No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  He crossed a bridge and noticed that there was not a car or pedestrian or goat in sight. He glanced up, but the sky was empty. Groves of fruit trees stood in rows, Soviet war ruins lying here and there between them. He drove on, the road sloping down into a broad plain. He passed clusters of abandoned mud houses and neglected fields and then, up ahead, he saw vehicles approaching. They soon pulled up before him, blocking his path. Men in white turbans jumped out and pointed their Kalashnikovs and shouted. There was little he could say or do. Before he knew it, he was assailed by fists and rifle butts and shoved unceremoniously into the back of a vehicle. Someone shouted that he was a coward for forsaking his country. In the front seat, a Taliban commander turned to him and said, “We kill people like you.”

  From their turbans and their accents, he knew that this was no ordinary Taliban force. This was the Palace Guard—“crazy Kandaharis,” as he used to call them: elite special forces from the Taliban heartland provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. They were taking him back to the front lines.

  Later that afternoon he was pressed back into service. For three days, he and other captives were ordered to fire on various Northern Alliance outposts and to guard weapons caches. At nightfall, he was shackled and tossed into an improvised prison.

  By the third day, their food supplies were dwindling. Men were melting snow to drink. A fellow captive begged Mullah Cable to shoot him and end his misery. He began to wonder if he should have held out longer in the mountains and kept his unit together. It had been foolish to assume that the Taliban would simply fall over, not with these brutish Palace Guards keeping everyone in the fight. Maybe the Taliban were stronger than he’d suspected. Maybe this war would take months or even years.

  But how did any of that matter? It was no life, sleeping in the mountains, hiding from killer machines that he could barely see, watching friends erased in a flash. Even if the Taliban stood for a hundred years, he decided, he would never go back. But he couldn’t stay here, either.

  He had certainly gotten out of worse before. Two years earlier, during a routine inspection near his mountain camp, he had come across a shepherd boy guarding his animals with particular zeal. Something didn’t seem right. Mullah Cable had questioned the boy, and, when he clammed up, he ordered his men to inspect the flock. Pulling back the wool on one sheep, a Talib found a gun firmly tied to its belly. They searched the others. Every single one bore a weapon. Mullah Cable headed back to the camp and found his weapons cache nearly empty. It was only then that the boy spilled the truth: Northern Alliance rebels had been bribing villagers to steal from the Taliban’s weapons stock, in the process bulking up their own supplies. Mullah Cable’s unit was now nearly defenseless.

  It would take much too long for backup to arrive. That evening, as the sky dimmed, panic had spread among the unarmed fighters. As the Talibs prepared to flee, the first fusillade of gunfire rang out not far away. From the sound of it, the rebels would be reaching the camp’s front entrance in minutes. Mullah Cable scanned the darkness for an escape route. In one direction was a road heading straight downhill, right into the enemy’s clutches. In the other, a small knoll. According to his spotters, rebels were circling around and about to close in on that, too. Then he looked at his truck, idling nearby, and inspiration struck. Calling over a Talib, he ordered him to drive up the knoll with headlights off, then turn around and drive back down, headlights on—and repeat, again and again. From the rebels’ vantage point, it would appear as if vehicle after vehicle of reinforcements was flooding into the camp. He then got on the radio—which he knew the rebels monitored—and let slip that thousands in backup were on their way. Soon enough, the firing died down. His sentries breathlessly called in with news that the rebels had broken ranks in retreat. The unit was saved.

  That had been back before the whole business with the Americans, when he was the confident commander of hundreds. Now a prisoner of his own side, he stood there silently as the Kandaharis hurled obscenities at him. Without food, however, he and the other detainees could hardly lift their Kalashnikovs, let alone march through the mountains. It was only then, the end of his third day in captivity, that the Palace Guards finally agreed to head to the nearest town to collect supplies. The captives assembled in a row for inspection, and when the guard saw Mullah Cable and another man in a shoeless state, he selected them both to take along.

