To Tom
There is nothing farther away from Washington than the entire world.
–Arthur Miller
CONTENTS
Prologue
One Every Man in This Village Is a Liar
Two Chasing Ghosts
Three As Long as You Can Pay for It
Four Terrorism and Other Stories
Five Forgive Us Our Trespasses
Six The Living Martyr
Seven The Leader
Eight Sacrifice
Nine We Expected Something Better
Ten A Question of Cost
Eleven Loddi Doddi, We Likes to Party
Twelve A City Built on Garbage
Thirteen The Earthquake Nobody Felt
Fourteen All Things Light, and All Things Dark
Fifteen There Would Be Consequences
Sixteen Killing the Dead
Seventeen I Thought I Was a Salamander
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
This memory from childhood is still there: the voices of the adults bounce fretfully, eternally, in rooms that have since been sold or abandoned. Beirut, they said, never Lebanon. John was in Beirut. All meaning fit into those words. His barracks had been blown up, but he had survived.
John the drinker, the smoker, apprentice in three-card monte and hanger-out with New York street cons; his face cut by light, arms angled in salt air, his imprint lingers still in corners and amber edges. John was my father’s cousin, my godfather’s brother, our two Irish Catholic families braided together in city blocks, in the Bronx, by marriage and the crosshatches of godfathering. He was adrift between the generations of our family, too old to be a cousin and too young to be an uncle, but still unmistakably one of us, with us in churches and cramped living rooms and summers on the beach. In my earliest memories I waddle in his retreating shadow, arms in the air and begging, “Johnny! Uppy!” And then this skinny street hustler sweeps me into the air to swing on the rim of centrifugal force until the salty, sunny world swims.
Even then, John had endured the thing I feared most. His mother had died. He was feeling very badly, my mother said. You shouldn’t ask him about it. John got into a little trouble, and then into some more trouble, so they sent him to live with my grandparents to get him out of New York. And when that didn’t work, they signed the papers allowing him to enlist. He was only sixteen. The Marines sent him to Beirut. Hezbollah bombed the bunkers. Thank God he’s all right, the adults said. Nobody talked about Hezbollah then, not in our house. Hezbollah didn’t mean anything. It was a featureless enemy in a war that was real only insofar as it touched our household.
A bomb explodes and everything goes wrong. John lived, but he wasn’t all right. Three hundred and five people died around him. A few years later, he shot himself in the head. It was just before Thanksgiving. He was a father. He was young. We drove to New York for the funeral. They printed prayer cards and sewed his head back together for the open coffin. People stood around and whispered. It didn’t look as bad as you might think, but it didn’t look good, either.
For a long time, that was everything I knew—not just about Beirut, but about war: that it was dark and dangerous, that you could survive and not survive, both at the same time. I was twenty-five when I covered the war in Afghanistan. I wound up there by accident, rushed into foreign reporting by coincidence, because I was vacationing in Paris on September 11. Before that, I was a national correspondent in Houston. So I was a reporter who didn’t really know how to write about combat, covering America from outside its borders as it crashed zealously into war and occupation. This huge change came without warning, but it felt wholly natural. It would be my generation’s fate, it seemed, to be altered by September 11, so I would write about war, soldiers would fight, and Americans would rearrange the way they thought about things. Everything was negotiable; you couldn’t imagine what would happen next. I got excited and felt that I was living through important times and went rushing in, and years later I came away older, different, with damage that couldn’t be anticipated beforehand and can’t be counted after. That’s the way it goes, the way people get older and empires begin to slip. And now the fear is that it didn’t mean anything. Isn’t that what we all suspect about the war on terror, the long war, the war that hasn’t ended? The stories repeat themselves, the same headlines, the same geography, the same mortality. We are losing interest and we fear it means nothing.
