Aftermath

hundreds of fiery circles glowed far into the distance. Carefully Shafiq maneuvered the car on the bumpy dirt road between mud houses. A traditional house in these areas, called a qala, is made of an extremely durable mixture of mud and straw and built like a fort, with high walls surrounding large compounds that often include different quarters and even areas for agriculture. We pulled up in front of one house, and Shafiq banged on the metal door. A man led us by motorcycle to another house, where a group of young men emerged. In the darkness I could make out a couple of them carrying weapons. We greeted the traditional way, each man placing his right hand on the other’s heart, leaning in but not fully embracing and inquiring about the other’s health, home, and family.

Mullah Abdillah left us, returning to his house. We followed the Taliban on foot to another house with the moon lighting our path. We entered through a short door into a guest room with a red carpet and wooden beams on the ceiling. A dim bulb barely lit the room. I spotted a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with several rockets beside it and a PKM, or belt-fed machine gun, leaning against the wall. An old man named Haji Shir Muhamad was sitting in the room. Shafiq, Kamal, and I were joined by two Talibs: Mullah Yusuf, a commander from Andar, and a boy called Muhamad. Mullah Yusuf had dark reddish skin and a handsome face. He wore a black turban with thin gold stripes and carried an AK-47. A boy brought a pitcher and basin, and we rinsed our hands. We drank green tea and ate a soup of mushy bread called shurwa with our hands. Some chunks of meat were served to us, followed by grapes. Haji Shir Muhamad had lived in Saudi Arabia for five years, so we were able to communicate in Arabic a little.

Mullah Yusuf slept in different houses every night, he said. He went from village to village, as did other Talibs, to avoid the Americans. He was Mullah Abdillah’s nephew and was originally from the Zarin village in Ghazni; although he was only thirty years old, he was an important commander in Andar. A year and a half before, Yusuf had been injured in battle by an American helicopter strike. The wound was in his thigh. He had been hospitalized but still had problems and walked with a pronounced limp. Yusuf’s cellphone rang with a bells-and-cymbals version of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice theme. Yusuf had been with the Taliban for five years. Before that he had studied at a famous religious school called Zia ul-Madaris al-Faruqia in Miranshah, center of Pakistan’s North Waziristan, where many Afghan refugees lived. He joined the jihad because foreigners had come to Afghanistan, he told me, and were fighting Afghans and poor people in their villages. He had not received training but had learned from friends. He claimed that he did not receive assistance from foreigners, only from people in the villages, who provided weapons and money. Yusuf told me he used what money he had to buy weapons and ammunition before he bought food. Local villagers even helped when the Taliban attacked checkpoints, he said. “All of this village helps because they are Muslim,” he said. “The Americans are not good. They go into houses. Some people from this area are in American jails. Fifteen days ago the Americans bombed here and killed a civilian.” Foreigners did occasionally come to fight with them, he said, including Saudis and Uzbeks. It soon became clear that he referred to all foreign fighters who volunteered to fight with the Taliban as Arabs. “They are like my brothers,” he said. Arabs and Chechens taught them how to use remotely detonated bombs.

“The Americans are blind in Afghanistan,” Yusuf said. Afghanistan would be a graveyard for them. But when the foreigners left, the Taliban could negotiate with the Afghan army and police, instead of continuing to fight. “They are brothers, Muslims,” he said. He fought with them now only because they were with the Americans. President Karzai would flee to America when the foreigners left, he said. When the foreigners left, girls could go to school and women could work, he added. I asked about the killing of aid workers. If foreigners didn’t fight the Taliban, he said, he didn’t fight them. The Afghans needed help, and it didn’t matter if aid workers were Muslims or infidels, but “the UN is with the Americans, so I fight them.”

A year before, in a big attack in Andar, the Americans killed a senior commander named Mullah Mu’min. Yusuf had been his deputy and assumed leadership after he was killed. Yusuf received his orders from his own commanders. The mujahideen always wanted to attack the Americans, he said, but their commanders told them when to attack. Mullah Yusuf operated only in Ghazni. Mullah Omar was the top commander, he told me, but only Yusuf’s most senior commanders could communicate with the one-eyed former leader of Afghanistan, who called himself the “commander of the faithful.”

