame another obstacle, he became more addicted to the easy cash. When the Iranian authorities imported sniffing dogs to catch heroin smugglers, Razzaq and his friends filled hypodermic needles with some heroin dissolved in water and sprayed the liquid on cars at the bus station that would be continuing on to Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz. “The dogs at the checkpoint went mad. They had to search 50 cars. They decided the dogs were defective and sent them back, and that saved us for a while.” Eventually, he said, they concocted a substance to conceal the heroin smell from the new pack of dogs.
After the fall of the Taliban, Razzaq moved back to Helmand, built a comfortable house and began supporting his extended family with his expanding trafficking business. Razzaq’s main challenge today is Iran. While the Americans have turned more or less a blind eye to the drug-trade spree of their warlord allies, Iran has steadily cranked up its drug war. (Some 3,000 Iranian lawmen have been killed in the last three decades battling traffickers.) To cross the desert borders, Razzaq moves in convoys of 18 S.U.V.’s. Some contain drugs. The rest are loaded with food supplies, antiaircraft guns, rocket launchers, antitank missiles and militiamen, often on loan from the Taliban. The fighters are Baluch from Iran and Afghanistan. The commanders are Afghans.
Razzaq’s run, as he described it, was a scene out of “Mad Max.” Three days were spent dodging and battling Iranian forces in the deserts around the earthquake-stricken city of Bam. Once they made it to Isfahan, however, in central Iran, they were home free. They released the militiamen, transferred the stuff to ordinary cars and drove to Tehran, where other smugglers picked up the drugs and passed them on to ethnic Turks in Tabriz. The Turks would bring them home, and from there they went to the markets of Europe.
Should he ever run into a problem in Afghanistan, he told me, “I simply make a phone call. And my voice is known to ministers, of course. They are in my network. Every network has a big man supporting them in the government.” The Interior Ministry’s director of counternarcotics in Kabul had told me the same thing. Anyway, if the smugglers have problems on the ground, they say, they just pay the Taliban to destroy the enemy commanders.
Razzaq has at times contemplated getting out of the smuggling trade, he said, but the easy money is too alluring. Depending on the market, he can earn from $1,500 to $7,500 a month. Most Afghans can’t make that in a year. Besides, he said, “all the governors are doing this, so why shouldn’t we?”
Losers Become Winners
In December 2001, not long after the Taliban were routed, I visited the Shah Wali Kot district, several hours’ drive on unpaved roads from Kandahar, a Mordor land of rock mountains shaped like sagging crescents and mud-baked houses melting into the dunes. The Taliban leaders had fled, mostly to Pakistan. Gul Agha Shirzai, formerly a local warlord and soon-to-be new governor, and his soldiers had swarmed into power while the Americans set up their operations base in Mullah Omar’s Xanadu-like residence. I was with a large group of Populzai, the clan of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.
We were in a big guest room with more than a dozen men gathered in a circle, all wearing the kind of turbans that look like gargantuan ice-cream swirls. The ones in black turban swirls were giggling, chatting and slapping one another on the back. The ones in white turban swirls were sulking, grumbling or mute. In this group, the miserable white turbans were Taliban men. They had just lost their pickup trucks, weapons, money, prestige and jobs, all of which had gone to the gleeful black turbans.
Today those miserable white turbans have taken to the mountains to fight. The gleeful black turbans are under siege. I saw one of the black turbans this summer, the Shah Wali Kot district leader, in the garden of the Kandahar governor’s palace. He was a mess. He chuckled loudly when I asked him how it was back in Shah Wali Kot. “Frankly, we are just defending ourselves from the Taliban,” he said. “Our head is on the pillow at night, but we do not sleep.”
That small division among the Populzai in Shah Wali Kot echoes the larger division of the Pashtun into two main branches: the Durrani and the Ghilzai. The Durrani, Karzai’s tribe, have dominated for the last two centuries in Afghanistan and regard themselves as the ruling elite. In the south, the Ghilzai were often treated as the nomadic, scrappy cousins. With the exception of Mullah Omar, who had been a poor Ghilzai farmer, the leaders of the Taliban tended to be Durrani. These days, the perception among the southern Ghilzai is that they are persecuted, that the jails are filled with their people, while the Durrani in the south received all the Japanese, U.S. and British contracts and jobs. From what I could gather during my weeks in Afghanistan, these perceptions were mostly true. But even if they were exaggerated, such perceptions, in an illiterate society, have a way of quickly morphing into reality.
Take Panjwai, a district just outside Kandahar, where hundreds of Taliban massed this summer, taking advantage of the changeover from American soldiers to a NATO force of Canadian troops. One afternoon I met a red-haired propagandist and writer for the Taliban in a Kandahar office building. With his slight lisp, chain-smoking habit and eclectic reading — French novelists and Arabic philosophers — he seemed more a tormented graduate student than the landless villager from Panjwai he was. Panjwai is a mishmash of tribes, and the Taliban were exploiting the grievances of the Nurzai, a tribe that has felt persecuted and unfairly targeted for poppy eradication. Traders in Kandahar, he said, were donating money to the Taliban. Landowners were paying them to fight off eradicators. The Taliban were paying poor, unemployed men to fight. And religious scholars were delivering the message that it was time for jihad because the Americans were no different from the Russians. Just a few weeks earlier, the Taliban went on a killing spree in Panjwai. They beheaded a tribal leader in his home, shot another in the bazaar and hanged a man near a shrine with a note tacked on his body: “SPY.”
The Taliban were feeling bold enough that one afternoon Mullah Ibrahim, a Taliban intelligence agent, dropped by my hotel for lunch. He was a Ghilzai, from Helmand, and told me he had tried to lead a normal life under the official amnesty program. Instead, he was locked up, beaten and so harassed by Helmandi intelligence and police officers that his tribal elders told him to leave for Pakistan and join the Taliban there. Then, about a year ago, he decided that he was tired of fighting and living as a fugitive and accepted a reconciliation offer from an Afghan general. Pakistani intelligence got wind of this and imprisoned him; upon his release, the Pakistanis gave him money and a motorbike and pressured him to go back to war. He is still tired of war, but the Pakistanis won’t let him live in peace, and now if he tries to reconcile with the Kabul government, he told me, the Taliban will kill him.
When fighting broke out on the main highway near Kandahar, I saw that the police had tied up a group of villagers — but the Taliban had all escaped. One of those village men, his hands bound behind his back, told me that he had peeped out from his house earlier that day and saw some 200 Taliban with new guns and rocket launchers. They wanted food and threatened him and other villagers. “But I am not afraid of them,” he said loudly. “I am only afraid of this government.” Why? “Look at what they do. They can’t get the Taliban, so they arrest us. We have no hope from them anymore. And when we call and tell them Taliban are here, no one comes.” As an engineer from Panjwai who had been an Afghan senator during the Communist era told me: “We are now like camels. In Islam, a camel can be slaughtered in two different ways.
“The Taliban are using rivalries and enmities between people to get soldiers, the same tactics as the mujahedeen used against the Russians,” the engineer continued. “Just like in Russian times they come and say, ‘We are defending the country from the infidels.’ They start asking for food. Then they ask the people for soldiers and say, ‘We will give you weapons.’ And that’s how it starts. And the emotions are rising in the people now. They are saying, ‘Kaffirs have invaded our land.”’
Qayum Karzai, the president’s older brother and a legislator from Kandahar, seemed utterly depressed when I met him. “For the last four years, the Taliban were saying that the Americans will leave here,” he said. “We were stupid and didn’t believe it. Now they think it’s a victory that the Americans left.”
With the Americans on their way out and the NATO force not yet in control, the Kandahar Police were left on the front line: underfinanced, underequipped, untrained — and often stoned. Which is perhaps what made them so brave. One afternoon I ran into a group who said their friends had just been killed when a Talib posing as a policeman served them poisoned tea. A shaggy-haired officer in a black tunic was standing by his pickup, freshly ripped up by a barrage of bullets, and staring at my feet. “I envy your shoes,” he said, looking back at his own torn rubber sandals. “I envy your Toyota,” he said and laughed. And then looking at my pen and notebook, he said, “I envy you can read and write.” It’s not too late, I offered feebly, but he tapped his temple and shook his head. “It doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “I smoke hash. I smoke opium. I’m drinking because we’re always thinking and nervous.” He was 35. He had been fighting for 20 years. Four of his friends had been killed in the fighting the other night. He had to support children, a wife and parents on a salary of about $100 a month. And, he said, “we haven’t been paid in four months.” No wonder, then, that the population complained that the police were all thieves.
At Kandahar’s hospital I met a 17-year-old policeman (who had been with the police since he was 14) tending to his wounded friend. He was in a jovial mood, amazed he wasn’t dead. He said they had been given an order to cut the Taliban’s escape route. Instead they were ambushed by the Taliban, ran out of bullets and had no phones to call for backup. “We ran away,” he said with a nervous giggle. “The Taliban chased us, shouting: ‘Hey, sons of Bush! Where are you going? We want to kill you.”’
Last month, NATO forces struck back around Panjwai with artillery and aerial bombardments, killing an estimated 500 Taliban fighters and destroying homes and schools. But unless NATO can stay for years, create a trustworthy police force and spend the millions necessary to regenerate the district, the Taliban will be back.
Deciding to Fight
Inside the old city walls of Peshawar, Pakistan, a half-hour drive from the Afghan border, in a bazaar named after the storytellers who enthralled Central Asian gold and silk merchants with their tales of war and tragic love, sits the 17th-century Mohabat Khan Mosque. It is a place of cool, marble calm amid the dense market streets. Yousaf Qureshi is the prayer leader there and director of the Jamia Ashrafia, a Deobandi madrasa. He had recently announced a pledge by the jewelers’ association to pay $1 million to anyone who would kill a Danish cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. Qureshi himself offered $25,000 and a car. I found Qureshi seated on a cushion behind a low glass desk covered with papers and business cards — ambassadors, N.G.O. workers, Islamic scholars, mujahedeen commanders: he has conversed with them all. His office resembles an antiques shop, the walls displaying oversize prayer beads, knives inlaid with ivory and astrakhan caps. It was day’s end, and Qureshi was checking the proofs for his 51st book, called “The Benefits of Koran.”
Qureshi told me that he meets with Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, about twice a year. Qureshi understands Musharraf’s predicament: “The heart of this government is with the Taliban. The tongue is not.” He didn’t claim total insider knowledge, but he said, “I think they want a weak government and want to support the Taliban without letting them win.” Why? “We are asking Musharraf, ‘What are you doing,’ and he says: ‘I’m moving in both ways. I want to support the Taliban, but I can’t afford to displease America. I am caught between the devil and the deep sea.”’
Not long ago, Qureshi said, he received three emissaries from Mullah Omar who wanted Qureshi to warn another religious leader to stop preaching against the Taliban. “I refused,” he said. Later Sheikh Yassin, one of the messengers, was arrested by the I.S.I., Pakistan’s military intelligence service. So why, I asked, does Qureshi say the I.S.I. is supporting the Taliban? “That is the double policy of the government,” he replied. Even in the 1990’s, he said, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was supporting the official Afghan government of Burhanuddin Rabbani while the I.S.I. was supporting his opponent, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as he rained thousands of rockets upon Rabbani’s government and the citizens of Kabul. Qureshi told me that if he and local traders didn’t want Al Qaeda or the Taliban to flourish, then they wouldn’t. “We are supporting them to give the Americans a tough time,” he said. “Leave Afghanistan, and the Taliban and foreign fighters will not give Karzai problems. All the administrators of madrasas know what our students are doing, but we won’t tell them not to fight in Afghanistan.”
The new Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are of three basic types. There are the old war-addicted jihadis who were left out of the 2001 Bonn conference, which determined the postwar shape of Afghan politics and the carve-up of the country. There are the “second generation” Afghan refugees: poor, educated in Pakistan’s madrasas and easily recruited by their elders. And then there are the young men who had jobs and prestige in the former Taliban regime and were unable to find a place for themselves in the new Afghanistan.