  They were brought to a small bazaar where men and boys were crowding around a few stalls and vendors were calling out their prices. The Kandaharis fanned out in every direction, and Mullah Cable and his fellow captive were dispatched to collect bread. When he neared a pyramid of tomatoes, he glanced back at the Kandaharis, who were busy looking over vegetables and talking among themselves. Slipping behind the tomatoes, he whispered to the other captive, “Follow me!” They broke into a sprint and just kept running.

  It was long dark when they arrived at a level plain stretching south to the horizon, an open country of old mud huts and mud streams known as Bagram. Mullah Cable stopped in a field to examine his feet, now bruised a dark purple. All around him were the remains of a major Soviet military base, the fields littered with the detritus of that now-ancient occupation: rusting tanks, orphaned turrets, decaying mountains of wheelless jeeps, and, a short walk away, a gigantic, corroding warehouse made of corrugated iron—the perfect place to spend the night.

  As he worked to pry open the door, a pair of headlights appeared in the distance. He moved faster as they careened toward him. Before he knew it, a jeep drove right up and armed men jumped out. Another Palace Guard patrol. He and the other captive were kneed and slapped and ridiculed and thrown into the back of a jeep. During the ride, Mullah Cable cried out from the pain of men sitting atop him and the broken road beneath him. When he tried to speak he was hit with something hard.

  The Taliban camp, when they pulled in, was already a frenzy of activity. News over the radio told that Alliance rebels were pulling close, and a guard handed him a Kalashnikov with the words, “Don’t be a coward.” Not long after, the night erupted in gunfire. Men were shouting orders in the darkness. It was being said that the rebels had reached the front gate, but he could not see anything in that direction save the hills, dark against the sky. He fired wildly and then thought better of it, tossed his weapon aside, and broke for the rear exit. He was nearly out of the gate when something stopped him in his tracks: a pair of makeshift sandals that had been carved out of old army boots. Fortune was finally on his side. Strapping them on, he headed down the main road into the black night.

  Some hours later he came upon another fleeing captive who reported that the camp had fallen and the surrounding fields were teeming with Palace Guards trying to find their way home. They, too, were not eager for martyrdom.

  A twelve-hour walk to Kabul lay ahead. The road was lifeless, no sound anywhere but for his sandals on the gravel. He neared some darkened mud houses and slowed to see if anyone might be home but then changed his mind and kept walking. Some hours passed and fatigue set in. He came upon another row of houses that stood in perfect silence. Suddenly a flashlight blinked on and a voice yelled, “Stop!” Men in turbans were gathered ahead, and his heart sank.

  A Taliban officer stepped forward. “Where are you going? he asked, sounding nervous. “Who are you?”

  Mullah Cable had to think quickly. “I was up in Bagram visiting family. I’m on my way back to Kabul.”

  The officer studied him. “What kind of shoes are those? You don’t look like an ordinary person.” Mullah Cable responded with more lies, whatever came to mind, none of which made much sense. It turned out he had stumbled into Qale Nasro, a garrison town still in Taliban hands. The soldiers conferred, not knowing quite what to do. In the end, they decided to keep him at their guard post for the night.

  When he awoke at dawn, the soldiers were already deep in discussion. They looked tense, clutching their walkie-talkies and listening to reports on the advance of Alliance rebels. It would be thirty minutes, or an
hour at most, before the rebels reached Qale Nasro. The soldiers no longer seemed to have the slightest interest in him. Without hesitating, Mullah Cable slipped away and returned to the main road heading to Kabul.

  He walked for hours as the sun climbed steadily overhead. When a minivan taxi appeared, he ran to catch it and it rolled to a stop, but the driver took one look at him, with his Taliban-style black turban and strange sandals, and refused to unlock the door. The two men negotiated through the open window. Mullah Cable pressed his case, repeating that he was a civilian visiting family up north, and the driver continued to look him up and down and kept the door locked. Finally, Mullah Cable unclasped his gold Swiss watch. A gift from his beloved brother, eight years deceased, it was the most valued thing he owned, the only item of luxury he’d allowed himself in the mountains. The driver took it and let him in.

  They drove south. Mullah Cable wondered if the shame of what he had just done would ever leave him. What would his brother have said? It was all happening too fast. Just weeks before, he would have been driven anywhere he wished, by taxi or passing civilian alike, for free.