Yusuf told me he would stop fighting when the foreigners left Afghanistan, but then he would go to other places like Chechnya, Palestine, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, and Somalia to fight. I doubted it was more than bravado; he knew little about the world outside Afghanistan and his refuge in Pakistan. Still, the pre-September 11 Taliban were much less connected to other struggles in the Muslim world. Globalized jihadism was penetrating even the remote Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. While most Afghan Taliban fought only for Afghanistan, the longer the Americans remained, the more links the Taliban might forge. Out of curiosity, I asked Yusuf what he thought about Hizballah. Throughout the Muslim world, tensions between Sunnis and Shiites were increasing. In Pakistan the Sunni groups backing the Taliban were bitterly anti-Shiite and often murdered innocent Shiites. At first my hosts were confused between Libya and Lebanon. Shafiq said they didn’t like Shiites but they liked Hizballah because they fought America, though this was not exactly accurate. “Hizballah are mujahideen,” Yusuf said. “It is no problem that they are Shiites. They are our brothers. The Americans made problems between Sunnis and Shiites. All Muslims are one.”

Muhamad, Yusuf’s eighteen-year-old companion, was also from Ghazni but had gone to an Islamic school in the Pakistani city of Quetta, which borders Afghanistan and sheltered many Taliban leaders. The school was called Mahmadiya, and education was in Pashtu, the only language Muhamad knew. Room and board had been free. In Quetta he had joined the Taliban, he said, because they were Muslim and his whole village had joined, and because he didn’t like the Americans entering his village. His parents did not know he had joined; they thought he was still studying in Pakistan. He had been a fighter for only fifteen days but had received two or three months of training in Ghazni. The training was not difficult, he said, but he had taken part in only one attack so far, against a police checkpoint in Ghazni. He had used an AK-47, and his friend had used an RPG. The Afghan police were not good fighters, he said. Shafiq added that the Afghan army was very good, and soldiers hit their targets when they shot. Referring to Muhamad, Shafiq proudly said, “All our boys are Mullah Omar and Osama.”

After we finished eating we walked to a mud shed. Shafiq opened its wooden doors to reveal a white Toyota Corolla. The men loaded the RPG launcher and four rockets into the car, along with the PKM and the AK-47. We drove under the moonlit desert on dirt paths to the village of Kharkhasha, where Shafiq lived. Shafiq put a tape of Taliban chants on. They were in Pashtu and without music, which was officially forbidden by the Taliban. We walked over a short wooden footbridge, and Shafiq’s older brother opened the door to greet us.

We entered the guest room in darkness and sat down on the thin mattresses that lined the walls. A small gas lamp was brought out as well as grapes and green tea. Shafiq belonged to the Jalalzai tribe, which was the biggest in Andar, he said. He fought the Soviets alongside Maulvi Muhamad Younes Khalis’s hardline Hizb-e-Islami, a splinter group with the same name as the one led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Shafiq was jailed for five years in the Communist era, and he bore tattoos on his wrist from that time. During the jihad against the Soviets, he worked with Arab doctors who volunteered to help the mujahideen. He picked up some Arabic from a Lebanese doctor called Sheikh Aqil, whom he described as a big, strong man. Following the Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahideen started to fight one another, Shafiq said he saw that the mujahideen had become robbers. He joined the Taliban in 1994 because they wanted peace and Islam.

When the American forces left, Shafiq said, he would be willing to negotiate with the Taliban’s Afghan rivals—but not with President Karzai, who was not a Muslim but a Jew. “I cannot make a deal with Karzai because he is American,” he said. Shafiq wanted a Sharia government, meaning one where Islamic law was imposed, and he hoped that Mullah Omar would return to rule the country. Girls could attend school, he said, and women could work, as long as they wore a hijab that covered them appropriately. Women could even serve as Parliament members and as governors, but not as the president, he said. Shafiq had a seven-month-old daughter; he said he would send his daughters to school, but only if the teachers were women. He was wary of giving too much freedom to women. They could go to cinemas only with their brothers or fathers, he said, not with other boys. There weren’t many cinemas in Afghanistan, so I didn’t know what he was so worried about. “If you give women freedom, they will go with boys and get HIV,” he said. One of my favorite views in Kabul was of kites fluttering high above homes in Kabul. The Taliban regime had forbidden kite flying in the past, and I asked Shafiq what he thought. Kites are not good, he said; it was better to work or study, and flying a kite was not even a sport. Soccer was also bad, but exercise and martial arts were good. Even the boys we passed playing with fire were doing something that was haram (forbidden).

Shafiq wanted help from Saudi Arabia or Iran; he and his men needed money for ammunition. They received