Coincidentally, there are also now three fronts. One is led by Mullah Omar’s council in Quetta. The second is led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a hero of the jihad against the Soviets who joined the Taliban. Although well into his 80’s, he orchestrates insurgent attacks through his sons in Paktia, Khost and Paktika, the Afghan provinces close to Waziristan, where he is based. Finally, there is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former leader of Hezb-i-Islami, the anti-Soviet fighters entrusted with the most money and arms by the U.S. and Pakistan. He had opposed the Taliban, living in uneasy exile in Iran until the U.S. persuaded Tehran to boot him out; he sneaked into the mountainous eastern borderlands. Since the early days of Karzai’s government, he has promised to organize Mullah Omar’s followers with his educated cadres and finance their jihad against Karzai and the American invaders. Old competitors are coming together in much the way the mujahedeen factions cooperated to fight the Russians. Hekmatyar adds a lethal ingredient to this stew: his ties and his followers extend all through Afghanistan, including the north and the west, where he is exploiting factional grievances that have nothing to do with the Pashtun discontent in the south.
An Afghan I met outside Peshawar — for his safety he asked me not to use his full name — was typical of the 20-something Talibs who had flourished under the Taliban regime. He was from Day Chopan, a mountainous region in Zabul Province, northeast of Kandahar. When the Northern Alliance and the Americans took Afghanistan, he escaped through the hills on an old smuggling route to the North-West Frontier Province.
It was familiar terrain. A.’s father had been a religious teacher who studied in Sami ul-Haq’s famous Haqqaniya madrasa near the Khyber Pass and preached jihad for Harakat, one of the southern mujahedeen parties whose members filled Mullah Omar’s ranks. Those old ties still bind and have provided a network for recruiting. A. grew up in madrasas in the tribal Pashtun lands of Waziristan, where he learned to fire guns as a child in the American-financed mujahedeen camps. As a teenage religious student in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, he would go door to door collecting bread for his fellow Talibs. Behind one of those doors, he saw a girl and fell in love. When his father wouldn’t let him marry the girl, he threatened to go fight in Afghanistan. His father would not relent, and A. signed up at the local Taliban office in Peshawar. “We got good food, free service, everything was Islamic,” he told me. “It was the best life, rather than staying in that poor madrasa.” His father soon did relent, and A. became engaged, but he was only 15 and had no money. So he went back to the Taliban and was soon working beside the deputy defense minister. “Of course, then there were bags of money,” he said.
A., now 28, was living in an Afghan refugee village that used to belong to Hekmatyar’s group. Weak with malaria, he was nevertheless plump and jovial, even funny at times. Only when the Pakistani intelligence services came up did his already sallow hues pale to old bone.
After fleeing the American bombardment in 2001, he told me, the Taliban arrived in Pakistan tattered, dispersed and demoralized. But in the months after the collapse, senior Taliban leaders told their comrades to stay at home, keep in touch and wait for the call. Some Taliban told me that they actually waited to see if there was a chance to work with Karzai’s government.
“Our emir,” as A. referred to Mullah Omar, slowly contacted the commanders and told them to find out who was dead and who was alive. Those commanders appointed group commanders to collect the underlings like A. Weapons stashed away in Afghanistan’s mountains were excavated. Funds were raised through the wide and varied Islamic network — Karachi businessmen, Peshawar goldsmiths, Saudi oil men, Kuwaiti traders and jihadi sympathizers within the Pakistani military and intelligence ranks.
Mullah Omar named a 10-man leadership council, A. explained. Smaller councils were created for every province and district. Most of this was done from the safety of Pakistan, and in 2003 Mullah Omar dispatched Mullah Dadullah to the madrasas of Baluchistan and Karachi to gather the dispersed Talibs and find fresh recruits. Pakistani authorities were reportedly seen with him. Still, neither Musharraf nor his military men in Baluchistan did anything to arrest him.
It was a perfect job for Dadullah, whose reputation for bravery was matched by his savagery and his many war wounds, collected in more than 25 years of fighting. In 1998, his fighters slaughtered hundreds of Hazaras (Shiites of Mongol descent) in Bamiyan Province, an act so brutal it was even too much for Mullah Omar, who had him disarmed at the time. Dadullah’s very savagery, filmed and now often circulated on videotape, coupled with his promotional flair, were just the ingredients Omar needed to put the Taliban back on the map.
Today, Quetta has assumed the character of Peshawar in the 1980’s, a suspicious place of spies and counterspies and double agents. It is not just the hundreds of men in typical Afghan Pashtun clothing — the roughly wound turbans, dark shalwar kameez, eyes inked with kohl — who squat on Thursday afternoons outside the Kandahari mosque in the center of town, comparing notes on the latest fighting in Helmand or the best religious teachers. Rather, as I wandered the narrow alleyways of the Afghan neighborhoods, my local guides would say, “That’s where Mullah Dadullah was living” or “That’s where Mullah Amir Khan Haqqani is living.” (Haqqani is the Taliban’s governor in exile for Zabul Province.) Mullah Dadullah is now a folk hero for young Talibs like A. And all the Taliban I met told me that every time Dadullah gives another interview or appears on the battlefield, it serves as an instant injection of inspiration.
By 2004, A. said, he was meeting a lot of Arabs — Saudis, Iraqis, Palestinians — who taught the Afghans about I.E.D.’s (improvised explosive devices) and suicide bombings. “They taught us how to put explosives in plastic,” he told me. “They taught us wiring and triggers. The Arabs are the best instructors in that.” But now the Afghans are doing fine on their own. Pakistani jihadis in Afghanistan received their training, they told me, from Pakistani officers in Kashmir.
The southerners have also forged ties with the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan. There is a free flow of arms and men between Waziristan and the Afghan provinces across the border. According to A., even Uzbeks from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have joined some of the fighters now in A.’s home mountains in Day Chopan.
It was disheartening to hear A. describe his first encounter with Americans, who were trying to set up a base in a remote region of Zabul. Though they were building a road where no roads had gone before, he could perceive that asphalt only as a means for the Americans to transport their armored vehicles and occupy Muslim lands. A friend of his joined us as we were talking. He had just arrived in Pakistan from the Day Chopan region and said that the Americans were like a cyclone of evil, stealing their almonds and violating their Pashtunwali (the Pashtun tribal laws). In this instance, he meant the law by which even a cousin will not enter your house without knocking first.
A. is now a media man in Pakistan, coordinating the editing of films for discs, censoring them in case there are commanders who don’t want their faces seen and distributing them. He proudly offered me the latest disc of Mullah Dadullah beheading some “spies for the Americans.” He said he had sold 25,000 CD’s about the fighting in Waziristan.
He was full of contradictions. He said that if he didn’t have a house in Day Chopan, he would never spend a single night there because there was no education, no electricity, no power, nothing, just a heap of stones. Yet he did not want America to change all that. “We don’t like progress by Americans,” he declared. “We don’t like roads by Americans. We would rather walk on tired feet as long as we are walking in an Islamic state.”
Was it all just bravado speaking? Was an opportunity to build bridges to young men like A. somehow lost or just neglected? It was hard to tell. But when the I.S.I. subject came up again, his tone changed. “They are snakes,” he told me. He said that they were trying to create a new, obedient leader and oust the independent-minded Mullah Omar, and for that, the real Taliban hated them. Then he said: “I told you that we burn schools because they’re teaching Christianity, but actually most of the Taliban don’t like this burning of schools or destroying roads and bridges, because the Taliban, too, could use them. Those acts were being done under I.S.I. orders. They don’t want progress in Afghanistan.” An Indian engineer was beheaded in Zabul in April, he said, and that was also ordered by Pakistan, which, from fear of the influence of its enemy, India, was encouraging attacks on Indian companies. “People are not telling the story, because no one can trust anyone, and if I.S.I. knows I told you,” he said, he would be dead.
Pakistan’s Assets
There are many theories for why Pakistan might have wanted to help the Taliban reconstitute themselves. Afghan-Pakistani relations have always been fraught. One among the many disputes has to do with the Durand Line, the boundary drawn up by the British in 1893 partly to divide the Pashtun tribes, who were constantly revolting against the British. The Afghan government has never recognized this line, which winds its way from the Hindu Kush mountains of North-West Frontier Province 1,500 miles down to the deserts of Baluchistan, as its border. Nor have the Pashtun tribes. The Pakistanis may hope to force Karzai to recognize the Durand line in exchange for stability.
Another theory is that Musharraf must appease the religious parties whom he needs to extend his power past the end of his term next year. Musharraf bought them off, gave them control of the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan and let them use the Taliban. And finally, the Pakistanis see Afghanistan as their rightful client. They want an accommodating regime, not Karzai, whose main backers are the U.S. and India, Pakistan’s nemesis.
Pakistan’s well-established secular Pashtun nationalist political leaders remain distraught that their lands have again become sanctuaries for the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani religious parties, which, since elections in 2002, rule these provinces and are completing a Talibanization of the region. The secular leaders point to another layer in Pakistan’s games: keeping the tribal areas autonomous enables Pakistan’s intelligence services to ward off the gaze of Westerners and keep their jihadis safely tucked away.
One thing you notice if you visit the homes of retired generals in Pakistan is that they live in a lavish fashion typical of South America’s dictatorship-era military elite. They control most of the country’s economy and real estate, and like President Musharraf, himself a former general, they do not want to relinquish power.
Although there is a secularist strain in the Pakistani military, it has been aligned with religious hard-liners since the army’s inception in 1947. Many officers still see their duty as defending the Muslim world, but their raison d’être has been undermined by the fact that though Pakistan was founded as a refuge for South Asia’s Muslims, more Muslims today live in India. They seem to envy the jihadis’ clarity. The militants had no identity crises. According to Najim Sethi, a prominent Pakistani journalist, military officers often have “a degree of self-disgust for selling themselves” to the Americans, and they still bear a grudge against the United States for abandoning them after the Afghan jihad and, more recently, for sanctioning Pakistan over its nuclear program. The standard army phrase about the Americans was, he said, “They used us like a condom.”
Officers spoke to me as if they were simply translating the feelings of the jihadis for a tone-deaf audience, but they sounded more like ventriloquists. One retired colonel I spoke to was a relative of a Taliban leader from Waziristan, Abdullah Massoud, who had earned both sympathy and reverence for his time in Guantánamo Bay. Massoud was captured fighting the Americans and the Northern Alliance and spent two years there, claiming to be a simple Afghan Talib. Upon his release, he made it home to Waziristan and resumed his war against the U.S. With his long hair, his prosthetic limb and impassioned speeches, he quickly became a charismatic inspiration to Waziristan’s youth.
Since 2001, some of Waziristan’s tribes have refused to hand over Qaeda members living among them. Under intense American pressure, Pakistan agreed for the first time in its history to invade the tribal areas. Hundreds of civilians and soldiers were killed. American helicopters were seen in the region, as were American spies. The militants (with some army accomplices) retaliated with two assassination attempts against Musharraf late in 2003. He struck back, but as the civilian casualties mounted and the military began to balk at killing Pakistanis, Musharraf agreed to a deal in the spring of 2004 whereby the militants would give up their guests in return for cash. Pakistani officers and the militants hugged and shed tears during a public reconciliation. But the militants did not relinquish their Al Qaeda guests, and they took advantage of the amnesty to execute tribal elders they said had helped the Pakistani military. The tribal structure in Waziristan was devastated, and the Taliban took to the streets to declare the Islamic emirate of Waziristan. Since Musharraf signed a truce with the militants last month, attacks launched from Waziristan into Afghanistan, according to NATO, have risen by 300 percent.
“Muslim governments are not able to face the Americans,” the retired colonel from Waziristan said, explaining the mujahedeen mind-set. “If Muslim governments should stand up against duplicity and foreign hegemonic designs, and they don’t, who will? Someone has to stand up to defend the Muslim countries, and it’s this that gives the jihadis the courage and zeal to stand up to the worst atrocities. This is the core issue of the mujahedeen movement. You call it the war on terror. The mujahedeen call it jihad.” And so, essentially, did he.
One afternoon, in the midst of a monsoon, I sought out one of the founders of the pro-jihadi strategy, the retired general Mirza Aslam Beg. He lived in Rawalpindi, the military capital half an hour from Islamabad, in a brick and tile-roofed mansion with a basketball hoop, flowing greenery and Judy, his one-eyed cocker spaniel. The house was immaculate, with marble floors, rugs, fine china and porcelain on display behind glass and an amusing portrait of Aslam Beg as a young, Ray-Banned, pommaded officer. His mansion sits across the street from Musharraf’s.
Aslam Beg played a leading role in the military’s creation of “asymmetrical assets,” jargon for the jihadis who have long been used by the military as proxies in Kashmir and Afghanistan. He was chief of the army staff from 1988 to 1991, while the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan was selling the country’s nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Beg held talks with the Iranians about exchanging Iranian oil for Pakistani nuclear skill.