September 11 stands out now like a depot, the last train station before a vast unknown prairie, where the engine of events groaned and roared and hauled America back into the wilderness. It was the beginning of lost days, of disastrous reaction, of fumbling around in the world. We had already tamed our own hostile landscapes, the enormous stretches of the West, stamped out what came before, emptied and erased a vast run of earth so that we, the Americans, could have a tabula rasa, could invent a new nation and grow strong. And then September 11 came and infected us with the idea that we could tame all the wilderness of the world, too, and make ourselves perfectly safe.
I wanted to see, and so I went along to watch. I was younger than I realized and extremely American; sentimental but not stupid. I didn’t go to Afghanistan with any strong convictions; I was a reporter, and I wanted to see. Only after covering it for years did I understand that the war on terror never really existed. It was not a real thing. Not that the war on terror was flawed, not that it was cynical or self-defeating, or likely to breed more resentment and violence. But that it was hollow, it was essentially nothing but a unifying myth for a complicated scramble of mixed impulses and social theories and night terrors and cruelty and business interests, all overhung with the unassailable memory of falling skyscrapers. There were, of course, certain wars, certain campaigns, certain speeches, all netted together under a heading. But this war we all talked about wasn’t a coherent system, or a philosophy, or a strategy. Maybe it was a way for Americans to convince ourselves that we were still strong and correct. Mostly, I think, it was fear. Fear made more dangerous by gaping American estrangement from the rest of the world. Fear at a loss for an object.
As Americans we have the gift of detaching ourselves and drifting on; it has saved us over and over again from getting mired in guilt or stuck in the past. Sometimes we are too good at it. Here in the same generation, the wars happening over there, elsewhere, already have the irreality of a dream. It’s the effect of time, too, and years piling up. You can’t remember it all and you can’t explain why you did what you did. You have a few drinks and call an old friend and say, this happened, remember? This happened and we were there. But the wars are still happening, and they have been happening all along. People died. Promises were broken. Things were destroyed. And as Americans these actions belong to us. We should remember those days, or we should admit they meant nothing, and if they meant nothing then there is the question of how much we have lost, and why.
As it turned out, the first thing I knew about war was also the truest, and maybe it’s as true for nations as for individuals: You can survive and not survive, both at the same time.
ONE
EVERY MAN IN THIS VILLAGE IS A LIAR
Cold dawn broke on the horizon outside. The bedroom door shushed open, bringing the morning air and a warlord on predator’s toes.
I lay in a nest of polyester blankets and listened to his footsteps cross the carpet. Every muscle pulled tight. You reveal yourself in breath, in the nerves of your face. Count the breaths, in and out. He sat on the edge of the bed. Smooth breath, relax your eyes, don’t let the lids shake. Then his call
oused old hand was stroking my hair, cupping my scalp, fingers dripping like algae onto my ears and cheeks.
The warlord lived in Jalalabad, in a swath of Afghanistan where the soil is rich with poppies and land mines, in a house awash in guns. People whispered that he was a heroin trafficker. His tribal loyalists clotted the orange groves and rose gardens outside, AK-47s in dust-caked fingers. They said he was ruthless in war, that his skin was scarred by an arrow. There was a vague whisper about a legendary ambush, the warlord killing enemies with his bare hands. And now those ropey hands were petting my hair, silent and brazen.
I clung to one thing: Brian, the photographer, was in the bathroom. Water slapped the floor. How long would his shower last, and how could I escape the warlord’s lechery without offending him? The truth was, we needed him. He was an enemy of the Taliban, funded by the U.S. government, making a play for power in the vague, new order that had begun when American soldiers toppled the Taliban government. I was a stranger here, and he was my best source. He said he knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding. And now he was petting me like a puppy; nobody could sleep through it. The bed creaked. Stale breath sank in my face. Papery lips pressed my forehead. I opened my eyes and tried to look groggy.
“What are you doing?”
“Sshhh.”
I struggled upright, cleared a phlegmy throat, and tried to sound dignified: “You are putting me into a very awkward position.” A black-and-white-movie line, spilling out in a moment of panic.
He smiled and reached for my face.
“Please don’t do that,” I snapped.
