How The U.S. Turned Allies Into Enemies in Afghanistan and Lost The War
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Azam Ahmed, a former Kabul bureau chief, made repeated trips to the Waygal Valley of Afghanistan, an area that was once off-limits.
The New York Times
The Taliban war hero scans the crowd, searching. From the back, he snatches a man with a flop of dusty hair and a face marred by shrapnel.
The man’s head is bowed, and he is missing an arm and an eye. Something has happened to him, something awful.
“This,” the Taliban commander says, shaking the man a bit too hard, “was the last ally of the Americans here.”
In this remote province, the commander carried out one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a pitched battle that sounded an early warning of a conflict terribly off course and altered the history of the war.
Now, years after the Americans abandoned this valley, and Afghanistan altogether, the commander jerks the man from the crowd to explain how the United States lost both.
Clutching the empty arm of his jacket, the commander spins him around like a marionette. The man’s sheared limb and ragged scars tell only half the story: His family was killed next to him, massacred as they fled the Taliban.
“This man was my sworn enemy,” said the Taliban commander, Mullah Osman Jawhari.
“But do you know who did this to him?” the commander asks, a garish smile spreading over his face.
“It was his friends, the Americans.”
Turning Allies into Enemies
When the war in Afghanistan began, there were almost no Taliban here, just a couple of bearded misfits the locals laughed at.
Then U.S. forces showed up, and this valley in Nuristan Province, surrounded by mountains of alpine forest, became the site of some of the most violent attacks on American soldiers since Vietnam.
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