Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (4 page)

In the yard, they split firewood and hoisted water. Inside, they
sweetened the air with drugstore perfume. They rolled their words out quietly, petted one another’s arms, stroked the children’s hair. They had pierced noses, brilliant eyes, and dark hair woven into complicated braids creeping from embroidered scarves. Gold vines crawled up sleeves, a wink of bead, a glimmer of thread, lace shawls. The world never saw any of it. I watched Sediqa, Naseer’s wife, rip off her burqa one afternoon and throw it on the bed.

A few days before the battle of Tora Bora, Sediqa went into labor. They brought her baby girl home from the hospital and carried her out of the darkness and over the dirt yard. Naseer had invited Brian and me to celebrate with the family. “The baby is here!” the women called from the yard, and the men spilled out to regard the tiny creature in buttery light from the sitting room window. “Come and see her, she’s here!”

One of Naseer’s brothers shook his head and whispered: “This is not so good for Naseer, because it’s his firstborn. Everybody wants his firstborn to be a boy.”

“For me, they’re both good,” Naseer argued, overhearing. “A boy is okay, a girl is okay. This is a democratic house.”

The men withdrew to talk politics. The women grabbed my hand and pulled me into a back bedroom. Sediqa lay with blankets to her chin, pale and silent. The other women dribbled tea into the baby’s mouth. Somebody slipped a cassette into a dusty tape player, and Indian music wailed from the speakers. There was music here all along, even when the Taliban banned song and the men of the family had to stuff cassettes into their pockets and smuggle them from Pakistan.

And then, in that cramped little room, we were all dancing. The women were stomping and arching, shaking their hips, describing small pictures with their fingertips. It was sexy, sultry, joyful. They were dancing for a new life, another soul indoctrinated into their private sorority. Even the smallest girls, the ones who were babies when the Taliban came, knew how to dance. They had learned from their mothers and aunts, even when it was illegal, even when the women were weary from chores, even when the government told them it was frivolous and wanton and sinful. The women didn’t care. Maybe there would be more years of Taliban, maybe the American occupation would replace the
Soviet occupation, maybe anything would happen. But they believed in their bones that Afghans would dance again one day.

And when the dancing came, they wanted their daughters to be ready.

The money finally came through, and the warlords got their war. Workers scrambled out to Jalalabad’s shattered airport to patch up the runways. Soon we began to see the traces of U.S. Special Forces, who moved into the region but stayed hidden from view. They left empty bottles of Poland Spring scattered at abandoned campsites. On December 4, America’s proxy troops began a ground assault into the Tora Bora cave complex, hoping to capture Osama bin Laden. Zaman, Ali, and Abdul Qadir, the third powerful anti-Taliban warlord, split responsibility for the Afghan troops, arguing and elbowing each other every step of the way.

As the battle began, the mujahideen prowled the mountains underfed and shivering, clad in tattered tennis shoes and old sweaters. Many of them were young, and had spent their adolescence in a seamless stream of war. They didn’t know how to read. They didn’t know how old they were. When the tanks bellowed they leaped around and shouted and clapped hands. Their commanders spent their time arguing cartoonishly over who controlled which chunk of hillside, whose men should do what. The mujahideen mooned around, stroking one another lovingly and dreaming of their next meal.

Watching the mujahideen, I tried to imagine how this war looked to them. Afghanistan was a sandbox for generations of men who wanted to play at war, one conflict bleeding into the next. The twentieth century was an ordeal of civil wars, unrest, and coups, culminating in the Soviet invasion. The U.S.- and Saudi-funded jihad against the Soviets had wedged the notion of holy war firmly into the contemporary Afghan consciousness, and armed and funded the men who would emerge as the Taliban in the chaos of civil war. The Taliban had sheltered Al Qaeda, which in turn plotted September 11 and drew the wrath of the Americans. This was the war God had brought them now, God and the Americans. And so they fought.

I asked a twenty-two-year-old soldier when he had learned to fire a
rocket launcher. He let out a huff of laughter. “What do you mean? I always knew how. I learned when I was a baby.” He dropped his head and bounced his gun, testing its weight.

“I never went to school, and I don’t know how to do anything. Just fighting.”