Aslam Beg likes to remind visitors that he was one of a group of army officers trained by the C.I.A. in the 1950’s as a “stay-behind organization” that would melt into the population if ever the Soviet Union overran Pakistan. Those brigadiers and lieutenant colonels then trained and directed the Afghan jihadis.
In the 1980’s, “the C.I.A. set up the largest support and administrative bases in Mohmand agency, Waziristan and Baluchistan,” Aslam Beg told me. “These were the logistics bases for eight long years, and you can imagine the relations that developed. And then Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Saudis developed family relations with the local people.” The Taliban, he said, fell back after 2001 to these baselines. “In 2003, when the U.S. attacked Iraq, a whole new dimension was added to the conflict. The foreign mujahedeen who’d fought in Afghanistan started moving back to Afghanistan and Iraq.” And the old Afghan jihadi leaders stopped by the mansion of their mentor, Aslam Beg, to tell him they were planning to wage war against the American occupiers.
As the rain outside turned to hail, banging against the windows, Aslam Beg ate some English sandwiches that had been wheeled in by a servant. “As a believer,” he went on, “I’ll tell you how I understand it. In the Holy Book there’s an injunction that the believer must reach out to defend the tyrannized. The words of God are, ‘What restrains you from fighting for those helpless men, women and children who due to their weakness are being brutalized and are calling you to free them from atrocities being perpetuated on them.’ This is a direct message, and it may not impact the hearts and minds of all believers. Maybe one in 10,000 will leave their home and go to the conflicts where Muslims are engaged in liberation movements, such as Chechnya, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir. Now it’s a global deterrent force.”
The Authentic Jihad
The old city of Lahore, with its broad boulevards and banyan-tree canopies, remains the cultural and intellectual heart of Pakistan. It is home to a small elite of journalists, editors, authors, painters, artists and businessmen. Najam Sethi, editor in chief of The Friday Times, and his wife, Jugnu Mohsin, the publisher, are popular fixtures among this crowd. Like so many of Pakistan’s intellectuals, they have had their share of run-ins with government security agents. For pushing the bounds of press freedom, Sethi was dragged from his bedroom during Nawaz Sharif’s reign, beaten, gagged and detained without charge. Musharraf, in his new autobiography, claims that Nawaz Sharif wanted him to court-martial Sethi for treason, an act that seemed ludicrous to him, and he refused.
I met him one afternoon at the newspaper’s offices as he was preparing his weekly editorial. He is a tall, affable man with smiling eyes and large glasses. And he got right down to business, providing an analysis of why Pakistan had decided to bring its “assets” — by which he meant the Taliban and Kashmiri jihadis — off the shelf.
In the days following 9/11, when Musharraf gathered together major editors to tell them that he had no choice but to withdraw his support for the Taliban, Sethi raised the touchy issue of the other jihadis. He said that if Musharraf was abandoning the Taliban, he would have to abandon the sectarian jihadis (fighting the Shiites), the Kashmir jihadis, all of the jihadis, because they were all trained in mind by the same religious leaders and in body by the same Pakistani forces.
In January 2002, Musharraf gave an unusually long televised speech to the nation. He reminded the people that his campaign against extremism was initiated years before and not under American pressure. He vowed that Pakistan would no longer export jihadis to Kashmir, that he was again placing a ban on several jihadi organizations, that camps would be closed and that while the madrasas were mostly educating the poor, some were centers of extremist teaching and would be reformed. A month later, Musharraf was at the White House next to President Bush, who praised him for standing against terrorism.
Sethi characterized Pakistani authorities as believing that the U.S. in Iraq “will be a Vietnam.” He said: “Afghanistan will be neither here nor there. So we cannot wrap up our assets. We must protect them.” The I.S.I. realized it could help deliver Al Qaeda to the U.S. while keeping the Taliban and the jihadis on the back burner. At the same time, Musharraf’s moderate advisers were telling him that holding on to those assets would eventually boomerang. And soon enough, the assets began to come after Musharraf — while the people of Pakistan were turning against him for being pro-American. “So going after jihadis who were protecting the Taliban came to a halt,” Sethi said.
Meanwhile the landscape next door in Afghanistan was changing. The warlords were back in action. The drug economy was surging. By 2003 and 2004, Musharraf’s men were becoming hysterical about what they saw as a growing Indian presence in Afghanistan, particularly the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad, the Pashtun strongholds that Pakistan considered its own turf. Karzai was doing business with Indians and Americans and was no longer a Pashtun whom Pakistanis would want to do business with.
As Sethi spoke, I recalled a meeting I had with one of Kandahar’s prominent tribal leaders. He recounted a visit from a former Pakistani general who had been active in the I.S.I. The general invited Kandahar’s leaders to lunch and warned them not to let the Indians put a consulate in Kandahar and to remember who their real benefactors were. Today there is a consulate there, and Indian films and music are sweeping through the Pashtun lands. What is more, many Pakistanis believe India is backing the Baluch insurgency in Pakistan’s far south, clouding the prospects for the new, Chinese-built port in Gwadar. The port is Pakistan’s single largest investment in its economic future and has been attacked by Baluch rebels.
In many ways, Pakistani policy is already looking beyond both Karzai and the Americans; they believe it is prudent to imagine a future with neither. That future will be shaped by the past: the past with India, the past with the Soviet Union, the past with America. For Pakistan’s hard-liners, at least, the obvious choice was to take their assets off the shelf and restart the jihad.
A Difficult Choice
On the wall outside the Eid Ga madrasa, in Kuchlak, a parched town near Quetta, Afghan students and teachers were debating the merits of jihad. One boy had just fled an American assault on Day Chopan in Zabul Province. He had never been to Pakistan before. He was frenzied, in shock. As a student from Kandahar led the others in dusk prayer, a young boy whispered to me, “I like America.” They were hardly a unified group. One young Helmandi told me, “We want our traditions of Islam and Sharia, not your democracy,” while another argued for peace. Then the Helmandi asked, with genuine confusion: “Why are Muslims being tortured everywhere in the world, and no one is there to stand up for them? But if you touch one Westerner, the sky is on your head?”
Most madrasas in Pakistan are run by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, the religious-party alliance that has joined with Musharraf to keep the popular parties of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from regaining power. The J.U.I. madrasas usually endorse jihad, although even here I met madrasa students who were against the war. They subscribed to a vision of jihad as a struggle for self-improvement and the improvement of society. Mawlawi Mohammadin, a cleric from Helmand, went so far as to tell me that these are the true roots of jihad, though he confessed that his is a lonely voice. He was afraid of everyone — Taliban, Pakistani intelligence, even his pupils. “If we start openly supporting Karzai, we could be killed by our own students,” he told me with nervous laughter. Only a month earlier, a Taliban official from Helmand who had reconciled with Karzai’s government was gunned down by assassins on a motorbike in Quetta.
Mohammadin said that it is now open season for jihad in Afghanistan under J.U.I. guidance. Government ministers were even attending funerals to praise Pakistani Pashtuns who had died fighting in Kandahar. He estimates that there are some 10,000 Taliban fighters in Baluchistan. Despite the intimidation, he says he feels that his mission is to steer his students away from war.
One of these was Mohamed Nader, who had just attended a cousin’s funeral and was wondering what it all meant. His cousin’s family was poor, and without their knowledge, he had gone to earn money first by harvesting poppies in Helmand and then by fighting for the Taliban. Finally he was killed. Among the biggest problems, Nader told me, was that the cohesion of the Afghan family has been shredded by decades of poverty and refugee life in Pakistan. In a typically strong Afghan family, young adults obey their parents, even asking for permission to go fight. But here, boys just run off.
Rahmatullah was one of those who had run off and returned. He was skinny and disheveled, having just faced heavy fighting in Kandahar. Though an Afghan, he had grown up in Baluchistan, near the border, in an area where he said 200 fighters were now living. The mullah at his madrasa told all the students that it was time for jihad. And the I.S.I. was paying cash. But his father was old and against the war; he pleaded with him to abandon fighting. So he sent Rahmatullah to his friend Mohammadin, hoping he might open another path for his son. Rahmatullah told me that he wasn’t sure yet which mullah he would listen to.
(Next week, Part 2: How U.S. and NATO forces have been battling the Taliban and fighting for hearts and minds.)
Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the magazine, has reported extensively about Afghanistan. Her last article from the region was about the October 2005 Afghan elections.
Correction: Nov. 5, 2006
An article on Oct. 22 about the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan referred imprecisely to an Afghan warlord and general. Abdul Rashid Dostum is chief of staff to the commander of the armed forces, not the army chief of staff.


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October 29, 2006
Taking the Fight to the Taliban
By ELIZABETH RUBIN
Correction Appended
One morning this summer, I headed out with a U.S. Army convoy of Humvees, a truck called a wrecker and a packed supply truck into the Afghan mountains. I was among some two dozen American and Afghan soldiers from Task Force Warrior, an infantry battalion based in Zabul Province, just north of Kandahar. We trundled up a path fit for goats because the nearby riverbed was perfect for concealing improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s. Soon enough, the truck keeled over into the riverbed anyway. To hoist it up, the wrecker had to crash through wheat fields, and within minutes a gray-bearded farmer appeared brandishing his stick. “Are you Afghan?” he shouted at Farooq, my interpreter. “I have 30 members in my family. Why did you destroy my wheat?” The old farmer then clasped my wrist with his ancient garden tool of a hand. “You Americans are all friends of Bush the persecutor. You see this area” — he swept his other arm in every direction — “these are all Taliban. But they don’t have power. As soon as we find power, I will kill all of you.”
Farooq tried to calm him, but the farmer was fixated on his crushed wheat stalks until he spotted First Sgt. Ruel Robbins, a red-cheeked, chest-first sort. Robbins looked the farmer over, then said, “Tell him I’m real sorry to drive over his wheat, but I had to ’cause my vehicle turned over.” The farmer eyed the sacks in the supply truck; Robbins gave him one of rice and two of flour.
The farmer watched us take off in a swirl of dust, and Specialist Melissa Elliot, who was driving our Humvee, said to Farooq: “We’re not trying to hurt them. We’re trying to protect their security. Why’d he get so upset with us? Is their wheat part of their religion or something?”
“It’s the food for his family, ma’am,” Farooq said patiently.
And so began our mission into the mountains of Zabul Province, 6,500 square miles of desert, farmland and 9,000-foot peaks with almost no paved roads to link one patch to the next. It’s a place where, just decades ago, families lived as nomads, until King Mohammad Zahir Shah gave them government land to settle on, and where national politics is superseded by Pashtunwali — the Pashtun codes for tribal coexistence, based on retaliation, mediation and hospitality. In 1994, when the Taliban movement of young religious students swept into Zabul offering an end to illegal road taxes and warlord rule, Zabul’s leaders simply joined hands with their Pashtun brothers. After the Taliban’s fall, President Hamid Karzai’s nephew was dispatched to head the Zabul Police; in July 2002, I found him besieged by locals, who put feces in his food and threatened to kill him. For five years now American forces have been chasing the Taliban in Zabul and attempting reconstruction. The police buildings have improved. A new hospital (financed by the United Arab Emirates) was finished. Roads were being laid in terrain so remote that when the Americans turned up, the villagers thought they must be Russians. The Americans opened a trade school in Qalat, the capital. But the pace of progress has been painfully slow. These remain the Taliban’s mountains.
There are 42,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan today, trying to secure a country that is a third again the size of Iraq, where there are almost 150,000 U.S.-led troops. In the past two years, more than 300 American and NATO soldiers have died trying to stave off a resurgent Taliban. Already this year, some 1,500 Afghans have been killed. And while there were just two suicide bombings in 2002, there is now one about every five days.
