No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes

303 Pages·2014·1.49 MB·English

by  Anand Gopal

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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Prologue
PART ONE
1. The Last Days of Vice and Virtue
2. The Battle for Tirin Kot
3. The War from Year Zero
4. The Sewing Center of Khas Uruzgan
PART TWO
5. No One Is Safe from This
6. To Make the Bad Things Good Again
7. Black Holes
PART THREE
8. Election Day
9. The Far End of the Bazaar
PART FOUR
10. Back to Work
11. The Tangi
12. No-Man’s-Land
PART FIVE
13. Stepping Out
14. The Leader
Epilogue
A Note on Sources
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright

Prologue
This is a book about categories that people create and then come to believe in—
with a force of conviction so strong that sometimes it becomes literally a matter
of life and death.
When the 9/11 attacks took place, I was living in lower Manhattan, and on
that day it seemed that the categories of the world had revealed themselves with
brutal, unmistakable clarity. On the one hand, there were those who had
committed the atrocity, the terrorists, whose motives were so incomprehensible
that we could only, as President George W. Bush put it, regard them as “evil.”
And on the other hand there were the rest of us, the good, we who wanted
nothing more than a decent life of freedom and a better future.
That was the premise of the war on terror, and in particular of its opening
salvo, the invasion of Afghanistan. You were either with us or against us, a
principle that allowed the United States to sort friends from foes on a strange and
distant battlefield. For a few years this approach appeared to work, and the
country was at peace. Roads were paved, schools opened, and, for the first time
in its history, the country voted in truly democratic elections.
It was not long, though, before things started to go wrong. By 2008, when I
moved to Afghanistan as a correspondent, the situation had already slipped out
of control. An anti-American insurgency was metastasizing, and large swaths of
the country had succumbed to full-scale war. Errant air strikes, suicide attacks,
and roadside bombs had killed thousands. Troops from forty-three nations had
attempted to bring stability, working to build a national army, a police force, and
a judiciary system. After years of effort, though, the army was weak, the police
rapacious, and the judicial system still nearly nonexistent. A US surge of money
and troops provided little relief. The hope pervading the early years was gone.
What had happened? Over the course of four years, I traveled through the
Afghan countryside in search of answers. Much of the territory was off-limits to
foreigners, so I was forced to adapt. I learned the language, grew a beard, and hit
the road like a local, using shared taxis and motorcycles. In the process, I met
many people and heard many stories that challenged my preconceived notions of
the war and the categories we’ve used to fight it. When I mentioned this to one
of the Afghans whom I had come to know well, he replied with a proverb, one
he repeated often: “There are no good men among the living, and no bad ones
among the dead.”
Like so many Pashtun aphorisms, this phrase has many shades of meaning. At
one level, it refers to the universal habit of ignoring or criticizing people while
they are alive but remembering them fondly after they’ve departed. But for this
man, an Afghan who had lived through decades of war, it also meant something
more: that there were no heroes, no saviors, in his world. Neither side in the
conflict offered much hope for a better future. The categories of the American
war on terror—terrorists and non-terrorists, fundamentalists and democrats—
mattered little, not when his abiding goal, like that of so many caught in the
conflict, was simply to finish each day alive.
The more such stories I heard, the more I began to wonder whether the root of
the conflict was Afghans’ stubborn refusal to conform to the classifications that
Washington had set forth, and America’s insistence on clinging to those
divisions. In these pages, I recount the stories of three people in particular
who’ve lived this reality. One is an insurgent Taliban commander fighting
against the Americans; another, a powerful member of the US-backed Afghan
government; and the third, a village housewife—or, in the language of America’s
categories, our enemy, our ally, and a civilian.
PART ONE
1
The Last Days of Vice and Virtue
Early in the morning on September 11, 2001, deep amid the jagged heights of
the Hindu Kush, something terrible took place. When teenager Noor Ahmed
arrived that day in Gayawa to buy firewood, he knew it immediately: there was
no call to prayer. Almost every village in Afghanistan has a mosque, and
normally you can hear the muezzin’s tinny song just before dawn, signaling the
start of a new day. But for the first time that he could remember, there was not a
sound. The entire place seemed lifeless.
He walked down a narrow goat trail, toward low houses with enclosures of
mud brick, and saw that the gates of many of them had been left open. The smell
of burning rubber hung in the air. Near a creek, something brown lying in the
yellow grass caught his eye, and he stopped to look at it. It was a disfigured
body, caked in dried blood. Noor Ahmed took a few steps back and ran to the
mosque, but it was empty. He knocked on the door of a neighboring home. It,
too, was empty. He tried another one. Empty. Then he came upon an old mud
schoolhouse, its front gate ajar, and stopped to listen. Stepping inside, he walked
through a long yard strewn with disassembled auto parts and empty motor oil
canisters. Finally, when he pushed his way through the front door, he saw them
huddled in the corner: men and women, toddlers and teenagers, more than a
dozen in total, clutching each other, crammed into a single room.
“Everyone else is dead,” one said. “If you don’t get out of here, they’ll kill
you, too.”
In wartime Afghanistan, secrets are slippery things. The Taliban had planned