The ground assault played out like a pantomime of war. The mujahideen hadn’t captured a single prisoner, and had no idea how many men they’d killed. The same patch of ground was gained and lost, over and over again. At night they lay on the earth under thin wool blankets, bitter wind coursing through the hills. They knotted rags around their wounds because they had no bandages. Sometimes, the television crews paid them to fire their tanks into the canyons, and happily the fighters obliged. The mujahideen got so hungry one night they broke into a television news trailer and stole all the food. These were the foot soldiers of the U.S. war on terror.

One of the mujahideen thought he was twenty-two, but he wasn’t sure. His skin was drawn tight over pinched features. “We have no food or blankets. Our lives belong to God,” he said resentfully. “The Americans should come. They should be in the front line, and we will get behind them.”

I learned more from the mujahideen than I did from the smooth-talking warlords. The mujahideen predicted that they would never take Tora Bora. The Soviets had pounded away at the honeycombed network of caves for years and never managed to get inside, they pointed out. The older mujahideen had fought from within the caves back when they had battled on the side of bin Laden and the Americans. In those days, Tora Bora was the epicenter of their jihad against the godless Russians. They thought this latest mission was a lost cause, even when the United States dropped the 15,000-pound “daisy cutter” bombs. The mujahideen talked every day about the Pakistani border, the ease with which the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters could escape. Even knowing the futility, the fighters didn’t flinch. They shouldered their Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers and trudged dutifully into the hills to fight the war set before them. They sat around camp and told folk stories about Osama bin Laden. He was spotted astride a red pony. He was seen playing with his small son. Somebody saw him crossing a stream late one night. He was melting into myth.

After a week of fighting, the Afghan troops were still scrapping at the fringes of Tora Bora. Zaman was petulant, griping about his American backers. Thirty-one days had passed, he told me pointedly, since Osama bin Laden had fled Jalalabad under the protection of a Pakistani tribal elder. “I’ve been telling America all along,” he said. “If America wants to capture bin Laden, why aren’t they trying?”

I was in the mountains one day. The sky was white and gray and empty overhead. Bitter cold swept down from the north. I was close to the front line, but not quite there. Deep below, a river cut through the cliffs. There were land mines and gun skirmishes on these twisting trails. Sharp mountainsides plunged into deep valleys. It was hard to keep your bearings, hard to understand who was shooting at whom, and why. It was utterly confusing.

Then a commotion of voices echoed through the valleys, and the Afghans began to race up the mountain. All of the reporters charged instinctively after them, choking for oxygen in the thin mountain air. At my side ran another woman, a reporter.

“Where are we running to?” she gasped.

“I don’t know,” I panted. “But it must be something.”

She screwed up her face. “I think it’s really disturbing that we’re all running up the mountain and we don’t know where we’re going,” she yelled.

She was right, of course. It was disturbing, random, and emblematic. But at the time, each of us squinted at the other as if she were dim-witted.

She stopped running. I kept going, chasing my curiosity up the hill. But when I got to the top, there was nothing to see. We were charging after ghosts.

When the end came, it came quickly. It was another bitterly cold afternoon in the mountains, and I sat listlessly on a rock, listening while the warlords squabbled. Zaman was in the middle of it all, nested in some boulders a short walk up the mountain, juggling two conversations.
Languidly, he negotiated by radio with a representative from bin Laden’s encampment. In between, he argued with an enraged Hazrat Ali, who was listening in on the talks, convinced that Zaman was bungling negotiations. I watched Hazrat Ali pace in a grove of thorn trees, barking at Zaman by walkie-talkie.

Zaman had wrangled a promise out of the shadowy Al Qaeda negotiator. The fighters would crawl out of their caves and surrender at eight the next morning. Zaman kept telling Hazrat Ali that this was a fair plan, a good compromise. “That gives them time to talk,” he urged a skeptical, irritable Ali.

“Don’t give them time!” Ali exploded. “The Arabs are disagreeing! Three Arabs have three ideas!”

Zaman and Ali hated each other. After battling for supremacy for years, they were now grudging allies, forced together by mutual dependence on American money. As far as I could tell, each was more interested in outmaneuvering the other than in fulfilling any duties on behalf of America. It all comes down to this, I thought. This is the tip of the spear. These slippery, wild-eyed figures are the men fighting on behalf of my country.