With the Taliban’s alarming offensive, which began last spring, American generals began speaking of a different war — not a war against terror but a war of ideas. In military jargon this meant balancing kinetic and nonkinetic activity. Or, in plain speech, fighting the Taliban versus nation-building, two goals often at odds. “This is the war for the people,” Lt. Col. Frank Sturek, the battalion commander of Task Force Warrior, told me. Sturek served in Iraq under Lt. Gen. David Petraeus — one of the military’s leading thinkers on counterinsurgency — in Mosul, a city with 50,000 university students. In Zabul, by contrast, the literacy rate is 15 percent, at best. Sometimes Sturek couldn’t tell if people wanted to be catapulted to the 21st century or just left alone. On that he deferred to Delbar Jan Arman, the governor of Zabul Province and a former anti-Soviet mujahedeen, who mentored him on local ways — distinguishing a Taliban killing from a tribal feud or a quarrel over a boy lover. Arman explained cultural sensitivities: how pulling off a man’s turban or opening the clothing box of a woman could set off a revolt. Sturek would nod. “The standard military play is, Land in, round up the men, find someone who is nasty and mean and arrest him, drop off supplies and split,” Sturek told me. “We’re trying to humanize ourselves. It’s uncomfortable. You train an infantry battalion to kill the enemy, and it’s hard to tone it down.” The governor’s response was always: “The people are simple. We can win this war if the Army stays nice with the people and if we embrace them.”
After many sweaty hours, we rumbled into the Alamo Bar and Grill in Kharnay, elevation 8,000 feet. It was a fitting name for an outpost fashioned from a mud schoolhouse — dusty, waterless and powerless except for what the soldiers slurped off a Humvee battery. Charlie Company, Fourth Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, had been based here for nine weeks already when we arrived. They had been living on meals ready to eat, or M.R.E.’s, patrolling the mountains with packs weighing 60 pounds or more, befriending locals and being mortared and ambushed once or twice a week. Their skin was burned, their uniforms ripped. But for this evening, all suffering was suspended for barbecue night. The Humvees had brought frozen slabs of beef from the United States.
In downtime, the soldiers of Charlie Company would cram into a mud room to imbibe American culture — “Shark Tale,” “The Bourne Supremacy,” Lil Wayne, Toby Keith singing his “Taliban Song” — all courtesy of Pvt. Dennis Taylor and his DVD and CD collection. A teenager from Tampa’s housing projects, Taylor grew up with the Bloods. The Army has set him straight, even if his buddies teased him because they couldn’t decipher his lingo and he wasn’t sure what continent he was on or what the Koran was. “It’s Islam’s holy book,” said one soldier. “Man, how can you be fighting here and not know that,” another teased. Taylor laughed and shrugged.
At the other end of the spectrum was Cpl. Kyle Hayes, who had made Taylor his project and, like Sgt. Jon Terry, a sentimental tough guy from Louisiana, often shared meals with the Afghan soldiers accompanying their unit to taste their culture and to bond. Hayes owned a Web design company in New York City and until two years ago was touring with his band, “Half Left.” The band had a revelation while producing a record near ground zero in Manhattan, and they all joined the Army. Hayes’s family was stunned. “I was the only guy at basic training who voted for Kerry,” he told me. Sometimes he felt weird on leave in New York City, where people gawk at uniforms, though a few older people thanked him. His life plan, as inscribed in his diary, is to be a rock star, business mogul and founder of a Texan city by 35, governor of Texas by 45 and president by 55.
Anticipation hung over the Alamo. Charlie Company’s next mission was a bit of deceptive theater intended to lure the Taliban into ambushing the soldiers so they could counterattack. Part of the strategy involved Lt. Nathan Shields — a smiling, easygoing officer from Rochester — posing as a gullible new commander. Meanwhile, units hiding in the mountains would block the Taliban’s escape. That night, a few squads hiked up a thousand feet, each soldier hauling water (temperatures in the day are usually in the 100’s), food, rifle, knife, flashlight and first-aid kit, all atop 35 pounds of armor and ammunition. The Afghan soldiers carried little besides a rifle and ammunition. The American infantryman’s burden is the Taliban’s biggest advantage. Fleet-footed, carrying little more than an AK and a walkie-talkie, Taliban fighters could sail over the mountains.
The next morning we headed toward Solan, a village so unfriendly that when American soldiers airlifted in a bridge months earlier, it was burned down the next day. “We don’t know if the Taliban burnt it or the villagers,” Lt. David Patton, a tall, circumspect Texan with Task Force Warrior, said of the bridge in Solan. “Everyone believes in the mission,” he added, “but there’s an underlying thought that when we leave, it’ll go back to the way it was.” As Zabul’s governor, Arman, had told me, Zabul’s religious leaders all supported the Taliban, and in Afghanistan the most powerful platform is the minbar, a pulpit where the mullah delivers his Friday sermon. So although villagers were friendly when the Americans patrolled, they refused to help rebuild a school and a bazaar, for example, fearing retaliation from the Taliban who had destroyed them.
Shortly after we left the first village on our route to Solan, the Afghan soldiers began picking up Taliban radio chatter about the new Americans. Robbins was pleased. We were the bait, and the plan was working. We spread out along the gorge for a long, edgy march. Outside Solan, we met Sayed Ali Sheikh, an elder of the area, in whose compound the Americans had stayed before. He said he couldn’t guarantee that the place wasn’t rigged with explosives, but nevertheless he handed Robbins the key, showed us shrapnel the size of a skateboard that had ricocheted off a mountain when American planes dropped a 500-pound bomb — and vanished. In no time, the soldiers transformed Ali Sheikh’s compound into a base of operations: satellite hookup to call the Air Force for cover, mortar base near the well, sniper positions.
Ten lean men in turbans came to meet Shields, who played his role as new commander somewhat awkwardly. A strange dialogue ensued, led by one of the 10 men, Haji Gailani, whose oversize glasses, gabardine vest and cane denoted authority. He said that they didn’t deny Taliban fighters were nearby. “If you can catch those people, thank you,” he said. “If you want to slaughter my neck, please do.” There was a little nervous laughter. No, no, Shields said, of course not. Then Gailani said: “You have planes. You can hear the Taliban on your radios. And still you cannot force them out of here. How can we?”
Others began to speak up. Planes had attacked the mountains the night before, the men said. They had heard about the bombing of civilians in Kandahar. They wanted to know if they were about to be bombed. Robbins advised them to stay near the thickest walls and shut off the lights. Then they left.
And the waiting began. Pvt. Andrew Richards pulled out photos of his family, who lived in Colombia. Specialist Jonathon Routledge, whose voice still cracked and who couldn’t believe he was roped into the Army by some cool recruitment videos, poked at a chick that was pecking at spilled tea. Shields and the medic climbed onto the compound roof to give coordinates in case of a medevac. Pvt. Jason Belford was so itchy that he played can-you-down-a-pack-of-crackers-in-two-minutes.
The radio began sputtering with Taliban voices. An Afghan policeman, who went by the code name No. 5, had found their frequency. He heard them discussing our compound. They knew everything: how many Americans and Afghans, the location of the mortar, the sniper positions, the satellite and the flower (code for me, the woman in the group). Presumably one of our earlier visitors was an informant. No. 5 seemed a little dodgy, too — perhaps working only for the troops, perhaps the Taliban, perhaps both.
Shields, Sgt. Jeff Griffin, Belford and a few others moved out to check the area around the compound for mines. Just as we neared the rock garden, a detonation jolted us. A deafening sound. A black smoke squall. Amazingly, no one was hurt. But something was wrong. They had been out to that rock garden twice and found nothing. Suspicion fell on No. 5.
“Fire a mortar,” shouted one of the soldiers. Dan Guenther, a sniper from Texas, spotted something. Everyone assumed an imminent showdown. Someone threw a grenade into an outcropping to see if it was booby-trapped.
“If you’re gonna come to the party, come already!” shouted Guenther. Then he suggested they should all run out in front of the house, smack their butts and provoke a fight. It was 6:42 p.m., and the light was fading. Shields and a few others popped out of the compound’s shelter, hoping to draw fire. As darkness fell, I climbed up to talk to Specialist Tommy Glasgow, who was perched on the roof. He said that there was no way the Taliban would pick a fight after seeing all the U.S. fire power and listening to the bombers occasionally buzzing overhead. We talked about the mission in Zabul, and Glasgow said: “As bad as I don’t want to be here, we should be. The Romanians are coming to take over from us, and the Taliban are just gonna cream ’em.”
The fight never did come, and when we got back to the Alamo, the Americans were packing, and the Afghan police and soldiers appeared bewildered, convinced they would be dead in 24 hours. One policeman had already defected to the Taliban, I was told. “We’ll be bombing this compound in a few weeks ’cause it’ll be filled with Taliban,” Hayes told me. He tried to find an hour every day to write in his diary. On May 12, for example, he had written: “I killed some people last night. Second squad is out looking for corpses right now. We got mortared right around dark ... when I was getting all the last stuff done for the day, and I got a hypoglycemic attack when I was doing sit-ups. It was still a good day, though. I got a lot done. Everyday I grow stronger.”
A few days later, the Alamo was indeed abandoned by the Afghan forces.
The final draft of the U.S. military’s latest counterinsurgency manual, written under the direction of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. James Mattis, emphasizes that if you skimp on resources, endurance and meeting the population’s security requirements, you lose. Yet for the past five years, the Pashtun provinces have been plagued by a lack of troops and resources. James Dobbins, President George W. Bush’s former special envoy to Afghanistan, blames the White House, which he said had a predisposition against nation-building and international peacekeeping. The Bush administration rejected Afghan and State Department appeals to deploy a peacekeeping force in the provinces, dismissed European offers of troops and had already begun shifting military resources to Iraq, Dobbins told me, while U.S. troops in Afghanistan were to be limited to counterterrorism. “In manpower and money,” he added, “this was the least resourced American nation-building effort in our history.” In Afghanistan, the White House spent 25 times less per capita than in Bosnia and deployed one-fiftieth the troops. Much of the money that was pledged didn’t show up for years. “The main lesson of Afghanistan is low input, low output,” Dobbins said. “If you commit low levels of military manpower and economic assistance, what you get are low levels of security and economic growth.”
The draft counterinsurgency manual is thoughtful, full of details and warnings like these: losing moral legitimacy means losing the war; the more force is used, the less effective it is; provoking combat usually plays into the enemy’s hands; and building a government through illegitimate actions like unlawful detention and torture is self-defeating, even against fighters who conceal themselves among noncombatants.
Yet while I was in the south, I saw how readily vicious practices are condoned. An Afghan security official who insisted that I not use his name but who was an aide to a prominent southern governor, told of an instance when they couldn’t find a boy suspected of plotting an attack. “We sent out a command — arrest all his brothers, uncles, cousins, relatives, all of them,” he said. “When we arrested the relatives, no one knew what that boy was doing. Still we beat them all until they would shout, ‘Write that we killed 5 or 10 people, whatever you want, and I will say anything.’ ” In Zabul’s provincial capital, Qalat, the police proudly showed me three “Taliban” they had just captured. One of them had been beaten so badly he could hardly walk, and his feet were oozing puss. His eyes were mere wrinkles in swollen tissue. An American intelligence officer looked slightly embarrassed when he walked into the police station.
With a corrupt justice system, young Afghan men on the receiving end of injustice have often felt their honor could only be restored through acts of revenge. One night, a doctor introduced me to a young farmer who asked me not to use his name. He had been shot by U.S. forces in a gunfight a year earlier. Seven metal clamps were holding his leg in place. Though deeply religious, he never liked the Taliban regime. His family was relieved when Mullah Omar and the “Afghan Arabs” who first came to fight the Soviets in the 1980’s fled Kandahar. He believed that Karzai and the international community would help build the country. “But they didn’t,” he said in the dark little flat where we met. “They just came to arrest the people.” His father was a tribal leader with pomegranate orchards, and relatives often appealed to him to get their family members out of Afghan and American prisons. He would urge the Americans not to be fooled by false reports naming “Taliban.” The real Taliban had mostly fled to Pakistan.
About a year and a half ago, he told me, a mine exploded next to an American convoy. His father was sitting in a mosque when he was rounded up by coalition troops. Twenty days later, his father’s body was dropped off at a hospital. “I couldn’t control myself,” the young man said, nearly knocking over the gas lamp with his awkward, pogo-stick leg. “I wanted to avenge. I knew where the Taliban operated, because they would come at night, and so I found the commander of a small group. He welcomed me warmly and told me: ‘It is the time of jihad. You are a lion and a hero.’ ”
Colonel Sturek, a powerfully built, blue-eyed Maryland man so cleanshaven that he appeared bald, and Governor Arman, a heavily bearded engineer, made an unlikely team. They shared a meal of sheep, rice and melon four times a week to talk strategy. Sturek loved Arman’s vision of a network of roads by 2008, linking up Zabul’s remote districts, where they would build schools and markets. Zabul straddled the most dangerous stretch of highway in Afghanistan. After 3 each afternoon, Taliban blocked the roads, looking for foreigners, money, spies, satellite phones. Sometimes they would just burn up buses or trucks. They even set loose a donkey on the path to an American base, rigged with rockets, mortars and a detonation card.