  The van continued on. Had Mullah Cable looked at the country passing him by, he would have seen rows of ruined grape trees standing bare against the sky. He would have seen flame-blackened one-room shops, and mud houses with missing doors and windows and outer walls. It had all been done by his people, by the movement he had sworn his life to, but he saw none of it. Instead, he stared blankly ahead, wondering about the days to come, the friends he’d lost, and the end of life as he knew it.

  * * *

  Late on November 12, 2001, Mullah Cable entered Kabul. He found a hollow city. The roads were cratered, just as they had been when he’d left for the mountains all those years before. Shops and restaurants stood shuttered, and there was almost no one about. Crossing the Kabul River, he stared at the stinking mixture of mud and trash and goat droppings. He walked through neighborhoods he hadn’t seen in years, where refuse sluiced down hillside drains into street gutters. The stench of sulfur and human waste was smothering. Up in the mountains, he’d forgotten how little governing the Taliban had done outside their drive for security and order. Everywhere he looked, there was nothing but spectacular neglect.

  Near the city center, he arrived at a small house and for the first time in months saw his wife and daughter and the panoply of cousins and uncles who shared his roof. As they hugged, his relief was profound. He wanted nothing more than to stay in their company and live quietly and honorably. Peacefully. He hoisted up his sore feet and told them everything, and they listened with great concern and admiration. They said they didn’t know what they would have done had he not returned to them. It was not long before they left to prepare dinner and he drifted off to sleep.

  That evening, he awoke to visitors. Two cousins from the outskirts of town had heard that Northern Alliance rebels would be entering Kabul in the next day or two. As he ate his meal, Mullah Cable considered the news. He understood what everyone in town had long known: the civil war had compartmentalized Afghanistan’s nearly forty ethnic groups into political blocs. The Taliban drew their recruits almost entirely from ethnic Pashtuns, who made up about 40 percent of the country, while the Northern Alliance typically gathered support from ethnic Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek minority communities. Now most Pashtuns, even those who disliked the Taliban, felt anxious about the prospect of Northern Alliance rule.

  When Kabul fell, he knew, not a single Talib would be left alive. It would be madness to stay. But where could he go? No province seemed safe, and the possibilities of retribution—at the hands of Alliance rebels, the Americans, or even civilians—bloomed in his imagination.

  Only one option remained, and he could not deny it. The next morning Mullah Cable sold everything he owned to the neighbors, raising about $1,000. He, his wife, his daughter, and two other relatives squeezed into a minivan taxi. They passed the southern gates of Kabul, then the hills circling the city’s edge, and finally Bala Hisar, a set of mud-walled castle ruins that the Taliban used for storage. Mullah Cable watched as men climbed out of the castle windows, weapons in hand. Looters. Government vehicles were being stolen. He knew then that Kabul was falling, and that it would be lost forever.

  The taxi emerged onto a broad, vacant escarpment, and the road curved southeast. It was empty in both directions. Dark brown mountains lay in the far distance; beyond them, Pakistan. On the radio, the BBC was reporting scenes of jubilation in the city they had left behind. He sat deep in thought. The ignominy of his flight fit no narrative he knew. You worked hard, were clever and careful, and through patronage or charisma you became someone who mattered. You were brave in battle and loyal in life, and it paid off—but not for him. He was escaping like a common thief, turning his back on the movement that had made him who he was. “That was the beginning, I can tell you that,” he recalled years later. “That was the start of my depression. I was thinking, What will happen to me? I pressed my face against the glass. I was crying, but I didn’t want anyone to see. It felt like the sky was falling.”

  * * *

  Two mornings later, Mullah Cable and his family arrived at a small way station at the foot of the dark brown mountains. They waited through the day until a smuggler appeared, and Mullah Cable spoke with him briefly. Just ahead was a stand of pine trees, and the group left their taxi behind and headed toward it on foot. Soon they found themselves making their way through a thick forest. A few miles ahead lay the tribal badlands of Waziristan, a region of Pakistan home to “murderers, backbiters, and thieves,” as he explained to his wife. It was terra incognita for him, but he had heard enough tales of travelers being robbed and knifed there, or kidnapped and never seen again. Worse yet, Pakistan’s official policy was to arrest any Talib they found.