Then, suddenly, silence. The water stopped, the pipes fell quiet. The warlord glanced around, stood, and slipped back out of the room.
Brian stepped out; his hair gleamed with water.
I turned my eyes to him and hissed: “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I had met Mohammed Zaman weeks earlier, in Peshawar—a cramped kaleidoscope of a city perched on the last edge of organization and authority in Pakistan. To the west stretched the lawless tribal territories, the Khyber Pass, the Afghan frontier. Driven away by the Taliban, Zaman had been living an exile’s life in Dijon, France, before September 11. Under chilly French skies he’d pined after his family’s lands, the service of armed tribesmen, and, presumably, the rich, fresh fields of Afghan poppy. When U.S. jets started dropping bombs on Afghanistan, Zaman raced back to Peshawar and holed up in a rented house, waiting for the Americans to dispose of the Taliban and clear the path home—and eager to make some money while he was at it.
I sat in the shadows of a taxi late one night, my face and head draped in scarves, making my way through the jangling streets of Peshawar for an audience with Zaman. I liked it, all of it, enormously—the poetry of the place, the intrigue of war, imagining myself veiled in the back of a clopping carriage, bringing secrets to a bootlegger. The warlord’s return had drawn throngs of men for endless meetings; I picked my way around the crowds on the lawn and sat waiting in a long drawing room. A door opened and out marched an American diplomat I’d seen at the embassy. His eyes skimmed mine and he hurried on, stone-faced. He didn’t like being spotted there. I sat and watched him leave.
Zaman came out, tall and deliberate, face sagging from his skull. We sat with tea between us, and I asked him to take me to Afghanistan when he went.
He was solemn. “I take your life on my honor,” he said from the heights of his mountainous nose. “They will have to kill me before they can harm you.”
A few days later, we set off for war. The sun sank as we drove toward the Khyber Pass, storied old route of smugglers and marauders. Men pounded through a field hockey match in a haze of setting sun and rising dust. “Dead slow,” ordered a traffic sign. “These areas are full of drugs,” muttered the driver. In my head shimmered gilded pictures of the Grand Trunk Road, the Silk Road, Kim. On the edge of Afghanistan, stars crowded the sky, dull and dense. We crossed the border and plunged into the enormous uncertainty of this new American war. Forty Afghan fighters waited for us, young men and boys nestled together in pickup trucks. They shivered in the stinging night and gripped grenade launchers, chains of machine gun rounds trailing from the trucks. We drove alongside the Kabul River, past the shadowed bulk of mountains and tractors, along fields of tobacco and wheat. At the edge of Jalalabad, the deserted dinosaurs of rusted Soviet tanks reared from the ground.
In the core of the dusty night, we pulled up to his house. Zaman served a feast and stayed awake with us, lolling on the floor around the vegetables and lamb and spinning out long, fatigued stories. We blinked and yawned but Zaman pushed on toward sunrise. He was selling his case even then, from those earliest hours. Osama bin Laden had fled to the nearby White Mountains, he said, to the caves cut into stone, to Tora Bora. The terrorist and his followers still lurked nearby. If America was serious about this war on terror, the terrorists needed to be flushed out. He could do the job; he only needed guns, money, and equipment.
He talked on and on, weaving French into English, until the dawn call to prayer rang from a whitening sky. His words melted together. My chin was falling. I slept on the floor, and woke up in the new Afghanistan.
The first days with Zaman were easy. The stories fell like ripe fruit. But when he tiptoed to my bed, I knew we had to scrounge for another roof. There was nowhere to go but the Spin Ghar hotel, a crumbling Soviet relic rising from tangles of garden and derelict trees. Rank smells wafted through the cold corridors, over chipped linoleum, past cracked plaster walls. Mad jumbles of bodies crowded the lobby—foreign reporters, Afghans, hired gunmen in their robes and eye paint, all sprawled on the grass, smoking on the steps, flooding over the balconies.