Across Afghanistan’s southern provinces, American and Afghan troops were responding to the Taliban resurgence with Operation Mountain Thrust. In Zabul, the focus was on Taliban fighters in the Day Chopan mountains. Sturek’s goal was to disable the Taliban leadership, allow the Americans to find weapons caches, bring in aid and persuade people that they had no intention of interfering with their religion. As the full moon moved into place last May, enabling a predawn landing, Afghan and American soldiers with Charlie Company, Special Forces and U.S. doctors air-assaulted into the Day Chopan mountains, taking scattered gunfire, and descended on the tiny village of Hazarbuz. Special Forces soldiers with goggled sniffer dogs rounded up the men, numbered their hands with markers and interrogated them. Some were arrested and flown back to base camp. I followed Jeff Griffin and his squad, who were dispatched to the villagers’ homes with a message: Governor Arman is coming here to find out what you need, and a medical team has come to treat sick people and animals. This was typical of the American balancing act in Afghanistan. The Village Medical Outreach unit consists of reservist doctors who bring chests full of hygiene kits and medicine to villages that have just been raided by fighting forces.
We climbed up a hill through apricot and almond orchards to reach the scattered homes. We found a woman in a red velvet dress, who had beaded necklaces and a pair of scissors dangling from her neck. She said that the men were all sleeping. Then she said that they had left when we came. Griffin told her about the doctors, but she seemed frightened and said that she didn’t want medical attention. We wandered from house to house until a radio call came in from an observation unit. They had seen a boy wearing black, possibly an informant, running toward one of the houses.
More climbing, more rocks, until we reached a wind-swept mountain top where an old crippled man emerged to hug Griffin, who hugged him back, uncomfortably — after all, he had come to search his house. He then ordered the boy in black to move to a clearing so the observation unit, on a nearby mountain, could see if he was the runner. The soldiers rummaged through the house, turning up small piles of paper and boxes that seemed suspect. It turned out that the boxes were full of snuff and the house was just a shop. As we were about to leave, the radio blared out to Griffin: Don’t forget to tell them about the Village Medical Outreach.
As we rambled back down under the noonday sun, exhausted and thirsty, plucking apricots, almonds and mulberries off the trees, I remembered the Afghans I’d met complaining about Americans pillaging their harvest. It wasn’t hard to see how a few apricots could transmute into theft or how speaking to a woman after you have rounded up all the men could transmute into “Americans are abusing our women.” One afternoon, I had a car accident in Zabul. Within minutes, some 100 men pulled over and began heaving the wreck out of the ditch. As I crouched in the dirt wrapped in a tentlike Kuchi shawl, not a single man glanced my way. Rather, they asked my wounded translator if his wife was O.K. Someone must have sensed a foreigner, however, because 10 minutes after we left for the hospital, the Taliban showed up. They pummeled the driver, demanding to know what happened to the foreigner. He lied and saved his life. But that moment, when not one person glanced my way, offered a window into how seriously they abide by rules that are utterly alien to a 19-year-old American soldier. Sturek constantly struggled with pushing “cultural sensitivity” down the chain of command. It was nearly impossible.
On our long walk back down the mountain, two privates were trying to grapple with the contingencies of their lives, free will, U.S. history and America’s intangible objectives. They were having an existential moment and craving a meal at Red Lobster. This valley in Zabul reminded one of them, Specialist Joshua Pete, of canyons where the U.S. Army once fought his Navajo ancestors. Pete thought he had had a calling, that his country needed him. But because of Afghanistan, he had lost both his scholarship to Dartmouth and his fiancée. He didn’t believe in “this” anymore. Half the Afghans, he said, didn’t even want “our billions to build this country.” He wanted to be home fighting drug gangs in downtown L.A. or helping impoverished people in Flagstaff.
Back in the village of Hazarbuz, I found Governor Arman in his white robes, blazer and turban, sipping tea with Colonel Sturek. After one week, the governor said, once we were all gone, the Taliban would punish the people for sitting with Americans and the governor. Sturek agreed, but added that if the Americans didn’t come, the people would have no idea there was an alternative.
Men and boys filtered down to meet the governor. They sat cross-legged, skeptical, nervous. Arman was an earthy man, and while kind (“Tell anyone who has run to the mountains to come talk, there’ll be no trouble. I am your governor. Why am I here? To hear your problems.”), he also let them have it.
“Look at your kids,” he said, pointing to the boys. The men did, and he winced. “Look at their hands and feet, the infections on their skin, their bad education. Everyone looks sick. Don’t they have the right to be educated?
“Are the Punjabi kids in this situation?” he then asked, referring to the children of the ruling ethnic group in Pakistan. “Why do people call it jihad here in Afghanistan? Why don’t they fight this jihad in Quetta and Pakistan? We need to defend our country from the Punjabis.”
He told them that this war was a Pakistani drama. The Pakistanis were sending Taliban to burn Afghan schools while their own children were being educated. If America leaves, he warned, you will all be slaves of Pakistan.
Over the three days we stayed, Arman’s speeches grew harsher, and the men who visited him and Sturek grew more numerous and more attentive. The governor and the colonel could pick out the Taliban informants — like the young man with good sneakers whom everyone deferred to. Jin Kong radios, which work with solar power, batteries or a hand crank, were handed out by the U.S. military to the locals. The elders got bicycles; kids, school bags with pencils and other supplies.
Why did these Americans come here, the governor bellowed? Because the Taliban had not been nice with the people of this country. The Taliban beat the women, cut the heads off people, went to the north and made tribal enmity for Afghan people. How many Hazara, he asked, were killed in Shajoy (a district of Zabul)? Taliban had slaughtered hundreds of Hazara, an ethnic group descended from the Mongols and primarily Shiite. Arman repeated the accounts of Taliban cutting the throat of a little girl in front of her mother, then killing the mother, of the Taliban putting a gun in the mouth of a boy, who began to suck it and then they shot him. “Don’t you have sons?” he asked. Some of the men averted their eyes, fidgeting in the dust.
On one occasion, Arman asked the men who had come if any among them could read and write. He held up a paper with the word God written on it. None of them could read. “If you can’t read the name of God, you are blind,” he said. Trying to raise their Pashtun pride, he pointed to one of the interpreters, a Hazara from the neighboring district of Jaghori. “What is your district like?” he asked the interpreter, who dutifully reported it had 72 schools, 32 of them high schools, and that all boys and girls were educated. They had electricity, radio stations, lawyers and engineers. “Why are we Pashtuns always fighting?” asked the governor. “You will all be laborers to the Jaghori people because you are illiterate and uneducated.”
Perhaps, but the men wanted to know when their relatives would be let out of U.S. prisons in Kandahar and Bagram. And then a rocket exploded, then another, then gunfire began to echo back and forth between the valley walls. I trekked up to where snipers were perched on a small slope in front of a boulder. On the radio, we could hear Shields, who had taken some men and gone to patrol a valley. He was amazingly calm. “We’re under fire,” he said. “We’re in a riverbed on the side of a hill.” In fact, they were pinned down in an irrigation ditch with bullets throwing up dust and rocks all around them. An A-10 Warthog screeched across the sky as a 500-pound bomb smacked the side of the mountain.
We could still hear Shields breathing as he walked up the mountain. And that oddly calm voice: “We’re definitely putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Pretty much anywhere I’m standing they could take us out.”
A donkey began braying as the full moon drifted up above the mountains. Capt. Craig Johnson told Lieutenant Shields to watch out because shadows would cast long with that moon.
The Taliban, judging from the radio communications we were monitoring, seemed to be wounded and out of ammunition. One of them invited another to prayer. The other demurred, saying he was worried that he would be spotted. “O.K., then pray there, and I’ll pray here,” the first man said. Later, when I met a Taliban commander in Pakistan, he told me that they knew the Americans listened to their radios, so that the five daily prayers were often used as code to signal anything from “I’ve run out of food” to “Ambush them.”
The next afternoon, we flew by helicopter to Andar, a nearby village. I sat in the fields with a former teacher named Anwarjan. The governor had appointed him district chief for all of Day Chopan, but Anwarjan could barely travel. The entire province, he said, was Taliban. Still, he was busy with Shields getting hundreds of kids to school in the central town. He had convinced the parents that Pakistan wants their children to stay wild and uneducated. “I have 300 students now,” he said. “They’re changed. They are polite, greet people, treat their mothers well. One man can change a generation.”
But his efforts, he said, were being undermined by the constant incursions of Taliiban from Pakistan. “The leader of Day Chopan, Mullah Kahar, lives in Quetta,” in Pakistan, Anwarjan said. “All the heads are there. So why don’t you do anything?”
U.S. intelligence knows the same thing. As Seth Jones, an analyst with Rand, told The New York Times earlier this year, Pakistani intelligence agents are advising the Taliban about coalition plans and tactical operations and provide housing, support and security for Taliban leaders. Sturek told me that the U.S. is well aware that the Taliban heads are in Quetta. On one side, he said, most U.S. policy makers argue that the Pakistanis are our friends. On the other side are those, including some in the military, who say, “Let’s just drive into Quetta.”
I often received updates from Charlie Company soldiers after leaving Afghanistan. One of their platoon was killed heading up to an observation post in Day Chopan. After they pulled out of Day Chopan, one of the soldiers told me, they heard that things weren’t going so well and that the Taliban were using the fact that the Romanians had taken over to claim the Russians were back. And another soldier wrote: “Our platoon got sent to a National Guard unit to help them out. They’ve lost like six people in the last week, but none of them were from our platoon.We were in Kandahar for a little while to get resupplied, and you’re notkidding about the Canadians going down.We kept having to go to the big ceremonies for their bodies to get loaded on the plane.It seemed like they were getting messed up pretty bad. I definitely don’t get the whole ‘success story’ thing.”
Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the magazine, has reported extensively about Afghanistan. This is the second of two articles.
Correction: December 17, 2006
An article on Oct. 29 about the war in Afghanistan referred imprecisely to the educational opportunities of a U.S. soldier before he joined the front. Specialist Joshua Pete did not lose a scholarship to Dartmouth because of the war. He was ruminating about what might have been possible if in fact he had applied to the college. This correction was delayed by efforts to reach Specialist Pete in Afghanistan.
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February 24, 2008
Battle Company Is Out There
By ELIZABETH RUBIN

WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the Americans’ small mountain outposts, but the area’s reputation among the soldiers was mythic. It was a known safe haven for insurgents. American troops have tended to avoid the place since a nasty fight a year or so earlier. And as Halloween approached, the soldiers I was with, under the command of 26-year-old Capt. Dan Kearney, were predicting their own Yaka China doom.
The Korengal Valley is a lonely outpost of regress: most of the valley’s people practice Wahhabism, a more rigid variety of Islam than that followed by most Afghans, and about half of the fighters confronting the U.S. there are homegrown. The rest are Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks; the area is close to Pakistan’s frontier regions where Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda figures are often said to be hiding out. The Korengal fighters are fierce, know the terrain and watch the Americans’ every move. On their hand-held radios, the old jihadis call the Americans “monkeys,” “infidels,” ‘’bastards” and “the kids.” It’s psychological warfare; they know the Americans monitor their radio chatter.
As far as “the kids” are concerned, the insurgents are ghosts — so the soldiers’ tactics often come down to using themselves as bait. The insurgents specialize in ambushes, harassing fire and hit-and-run attacks. NATO’s military advantage in such a war is air power. The soldiers don’t hesitate to call in Big Daddy (who, in today’s military, often flies in with the voice of a female pilot). But while these flying war machines are saviors to the soldiers, they cannot distinguish between insurgents and civilians.
I went to Afghanistan last fall with a question: Why, with all our technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes? As of September of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, NATO was causing alarmingly high numbers of civilian deaths — 350 by the coalition, compared with 438 by the insurgents. The sheer tonnage of metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds between January and September of 2007, compared with half a million in all of 2006.
After a few days, the first question sparked more: Was there a deeper problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? More than 100 American soldiers were killed last year, the highest rate since the invasion. Why were so many more American troops being killed? To find out, I spent much of the fall in the Korengal Valley and elsewhere in Kunar province alongside soldiers who were making life-and-death decisions almost every day — decisions that led to the deaths of soldiers and of civilians.