Blackened tree stumps and bullet-torn car doors, detritus of war, lay strewn on the ashen hillside. Ali’s soldiers rooted busily under the trunk of a bombed-out pickup in search of salvageable parts and combed shattered bunkers looking for spare bullets. Soldiers giggled over the bodies of three dead Arabs. They had been shot to shreds by machine guns. The mujahideen thought it was hilarious.

“We want to have safe passage out of your province,” the voice of the Al Qaeda spokesman scratched through the radio.

“Your blood is our blood, your children our children, your wives our sisters. But under the present circumstances, you must leave my area or surrender.” Zaman never passed up an opening for flowery tribal flourishes.

Ali was screaming at Zaman. He thought the whole thing was a trick. “Don’t give them so much time,” he urged the other warlord. “And don’t pull out of your positions overnight.”

But Zaman’s soldiers were shivering and ravenous. “Come up and hold the line yourself,” he snapped. As daylight thinned, Zaman swept
triumphantly down the rocky mountain trail. His mujahideen thronged behind him, kicking up storms of dust. Gleefully they waved at the journalists, chins high as conquering heroes.

“Don’t worry!” they shouted, skidding down on their heels. “Al Qaeda is over!”

At sunrise the next morning, Tora Bora was quiet. A warplane circled in the sky overhead, spewing white rings against a vibrant blue. Silence swallowed the mountains like some foreign fog. For the first time in days, no bombs were falling. And for the first time, we reporters couldn’t get close enough to see anything. Afghan guards had closed the roads and trails leading up the mountain. I took this to mean that the Americans were up there. The Afghans would take us anywhere, straight into the line of fire, but the Americans didn’t want to be seen. When we spoke to them, they’d pull their tribal blankets tighter around themselves and pretend they didn’t speak English.

It was still five minutes before the eight o’clock deadline when Haji Zaman’s pickup bumped its way down the mountain. I ran to the roadside and flagged him down. He rolled down the window. Tears stood in his eyes.

“What happened? Why aren’t you at the surrender?” I asked.

He shook his head. He didn’t say a word.

“Are the Americans there?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Did they tell you to leave?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Did they take over the surrender?”

“I have to go,” he said. He rolled up the window, and drove on.

A few minutes later, a crash echoed across the mountains, and the ground quaked. Warplanes pounded the hills with bombs. It kept up for hours, all day long. If the surrender had ever started, it was certainly over now.

That afternoon, I found Zaman sulking in a bombed-out building in the abandoned village he sometimes used as a base. We paced up and down a chicken yard. The sky was huge overhead. He was quiet. Sometimes he said, “How do I know I can trust you?”

“You can,” I said. I think we both knew the dynamic: he could trust
me, but I couldn’t trust him. At least he was no longer hitting on me. That was all gone, replaced by this wary willingness to accord me more information than the others could get. But then, what good is information when everybody around you is lying? That day, he never explained anything.

He made me wait until the next day before he told his story. By then, fresh fighting had erupted. Negotiations were more than dead; they were now viewed as an embarrassing faux pas on the part of the Afghans. Sitting in his pickup truck in Tora Bora, Zaman told me the story:

“I told the Americans, take these men and question them, get intelligence from them. Let them surrender. And they said no. No negotiations, no negotiations, no negotiations. Americans wouldn’t accept the surrender. They wanted the Al Qaeda soldiers dead. I suggested we question them. I said, if you want them dead, we can put them in a farmhouse somewhere when we’re through questioning them, and bomb the house. Nobody will know. But the Americans said no, we want them dead immediately.”

This may or may not have been one piece of truth, but Zaman was surely playing more hands than he’d admit. Other Afghans have since accused all three U.S.-backed warlords of helping the Al Qaeda fighters escape into Pakistan—for a fee, of course.

It is possible, of course, that every one of those stories is true—that Zaman wanted to capture bin Laden, tried to broker surrender, and eventually helped him slip out the back door, stuffing his pockets at every turn. These things are not mutually exclusive. Very little in Afghanistan is mutually exclusive. It is also possible that none of it was true at all, that the real story of Tora Bora is something else that we’d never imagined.