The electricity died that night, and gas lanterns shivered in the dark cavern of the hotel dining room. Everybody was very quiet. There was bad news.
Some of the reporters had set off for Kabul in a convoy that day. Two hours out of town, Afghan bandits stopped the first car and shot the passengers dead: a Spaniard, an Afghan, an Australian. There was an Italian woman, too, who was raped and then killed. The rest of the reporters squealed their cars around and came back to Jalalabad. The bodies were abandoned on the road. It was the first lost gamble, and it pulled us a little farther into war. Now we in the dark dining room were rendered survivors, the ones who hadn’t died. The faces swim out of darkness, painted in wisps of gaslight. They are talking about the abandoned bodies, about who fetched them. I feel empty. I have no reaction. It is a gap inside of me, like putting your tongue where a tooth used to be. I know that I should feel something; to feel something is appropriate and human. I stay silent so that the others will not realize that I am gaping like a canyon. I am not absolutely sure this is real; it’s so very far from where we started. On September 11, I was in Paris, and then in Bahrain, an aircraft carrier, and Pakistan, moving slowly, unconsciously closer to here, tonight. America is at war, and we are all here too, at the edge of death, just like that, in just a few weeks. And so we are on an island, and so the roads are a place to die.
In my room the darkness is thick as tar. My fingers can’t find a lock on the door. I am groping when the door cracks forward with a grunt of Pashto. I can’t see the Afghan man but I push at him, throw my arms into the darkness and find flesh, drive him back. His cries are pure sound to me. I don’t care. After Zaman at my bedside and reporters dead on the road, this man cannot stay. Our American and Afghan words mean nothing when they hit the other ear. We are stripped of all understanding, battling in the blackness. I shove him into the hall and force the door closed against the last pieces of him, a kicking foot, a grasping arm. Later on, I realize he was probably the sweet-faced cleaning man who shuffled like a kicked stray through the corridors at night. Later I laugh, a little embarrassed. But on this night, I have vanquished. I lean limp against the door of my stinking little cave, conqueror of misunderstood forces.
Back in Pakistan, before I crossed over into Afghanistan, somebody said to me: “Every man in this vil
lage is a liar.” It was the punch line to a parable, the tale of an ancient Greek traveler who plods into a foreign village and is greeted with those words. It is a twist on the Epimenides paradox, named after the Cretan philosopher who declared, “All Cretans are liars.” It’s one of the world’s oldest logic problems, folding in on itself like an Escher sketch. If he’s telling the truth, he’s lying. If he’s lying, he’s telling the truth.
That was Afghanistan after September 11.
You meet a man, and his story doesn’t sound right. You stare at him and your brain is chewing away, and out of the corner of your eye something bizarre and fantastic trails past—a pair of mujahideen with their fingers intertwined, plastic flowers glowing in black hair, winking and fluttering with the kohl-rimmed eyes of two besotted lovers. And you can’t help but look, but then all you can do is watch these strange peacocks, stunned by the magenta homoeroticism of this dry, pious land. By the time you peel your attention back and stop your thoughts from whirling, the man you were trying to weigh out is long gone. Afghanistan was meaning washed away in floods of color, in drugs, guns, sexual ambiguity, and Islam.
I met a young man who spoke Arabic and English, which was rare and fancy for provincial Afghanistan. He had worked for bin Laden, and I was certain his sympathies lay with the Taliban, with Al Qaeda. We sat together and had long interviews. Later I found out he worked for the CIA. They gave him a satellite phone, and he was calling in coordinates for bombing targets.
Every man in this village is a liar.
Maybe that’s why nobody believed the warlords when they kept saying that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora. A pity, because it was true: Osama bin Laden packed his bags and fled into the mountain redoubt near Jalalabad after September 11. The caves were his last stop before he lost his substance and melted into the world’s most famous phantom. Catching bin Laden was the first important thing the United States set out to do after September 11. The job was bungled so thoroughly that the war never really found its compass again. Here in eastern Afghanistan, the Americans would begin to lose the plot.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 1