Subduing the Valley
OVER THE LAST two years, the Americans have steadily increased their presence in Kunar province, fanning out to the small platoon-size outposts that have become the signature of the new counterinsurgency doctrine in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Korengal Outpost, nicknamed the KOP, was built in April 2006 on the site of a former timber mill and motel. The soldiers of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team live there in dusty tents and little wooden huts. They now have hot food and a small chow tent with an Internet linkup and a few phones for calling home. But the place was protected by not much more than concertina wire and sentries. Nearly every time I arrived at the KOP our helicopter was greeted by sniper fire or the dushka — a Russian-made antiaircraft gun.
Dan Kearney was essentially lord of the Korengal Valley. A self-described Georgia army brat, he grew up idolizing his warrior dad, Frank Kearney, and wanted to move in his father’s world of covert and overt operations. (His father is now a lieutenant general in Special Operations command.) Kearney often calls himself a dumb jock, playing the crass, loudmouthed tough guy with his soldiers. He had been in Iraq and told me he had gone emotionally dead there with all the dying and killing, and stayed that way until the birth of his son a year ago. His hardest day in Iraq was when a close friend, Rob Shaw, was severely wounded by an improvised explosive device that killed his first sergeant and a bunch of their friends — and the next thing he knew their colonel was asking Kearney to step in for Shaw and lead the company.
But as hard as Iraq was, he said, nothing was as tough as the Korengal. Unlike in Iraq, where the captains and lieutenants could let down their guard in a relatively safe, fortified operating base, swapping stories and ideas, here they had no one to talk to and were almost as vulnerable to enemy fire inside the wire as out. Last summer, insurgents stormed one of the bases in a nearby valley and wounded 16.
And unlike every other place I’ve been in Afghanistan — even the Pech River valley, just an hour’s drive away — the Korengal had no Afghan police or district leaders for the Americans to work with. The Afghan government, and Afghans down the valley, seemed to have washed their hands of the Korengalis. As Kearney put it to me one day at the KOP, the Korengal is like a tough Los Angeles neighborhood, “and we’re the L.A.P.D. kicking in the door, arresting guys, demanding information about the gangs, and slowly the people say, ‘No, we don’t know anything, because that guy in the gang, he’s with my sister, and that other guy, he’s my uncle’s cousin.’ Now we’ve angered them for so many years that they’ve decided: ‘I’m gonna stick with the A.C.M.’ ” — anticoalition militants — “ ‘who are my brothers and I’m not gonna rat them out.’ ”
So what exactly was his job out here? To subdue the valley. It’s a task the Marines had tried, and then the soldiers of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division — a task so bloody it seemed to drive the 10th Mountain’s soldiers to a kind of madness. Kearney’s soldiers told me they’d been spooked by the weird behavior of their predecessors last May: near the end of their tour, many would sit alone on the fire base talking to themselves. Privates disobeyed their sergeants, and squad leaders refused to step outside the wire to show the new boys the terrain. No one wanted to be shot in the last days of his tour.
Kearney kept his soldiers on a tight leash at first. Col. John Nicholson, a brigade commander with the 10th Mountain Division, had promised the Afghans he would not bomb their homes. When Kearney and the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team officially took over from the division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team on June 5, they kept that promise. “My guys would tell me they didn’t know which houses they’re shooting from, and I’d tell them they can’t shoot back into the villages,” Kearney recalled. “They hated me.” The insurgents were testing the new captain, he suspected, by deliberately shooting from homes. On July 10, the Korengalis ambushed his soldiers from one house they often used — a three-story mansion on a fertile outcropping, with balconies overlooking the valley, that belonged to Haji Matin, a timber baron turned insurgent leader. It had been the scene of fighting in the past.
When Kearney’s moment of decision came, two of 2nd Platoon’s sergeants, Kevin Rice and Tanner Stichter, had been shot, and the fight was still going on. Kearney could see a woman and child in the house. “We saw people moving weapons around,” Kearney told me. “I tried everything. I fired mortars to the back side to get the kids to run out the front. I shot to the left, to the right. The Apache” — an attack helicopter — “got shot at and left. I kept asking for a bomb drop, but no one wanted to sign off on the collateral damage of dropping a bomb on a house.” Finally, he said, “We shot a javelin and a tow” — both armor-piercing missiles. “I didn’t get shot at from there for two months,” Kearney said. “I ended up killing that woman and that kid.”
Kearney could often sound cold-blooded, like when he’d march into the mess tent in shorts, improvising rap lyrics about killing bad guys. But then he’d switch to counselor, trying to salvage a soldier’s marriage, or he’d joke with a Korengali elder about arranging a marriage between his own infant son and the elder’s daughter to make peace. The performances steeled him against shouldering so much mortality. As he put it, “The only reason anyone’s listening to me in this valley right now is ’cause I’m dropping bombs on them.” Still, he wasn’t going to let himself shoot at houses every time his unit took fire: “I’d just create more people that hate me.”
A Blood Feud
IN LATE 2001, the B-52 symbolized, for many Afghans, liberation from Taliban rule. They wove images of the plane into their carpets. Urban legends sprang up about the B-52’s power, how the planes glided along unscathed, even as the Taliban barraged them with antiaircraft fire. Kabulis spread the story that the B-52s had dropped thousands of leaflets saying, “Hit us if you can!” — and afterward the Taliban didn’t waste their bullets on the B-52s.
But the jets that defeated the Taliban were wiping out innocent families as well. In July 2002, Special Forces in the mountains of Oruzgan thought they were destroying a high-value Taliban target, but instead they rocketed and bombed an engagement party. About 40 Afghans were killed and nearly 100 were wounded.
Such mistakes have continued, though the causes can change. The insurgents regularly use civilians as shields, children as spotters and women as food suppliers. NATO killing civilians is great propaganda for the Taliban. At the same time, to Afghans with little technological sophistication, the scale and impersonality make the accidents seem intentional. Many are convinced the Americans are deliberately bombing them and even deliberately aiding a Taliban comeback. The reality is that bombs are only as accurate as the intelligence on the ground — and since 9/11, the U.S. and NATO have used air power as a substitute for ground troops.
By now, seven years of air strikes and civilian casualties, humiliating house searches and arbitrary detentions have pushed many families and tribes to revenge. The Americans then see every Afghan in those pockets of recalcitrance as an enemy. If you peel back the layers, however, there’s always a local political story at the root of the killing and dying. That original misunderstanding and grievance fertilizes the land for the Islamists. Whom do you want to side with: your brothers in God’s world or the infidel thieves?
In the case of the Korengal Valley, the story began about a century ago, when the tribesmen now known as Korengalis were kicked out of the province of Nuristan (immediately north of Kunar province) and settled in the Korengal, which was rich with timber forests and farmland. Over time they made an alliance with one branch of the large Safi tribe, which once dominated Kunar politics. But down the road along the Pech River valley, the rest of the Safis opposed the Korengalis.
As the Afghans tell the story, from the moment the Americans arrived in 2001, the Pech Valley timber lords and warlords had their ear. Early on, they led the Americans to drop bombs on the mansion of their biggest rival — Haji Matin. The air strikes killed several members of his family, according to local residents, and the Americans arrested others and sent them to the prison at Bagram Air Base. The Pech Valley fighters working alongside the Americans then pillaged the mansion. And that was that. Haji Matin, already deeply religious, became ideological and joined with Abu Ikhlas, a local Arab linked to the foreign jihadis.
By 2007, the Americans understood what happened. Last year, the governor of Nuristan even sat them down with the Korengali elders to try and mediate between the two sides. Nothing came of it. Kearney tried to dig deeper, sending e-mail messages to anthropologists and Afghan experts to get their guidance. He spent hours listening to Haji Zalwar Khan — who acted as the valley’s representative to the Americans and the government — talk about history and grievances. Haji Zalwar, a jihadi veteran of the anti-Soviet fight, bore the valley’s burden almost alone and had the grim demeanor to prove it. Kearney met as many villagers as possible to learn the names of all the elders and their families. But he inherited a blood feud between the Korengalis and the Americans that he hadn’t started, and he was being sucked into its logic.
“Serious P.T.S.D.”
LAST AUTUMN,, after five months of grueling foot patrols up and down the mountains, after fruitless encounters with elders who smiled in the morning and were host to insurgents in the evening and after losing friends to enemy fire, Captain Kearney’s men could relate to the sullen, jittery rage of their predecessors in the 10th Mountain Division. Many wondered what they were doing out there at all.
Kearney refused to entertain that thought. He would tell his visitors, whether generals or reconstruction teams, that his campaign plan was clear, if modest: “It’s World War II Pacific-island hopping, turning one village at a time.” Over five months, he had gained about 400 yards of terrain. When some generals and colonels had flown in for a quick tour, and Kearney was showing them the lay of the land, one officer said to another, as Kearney later recalled it, “I don’t know why we’re even out here.” Another officer jumped in to talk up the logic of the operation. Kearney told me he thought: Sort your stuff out before you come out here. My boys are sucking it up and dying. . . . For besides being lord of the valley, he had another role to play — motivator, disciplinarian and confidant to his soldiers. “It’s like being in charge of a soap opera,” he told me. “I feel like Dr. Phil with guns.”
One full-moon night I was sitting outside a sandbag-reinforced hut with Kearney when a young sergeant stepped out hauling the garbage. He looked around at the illuminated mountains, the dust, the rocks, the garbage bin. The monkeys were screeching. “I hate this country!” he shouted. Then he smiled and walked back into the hut. “He’s on medication,” Kearney said quietly to me.
Then another soldier walked by and shouted, “Hey, I’m with you, sir!” and Kearney said to me, “Prozac. Serious P.T.S.D. from last tour.” Another one popped out of the HQ cursing and muttering. “Medicated,” Kearney said. “Last tour, if you didn’t give him information, he’d burn down your house. He killed so many people. He’s checked out.”
As I went to get some hot chocolate in the dining tent, the peaceful night was shattered by mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire banging and bursting around us. It was a coordinated attack on all the fire bases. It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants. The soldiers were on a 15-month tour that included just 18 days off. Many of them were “stop-lossed,” meaning their contracts were extended because the army is stretched so thin. You are not allowed to refuse these extensions. And they felt eclipsed by Iraq. As Sgt. Erick Gallardo put it: “We don’t get supplies, assets. We scrounge for everything and live a lot more rugged. But we know the war is here. We got unfinished business.”
For sanity, all they had was the medics’ tent, video games and movies — “Gladiator,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Dogma,” Monty Python. Down the road in the Pech Valley, soldiers played cricket with Afghan kids and had organized boxing and soccer matches. Lt. Kareem Hernandez, a New Yorker running a base on the Pech River, regularly bantered over dinner with the Afghan police. Neighbors would come by with tips. But here in the Korengal, the soldiers were completely alienated from the local culture. One night while watching a scene from HBO’s “Rome” in which a Roman soldier tells a slave he wants to marry her, a soldier asked which century the story was set in. “First B.C. or A.D.,” said another soldier. The first shook his head: “And they’re still living like this 800 meters outside the wire.”
At the end of the summer, Kearney told his dad, “My boys are gonna go crazy out here.” The army sent a shrink, and Kearney got a wake-up call about his own leadership. He discovered that half his men thought he was playing Russian roulette with their lives and the other half thought he stuck too closely to the rules of engagement. “The moral compass of the army is the P.L. and the C.O.” — the platoon leader and the commanding officer, Kearney told me. “I told every one of my P.L.’s that they have to set that moral standard, that once you slip to the left, you can’t pull your guys back in.”
Operation Rock Avalanche
ON OCT. 19, Kearney and Battle Company were air assaulted into the insurgents’ backyard for a mission that many thought insane. It was called Rock Avalanche and would last about six days. One of its main targets was the village of Yaka China.
Kearney, being the good soldier, tried to pump up his boys with the promise that they would be going after insurgents who had killed their friends and whose grizzled faces were plastered on their bad-guy family-tree wall at the KOP. They would upset the guerrillas’ safe haven and their transit routes from Pakistan. They would persuade the villagers to stop harboring the bad guys by offering an $11 million road project that had just been approved by NATO and Kabul and would be built by the Kunar Provincial Reconstruction Team. And they’d complete the “human terrain mapping” that is part of the new counterinsurgency doctrine — what families dominate, who’s married, who’s feuding, are there divisions to be exploited?