  With the smuggler as their guide, they headed off the path, hacking their way through the bracken, clearing their way as they went. Every so often, they were directed by the smuggler to lie motionless on the ground. Mullah Cable looked at his wife, suffering these hardships in silence, picking her way through the trees in her burqa. Guilt welled up in him, guilt for her ordeal and for having ever gotten mixed up in politics. He told himself that she shouldn’t have to pay for his sins. The smuggler had given him a hunting rifle, and Mullah Cable decided that if someone came for his family he would fight to the death. “If I tell you to run,” he told her, “just do it. Don’t ask me, and don’t wait for me.”

  After many hours they emerged into a clearing. A smooth, paved highway, a sight he’d never seen anywhere in Afghanistan, stretched out before them. Some time later, a truck rolled to a stop and picked them up, as arranged. Once they were on their way, he noticed the driver staring at him. “I’ve been doing this for a long time,” the driver said. “But I’ve never seen anyone as anxious as you.”

  They drove on as the highway curved through forests of pine and holly. Every so often a Pakistani military vehicle trundled by and Mullah Cable ducked his head out of view. He knew that if he were caught he’d be turned over to the Americans or banished to a Pakistani prison, and the thought filled him with anger. What had it all been for? A mad village preacher throwing away the country for nothing?

  The forest thinned into a broad clearing. Up ahead, straddling the highway, stood a military checkpoint. They drove up and the driver waved and the Pakistani soldier nodded and they continued on. They drove through a second and third checkpoint, and Mullah Cable was not even questioned. He could not make sense of it.

  They crossed a dried riverbed and came upon street after street of low mud-brick houses. The driver announced that they had reached the town of Miram Shah. For the first time in three days, Mullah Cable and his family sat down to eat. The next morning they set out again, heading for the anonymous streets of the port metropolis of Karachi.

  * * *

  Back in Afghanistan the bombing continued, but the Taliban’s end was near. Thousands of their soldiers were fleeing, and while some made
it back to their home villages, the less fortunate among them ended up in Northern Alliance hands. Many of these were executed, including hundreds who were locked inside giant containers and suffocated to death. Though he didn’t realize it, Mullah Cable had only narrowly escaped a similar fate. Shortly after he left the Taliban garrison town of Qale Nasro, rebels overran the outpost and seized whomever they could find. A New York Times reporter traveling with them learned that a Taliban soldier hiding in an irrigation ditch had been dragged out, stripped of his belongings, and shot. For good measure, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher was then driven into the corpse’s head.

  When his family reached Karachi, relief washed over Mullah Cable. If he could keep out of sight of Pakistani authorities, he could begin to piece together a Taliban-free future. He had a new world to look forward to, a new set of possibilities. A life at peace.

  2

  The Battle for Tirin Kot

  On the day Jan Muhammad was scheduled to die, he awoke around dawn. He sat in the corner amid the darkness, until the familiar sounds of the morning began: the creaking of the hall gate, the deep thudding footsteps on the dirt floor, a series of bangs growing louder, and then the heavy rapping on his door. His Taliban jailers had adopted this tradition because you couldn’t hear the muezzin in here. He stood to pray.

  For the next two hours it was quiet. Then the sounds came again. Muhammad quickly groped around until he found the ornamental box where he had hidden the money. The door swung open and the hallway’s dull light filled the room. Grabbing his jerry can, he followed the guards through the windowless corridor. He entered a large room of yellowing tiles and buzzing flies, where prisoners were hunched over and whispering softly. They were brought here daily to empty their cans, which they used to relieve themselves. With no drains, the effluent sat in puddles, sometimes for days, until one of the men was ordered to scrub the floor clean. Jan Muhammad retrieved the money he had concealed in his pants and quickly stuffed it into the fist of another prisoner. It was everything he had, $2,000, collected patiently from family visits and the sale of contraband over the last year.