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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 a surprise attack on
Gayawa, but the villagers had known for days that the raid was coming, and those who could had hired
cars or donkeys and moved their families down into the valley. But this had been a hard, dry, unhappy
summer. Times were not good and many villagers could not afford to leave, even though they knew
what might await them. Of those who stayed, only the few hiding in the schoolhouse, where the
Taliban soldiers never thought to look, escaped untouched. The rest met an unknown fate.
Back then, Gayawa was near the epicenter of a brutal, grinding war between the government of
Afghanistan, controlled by the Taliban, and a band of rebel warlords known as the Northern Alliance.
In their drive to crush the resistance, government troops waged a Shermanesque campaign, burning
down houses and schools, destroying lush grape fields that had for generations yielded raisins
renowned throughout South Asia, and setting whole communities in flight. In the region surrounding
Gayawa, the Taliban enforced a blockade, allowing neither food nor supplies to enter. Those who
attempted to breach the cordon were shot.