It was a lot to ask of young soldiers: play killer, cultural anthropologist, hearts-and-minds winner and then killer again. Which is why, just hours before the mission was to begin, some soldiers were smearing black-and-green war paint on their faces when their sergeant shouted: “Take it off. Now!” Why? They’d frighten the villagers.
It seemed a moot point as Rock Avalanche got under way. Apache gunships were scanning the ridges for insurgents. Other helicopters were dropping off more soldiers. An unmanned drone was whining overhead as it sent infrared video feeds to a large screen back at the battalion’s headquarters, Camp Blessing, six miles north of the KOP.
Almost immediately, high on a mountainside looking down on Yaka China, Kearney had to play God. In a ditch to his left, Jesse Yarnell, a young intelligence officer, along with John, an Afghan interpreter, were intercepting insurgents on their two-way radios saying, “We see them, we’re going to wait.”
“They’re right down there!” said Kevin Caroon as he gazed out of his night vision. Caroon, from Connecticut and a father of two, was an Air Force JTAC — the joint terminal attack controller who talks the combat pilots onto their targets. “See that? Two people moving south 400 meters away from us,” Caroon said, pointing down the mountain face. More insurgents were located nearby.
“Sir, what do you want to do?” Caroon asked Kearney.
“I want them dead,” Kearney said.
“Engage them?”
“Yes. Take ’em out.”
Caroon radioed the pilot his instructions, “On-scene commander’s intent is to engage.” And that was it.
A sudden wail pierced the night sky. It was Slasher, an AC-130 gunship, firing bullets the size of Coke bottles. Flaming shapes ricocheted all around the village. Kearney was in overdrive. The soldiers back at the KOP were radioing in that the drone was tracking 10 men near the tree line. Yarnell was picking up insurgent radio traffic. “They’re talking about getting ready to hit us,” someone said. The pilot could see five men, one entering a house, then, no, some were in the trees, some inside, and then, multiple houses. He wanted confirmation — were all these targets hostile? Did Kearney have any collateral-damage concerns? Cursing, Kearney told them to engage the men outside but not to hit the house. The pilots radioed back that men had just run inside. No doubt there would be a family. Caroon reminded Kearney that Slasher had only enough fuel to stay in position for 10 more minutes.
“What do you want to do, sir?” Caroon asked him.
Kearney radioed his soldiers back at the KOP to contact his boss, Lt. Col. Bill Ostlund. Ostlund, a Nebraska social scientist who could switch effortlessly from aggressive bomber to political negotiator talking family values with Afghan tribal elders, was in the crowded tactical-operations room at Camp Blessing watching the drone’s video feed and getting the same intelligence. He signed off on collateral damage, and Kearney turned to Caroon: “Take out the compound. And anyone that comes out.”
Flaming rockets flashed through the sky. Thunder rumbled and echoed through the valley. Then there was a pause. Slasher asked Caroon whether the insurgents were still talking. Kearney shouted over to Yarnell in his ditch, “You picking anything up?” Nothing. More spitting rockets.
The night seemed incomprehensible and interminable. Slasher departed and Gunmetal — an Apache helicopter — swept in. Radio communication kept breaking down. At one point the crew of Gunmetal, sensing no hostile intent, refused Kearney’s orders to fire. Then suddenly Gunmetal was rocketing at figures scattering for cover. Then Slasher was back in the sky doing more “work.” In the predawn light Bone — the nickname for the B-1 bomber that seemed to be the soldiers’ favorite — winged in and dropped two 2,000-pound bombs above the village. Finally, around dawn, a weary Kearney, succumbing to gallows humor, adrenaline and exhaustion, said: “O.K., I’ve done my killing for the week. I’m ready to go home.”
Kearney estimated that they killed about 20 people, adding: “I’m not gonna lie. Some are probably civilians.”
In the logic of war, the best antidote for the menacing ghostliness of the ambushing enemy is killing and knowing you’ve killed them. The soldiers in the Korengal almost never had that kind of satisfaction. Any insurgents, if they were killed, would be buried fast, and all that was left in their wake were wounded civilians. That morning, after a long night of fighting, was no different. Within an hour or so, Lt. Matt Piosa, an earnest, 24-year-old West Point grad, and his patrol were in Yaka China. They radioed that the village elders were asking to bury their dead. They’d also collected wounded civilians. The tally was bad — 5 killed and 11 wounded, all of them women, girls and boys.
Kearney radioed Camp Blessing the bad news and dropped his head between his knees. Killing women and children was tragedy enough. But civilian casualties are also a political issue. If he didn’t manage to explain his actions to the Yaka China villagers and get them to understand his intentions, he could lose them to the enemy. Meanwhile, Yarnell and his team were intercepting radio messages like: “Be very quiet. Move the things over here. Pray for us.” At least some of the insurgents from the previous night’s fight had survived to fight again. The planes were tracking them hiding along a creek. But after the civilian casualties of the night before, senior commanders were refusing to give Kearney clearance to bomb or rocket them.
The short day was fading. The sun dropped behind the peaks. The cold winds rattled our bones. The soldiers tried to make light of their conviction that they’d be attacked by those insurgents dissolving into the villages. Their fears were realized.
Hearts and Minds
TO TRY TO ACQUIRE allies, Kearney and some of his men flew down the next day to Yaka China. With nowhere else to land, the Black Hawk helicopters descended on the roof of a house not far below the compound that Slasher, the AC-130, had rocketed the night of the 19th. Dust and dried grass whipped across the house and the villagers’ faces. Just to endear themselves even more, the soldiers from Battle Company had to step on harvested corn as they climbed down; it was drying on the second story.
The adversaries faced off in the courtyard as chickens sprinted in and out. On one side were Kearney, Ostlund and Larry LeGree, a naval nuclear engineer and head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team, together with their entourage, including interpreters, all in futuristic high-tech gear. On the other side were the Korengali elders, who looked as if they stepped out of “Lord of the Rings” with their crooked walking sticks, beards dyed red and blue eyes framed by kohl. With no Afghan government out here, the elders are the only channel for communication. The younger men sat on the ground, wrapped in shawls and bold indifference.
Kearney squatted and told the Korengalis that when he came to this region he hoped to walk into Yaka China and find out what the villagers needed. Instead, he found that there were some 50 insurgents in and around the village. He pointed to the evidence — military radio batteries that his men had found, binoculars, rockets, an old pistol, a small pamphlet titled, in Arabic, “How to Kill,” and one in Pashto, “The Concise Book on the Virtues of Jihad” — that had been collected in the general area by Afghan soldiers and Americans. It was not a very incriminating haul, and everyone knew it.
The day before, a U.S. medevac had airlifted out the wounded civilians from the village. Humanitarian assistance was air-dropped in, including concrete for retaining walls, rice and blankets for winter. The provisions were not compensation, Kearney told the elders. “It’s what the government does for their people when there is security here,” he said. He asked them to tell him where in the mountains the insurgents were hiding their supplies. “That way I don’t have to come in here and shoot at you and identify the good guys from the bad guys,” he said.
To keep his bearings amid the hostile faces, Kearney kept appealing to Haji Zalwar Khan, the leading go-between among the valley’s elders. He made his fortune in the timber trade and blamed the Americans for shutting it down. He tried to placate both the Americans and the insurgents. He was not about to side with Kearney in public. “How can I know where you found these things?” he asked, referring to the jihadi items. “In the mountain? The house? How do I know whom they belong to?”
Kearney smiled. He was getting used to the routine between the Americans and the villagers — miscommunication and deception. The encounter felt as much performative, a necessary part of the play, as substantive. And I wondered how Kearney was going to keep his sanity for 10 more months.
Just a week or so earlier, I had been at the KOP when villagers from Aliabad — a mile south of the KOP, and the home village of Haji Zalwar Khan — complained to Kearney that some ordnance had hit a house. Later they sent up the homeowner’s teenage son to wrest compensation from Kearney. As we walked to the KOP’s entrance to meet the boy, a shot rang out, then another. The bullets smacked the dirt in front of us. Kearney shoved me into a shack where an Afghan was cooking bread. A few more shots were fired. It was “One-Shot Freddy,” as the soldiers refer to him, an insurgent shooter everyone had a theory about regarding the vintage of his gun, his identity, his tactics — but neither Kearney’s scouts nor Shadow the drone could ever track him. I accidentally slashed my forearm on a nail in the shack and as I watched the blood pool I thought that if I had to live with Freddy and his ilk for months on end I, too, would see a forked tongue in every villager and start dreaming of revenge.
Kearney was angry. “Taliban shot your house?” he asked the boy from Aliabad. An interpreter translated.
No, said the boy, Americans did.
“What’d we shoot with?”
“I don’t know the weapon, but there’s little holes and two big holes.”
“I didn’t shoot into Aliabad,” said Kearney, adding that if one of his soldiers had, it was because insurgents were firing from the village.
“No one shoots from the village,” said the boy, though everyone knew insurgents had wounded several of Kearney’s soldiers by shooting from the mosque, the cemetery, the school. . . .
The boy changed course, “God knows better than me,” and that sent Kearney on a riff: “Yes. God does and God talks to me and told me they do.” And by the way, hadn’t the boy noticed that the bad guys always start shooting first?
“O.K., then shoot them, not our house,” the boy said.
“Then tell me where the bad guys are,” Kearney said. The boy said he didn’t know. What he knew was that the Americans were always shooting at the village.
This went on for some time. When the boy again protested that no one shoots from his village, Kearney interrupted him. “Aminullah does,” he said. Aminullah was a native of Aliabad and a rising figure in the valley’s insurgency.
The boy smiled.
“You’re smiling because you know I’m right,” Kearney said.
“You’re right,” the boy said. “So shoot the cemetery, not our house.”
Kearney moved closer to him. “Look, if you want help with your house, all you have to do is ask. But don’t accuse us every time something goes wrong.”
The boy laughed and repeated that he didn’t know where the bad guys were.
“It’s crazy, man. They must be ghosts!” Kearney said, laughing.
“Aminullah doesn’t come to Aliabad anymore,” the boy said, perhaps trying to give Kearney a bone.
Kearney leapt at it. “So Aminullah is bad?”
“Yes.”
“Ah! Finally! We’re getting somewhere.” Kearney took off his helmet and squeezed his hands together and rocked as he sat on a wall. “What about Mohammad Tali, he’s a good guy isn’t he?” Kearney asked.
Smiling again, the boy looked at the dirt: “No. You already told us he’s a bad guy.”
“Ah!” Kearney said, throwing up his hands. “So you were down there in the village when I gave radios and food. But instead you say I shoot at you all the time?” Kearney swung his legs back and forth. “Hey dude, ask yourself. Why would I bring you radios and food and shoot at you? Does Aminullah? No. What happened that day after I left?” The boy said all he knew was that the villagers went home and “they” started shooting. “Where?” Kearney asked, “from your village?”
“What can I say? The Americans were in my village.”
“Yeah, so I was doing good stuff for you guys and they shot at me. And what I’m trying to say is they could have shot at you again. And if I shoot at your house I’ll help. We’ll fix up that wall. I’m not here to hurt you.”
Everyone was getting restless in the little check post. Kearney tried to lighten up a bit. He asked the boy what he thought about the Americans.
“You build roads and clinics and schools and are here to help,” the boy said.
“Cop out,” Kearney shouted, chuckling. “Easy answer. Hey dude, you can say we’re rotten and messing up your lumber trade.” The boy laughed. Kearney laughed. Pfc. Michael Cunningham, the radio operator, and Sgt. Taylor White, who always manned the check post, both laughed.
“See, I knew it,” Kearney said. “That’s what you really think. Think I want to be here?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. “I think so.”
“Dude. I got a wife and son. I came here to help you out. If you give me as much help as possible I’ll get out of here a hell of a lot faster.”
Kearney told him to enjoy Ramadan, and then shouted, “Where’s my fuzzy friend?” as he looked about for Jericho, the puppy whose ears were chopped off by an Afghan worker: it was pre-emptive preparation for dog fighting — the ears would just give an enemy dog something to grab onto. “I need someone to make me happy. Jericho, I need some love.” Jericho appeared, leaping about. Kearney picked him up. “Hey, what’s up buddy? You’re a good boy. You smell like dirt.”
Kearney turned to Cunningham and White and said, “Well, he’s the first to admit Aminullah’s bad.” And give or take a little unreliable information shared here and there, that was the Korengal routine.
Fight Time
THE DAY AFTER the meeting with the elders of Yaka China, Yarnell and John could hear insurgents trying to pinpoint where Kearney and his men were. The helicopters had moved us to a ridge line, about 8,400 feet high, straddling the Korengal and Shuriak Valleys. The insurgents used the deep caves, boulders and forests as hideouts and transit routes between Pakistan and Afghanistan. We could hear someone who called himself Obeid saying he’d do whatever the Yaka China elders decided — whether to cooperate with the Americans or take revenge. By evening the elders had apparently reached their verdict. It was fight time.
Kearney, too, had reached a verdict. He would fool the insurgents, feigning a troop extraction when the helicopters came for resupply and pushing out his best guys in small “kill teams.” We heard the insurgents say, “We have wolves on them,” meaning spotters. A hoarse, whispering insurgent had eyes on either Sgt. Larry Rougle and his scouts or on Lieutenant Piosa and his rear guard. There was joking that Rougle and Piosa should dance and see which one the whisperer was spying on. Then nothing happened for almost 24 hours.
Rougle — who was called Wildcat — was on his sixth deployment since Sept. 11, 2001. He was with the first group of Rangers in Afghanistan. Even his rough background was something of a legend; he would tell how he grew up in a South Jersey gang, shot a guy, went to “juvie,” and there taught himself Russian (though he was estranged from his Russian father), taught himself politics, history, zoology. At night out in the woods, he’d tell his fellow scouts, “You know penguins are monogamous?”
I hung out with Piosa and his crew. His white skin, red hair and blue eyes belied the months of constant warfare he and his platoon had scraped through. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon and the soldiers were joking around, heating up Meals Ready to Eat, spitting gobs of Copenhagen and then, in a moment, recess was over. The insurgents were on them. Bullets ricocheted all through the woods. A strange silence fell as everyone scrambled for cover. Three of us crouched behind a skinny pine tree. And the silence broke: curses, shouting.
“Where’s it coming from?”
“Where are my guys?”
“Jones, are you seeing things?”
More bullets. Cracks against the tree trunks. Bits of confusing information were coming in on Piosa’s radio.
“They’re comin’ up the low ground at 2-4” — Sergeant Rice’s call sign.
“One W.I.A. hit in the arm.” Then there was panic and screaming.
“The enemy’s overtaken the hill,” bellowed Pvt. Sterling Dunn from further down the trees.
“2-4 is hit” — that was Rice.
“Wildcat is run over the hill” — that was Rougle.
“Get a team to run up there and take that hill. They pushed Wildcat over the hill!” Piosa shouted, trying over and over to reach Rice and Rougle, but getting no answer. The battalion surgeon, Capt. Joel Dean, and a sergeant sprinted up the hill to get to the wounded. As the first Americans neared Rice and Rougle’s positions they were fired on from those same positions. What was going on?
I followed Piosa through the brush toward the ridge. We came upon Rice and Specialist Carl Vandenberge behind some trees. Vandenberge was drenched in blood. The shot to his arm had hit an artery. Rice was shot in the stomach. A soldier was using the heating chemicals from a Meal Ready to Eat to warm Vandenberge and keep him from going into shock.
Piosa moved on to the hill where the men had been overrun. I saw big blue-eyed John Clinard, a sergeant from North Carolina, falling to pieces. He worshiped Rougle. “Sergeant Rougle is dying. It’s my fault. . . . I’m sorry. . . . I tried to get up the hill. . . .” Sergeant Rougle was lying behind him. Someone had already covered him with a blanket. Only the soles of his boots were visible.
“There’s nothing you could do,” Piosa said, grabbing Clinard’s shoulder. “You got to be the man now. You can do it. I need you to get down to Rice and Vandenberge and get them to the medevac.” Clinard wiped his face, seemed to snap to and headed off through the trees.
Two of Rice’s squad mates appeared, eyes dilated. They couldn’t believe they’d seen, up close, the ghosts they’d been fighting for the last five months. “I saw him in the eyes,” Specialist Marc Solowski said. “He looked at me. I shot him.” He and Specialist Michael Jackson had crawled up the hill twice trying to retake it. Each time the insurgents in “manjammies” whipped them back with machine-gun fire. There was blood on the stones around us. Some thought they saw blood trailing down toward the village of Landigal, where they were sure an insurgent had dashed into a cottage.
“We’re not losing this hill again,” Piosa shouted. “This hill is ours!” He wanted bombs to be dropped immediately.
“There’s women praying in that house,” Dunn shouted back.
I was fixating on Rougle’s black hat, lying by the bloodied rock patch where Dunn was sitting, when Sergeant Stichter, Dunn’s senior, appeared, out of breath and shaking, back from tending to Vandenberge. He needed water. The F-15 known as Dude was en route, the Apaches were chasing men and Kearney — who had bolted down the mountain, throwing grenades in caves — was barking orders. Kearney was badly shaken. He adored Rougle, and he’d broken down when he saw his big old buddy Rice bleeding at the landing zone. Rice comforted him and then lumbered to the helicopter, just asking to talk to his wife before they put him under.
The insurgents had run off with some of Rougle, Rice and Vandenberge’s stuff — ammunition, communication equipment, night vision goggles, machine guns. Kearney wanted the equipment back. He wanted to punish the valley. Stichter had his eyes on a guy pacing a rooftop in Landigal and wanted to blow his head off. Specialist Mitchell Raeon, whose uniform was now soaked in Rougle’s blood, had the guy in his scope but couldn’t range that far. “That’s a female,” Dunn said.
Kearney had identified insurgents who’d dashed into a house and wanted to hit them, but Stichter got back word from Camp Blessing saying the target was too close to other houses. Kearney sent back a reminder — you let some guys get away the other night. It was impossible to know for sure, but Kearney believed they were the guys who had killed Rougle, and now, he said, you’re going to let another group get away?
Someone cursed, then said, “They’re all leaving the house.”
Kearney radioed down to one of his lieutenants at an observation post. “Where are they going?” Yarnell heard the insurgents say they were coming back for the rest of the equipment. And then, with no warning, an F-15 dropped a bomb on Landigal, but off target, or so it seemed. Kearney was furious. He was sure headquarters had intentionally missed the house he had wanted hit.
I noticed Raeon was packing and unpacking Rougle’s things. Rougle’s scouts were in disarray, rudderless, and admitting it. Raeon said he kept seeing in his mind Rougle’s face alert and then dead, switching back and forth; he wanted it to stop.
The next day brought another brief firefight, and Rougle’s scouts rallied swiftly. They said they felt him watching and proud. There were more bomb drops and refusals to drop bombs, and then Becky, everyone’s favorite Apache pilot, swept in. Not only did she offer the comforting voice of a woman seeping right into their ears, but Becky was one of the most aggressive shooters. She flew up and down the canyon walls seeking out and rocketing insurgents. We heard them on the radio again boasting about retreating to safety under fire. They talked about the strike in Landigal that they thought might have killed Azizullah — “a real bad guy,” the radio operator told me.
Kearney was watching a crow flying above us. “Taliban are right,” he said. “Like they said yesterday, follow the birds, they follow the Americans. I wish I was made as strong as haj” — their nickname for insurgents. “They were balls to do what they did. And guess what? I’m not gonna lie. They won.”
Killing Together
AS WE WAITED for dusk to get back to the KOP, we all knew the insurgents were nearby, eyes on Kearney, eyes on the soldiers down in the valley. Even nightfall was no comfort because the full moon was floodlighting the Korengal. I returned to the KOP by helicopter with Kearney, while 1st and 2nd Platoons had to make the long trek back on foot. As soon as 1st Platoon set off, the insurgents struck with a devastating L-shaped ambush. All Kearney could do, back at the KOP, was calm his boys on the radio, get in the medevac and invoke the gods of war. The Apaches, Slasher and Bone dropped bombs all night. The soldiers and insurgents were so close that when Slasher, the AC-130, flew in, the pilot coordinated not with the JTAC but with Sgt. Roberto Sandifer, the platoon’s forward observer, who at that moment was under fire watching one of his guys die.
Around midnight, 1st Platoon filed into the KOP, eyes bulging, drenched in sweat, river water and blood. They were hauling the belongings of Mohammad Tali, a high-value target. Specialist Sal Giunta had killed him.
The next day I climbed up to the KOP and found Specialist Giunta, a quiet Iowan lofted into a heroism he didn’t want. His officers were putting him up for a medal of honor. Giunta told me the story of that night, how they’d barely moved 300 yards before they were blasted. Giunta was fourth in the file when it happened, and he jumped into a ditch. He couldn’t figure out why they were getting hit from where Joshua Brennan and baby-faced Franklin Eckrode should have been leading up ahead. He knew it must be bad, but as he leapt up to check he got whacked with a bullet in his armored chest plate. It threw him down. They were taking fire from three sides. He grabbed some grenades: “I couldn’t throw as far as Sergeant Gallardo. We were looking like retards and I decided to run out in front of the grenades.” He found Eckrode with gunshot wounds. “He was down but moving and trying to fix his SAW” — a heavy machine gun — “so I just kept on running up the trail. It was cloudy. I was running and saw dudes. Plural.”
He couldn’t figure out who they were. Then he realized they were hauling Brennan off through the forest. “I started shooting,” he recalled. “I emptied that magazine. They dropped Brennan.” Giunta scrambled up to Brennan. He was a mess. His lower jaw was shot off. “He was still conscious. He was breathing. He was asking for morphine. I said, ‘You’ll get out and tell your hero stories,’ and he was like, ‘I will, I will.’ ”
They were still taking fire. No one was there to help. Hugo Mendoza, their platoon medic, was back in another ditch, calling: “I’m bleeding out. I’m dying.” Giunta saw Brennan’s eyes go back. His breathing was bad. Giunta got Brennan to squeeze his hand. A medic showed up out of the sky. They prepared Brennan to be hoisted to the medevac in a basket. Soon he would be dead.
As the medevacs flew out, Sergeant Sandifer had talked in air cover: Slasher, the AC-130. The pilot was a woman and, Sandifer later told me, “It was so reassuring for us to hear her voice.” She spotted guys hiding and asked if she was clear to engage. “ ‘You’re cleared hot,’ I told her. And we killed two people together.” But, at this point, the killings were no consolation to Sandifer.
As Giunta said, “The richest, most-trained army got beat by dudes in manjammies and A.K.’s.” His voice cracked. He was not just hurting, he was in a rage. And there was nothing for him to do with it but hold back his tears, and bark — at the Afghans for betraying them, at the Army for betraying them. He didn’t run to the front because he was a hero. He ran up to get to Brennan, his friend. “But they” — he meant the military — “just keep asking for more from us.” His contract would be up in 18 days but he had been stop-lossed and couldn’t go home. Brennan himself was supposed to have gotten out in September. He’d been planning to go back to Wisconsin where his dad lived, play his guitar and become a cop.
Sandifer was questioning why they were sticking it out in the Korengal when the people so clearly hated them. He was haunted by Mendoza’s voice calling to him: “I’m bleeding out. I’m dying.” He worried that the Korengal was going to push them off the deep end. In his imagination it had already happened. One day an Afghan visited their fire base, Sandifer told me. “I was staring at him, on the verge of picking up my weapon to shoot him,” he said. “I know right from wrong, but even if I did shoot him everyone at the fire base would have been O.K. We’re all to the point of ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ” And they still had 10 months to go in the Korengal.
I wondered how Kearney was going to win back his own guys, let alone win over the Korengalis. Just before I left, Kearney told me his biggest struggle would be holding his guys in check. “I’ve got too many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end and kill people,” he said. One of his lieutenants wanted to shoot every Afghan in the face. Kearney shook his head. He wished he could buy 20 goats and let the boys beat and burn them and let loose their rage. He tried to tell them the restraints were a product of their success — that there was an Afghan government with its own rules. “I’m balancing plates on my goddamn nose is what I’m doing,” he said. “All it’s gonna take is for one of these guys to snap.”
But leave the Korengal, as the colonel had suggested, and let some other company deal with it? No way. He’d spent five months learning the valley, getting involved in it; he couldn’t just pull out. At least he would keep the insurgents busy here so the other companies could do hearts and minds unimpeded down along the Pech river. “I lost seven dudes here,” he told me. “It’s too much blood. I don’t want to give this up. This is mine.”
To Be Continued