Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

by Megan K. Stack

  Those days were deep with dimensions; conflicting things happened at the same time, on top of one another. Kabul had fallen to the Northern Alliance, but in the east, the war pounded on. The Afghans who’d opposed the Taliban were in a renaissance, and neck deep in the swirl of their ancient clan rivalries. The warlords plotted tribal revenge, scrapped for control of the heroin trade, lined their pockets and trolled for power. They tossed enemies into moldy jail cells, and sold them to the Americans who were rounding up jihadis. If you asked them why, they’d smile in chilling self-satisfaction and say, “He’s a terrorist.” Maybe it was true, and maybe it wasn’t, but the days were slipping away too quickly for anybody to quibble.

  Jalalabad had been a headquarters for Al Qaeda, home to a training camp and vast housing complexes built by the influx of Saudis, Kuwaitis, Chechens—“Arabs,” resentful locals called the rich Al Qaeda members who had taken up residence in sequestered communities. Osama bin Laden, with his wives and children, called Jalalabad home years before September 11. Now he huddled a few hours’ drive away in Tora Bora, the masterfully defensible cave complex built with CIA money back when America was fighting the Communists instead of the terrorists. U.S. warplanes hammered the mountains, but their intelligence was coming from Afghans who manipulated the firepower to suit their own interests.

  I learned to count the fighter jets that passed overhead in my sleep. There were no other airplanes in the Afghan skies; there was only the war. When thin dawn light creaked into the room, I’d know that three warplanes had passed. I woke up knowing, and remembering nothing.

  I have this memory, clear as glass: Sunset spilled all over the horizon. In the velvet grass below the hotel terrace, the drivers were bent on their prayer rugs, the guerrillas paced in the gravel, the palms and pines deepened in the dying light. Then a B-52 sliced a white gash into the sky. All of the reporters and translators and soldiers stood still, stared at the heavens, and waited to see where the bombs would fall. The planes thundered past every day, but for some reason on that day we stood there in collective awe. Maybe everybody had forgotten about the war for a minute, and then it was there again.

  One day, Zaman’s men brought the bodies of eight dead guerrilla soldiers down from the mountains and laid them out on the hospital floor. Then he herded in a great swarm of reporters to gape and snap photographs. He stalked over the dead, face twisted with rage, railing about the bombings. The Americans were killing peasants loyal to him, and now his mujahideen. They must be using old maps, he thundered. Who is telling them where to bomb? Do these look like Al Qaeda to you?

  The dead men were skinny, all of them, muddy and ragged. One man’s face had been blown off. Another lay with the back of his head gone, his brains leaking. Filtered sunlight spilled onto the floor; the smell of death was heavy. An American reporter fell on the ground and lay there crying. I looked at her, and at the corpses. Intellectually, I knew that her reaction was appropriate, but I felt disgusted by her weakness. Staring down at the bodies, I felt numb, light, as if my own body might vaporize, as if I didn’t need to breathe.

  The dying were worse than the dead. They came down from the hills in rattling caravans, slow as torture over bone-cracking roads of mud and rock, bleeding all over the backseats of rattletrap cars. Three hours, four hours, bright red lives seeping away.

  They wound up in the dim wards of Jalalabad’s filthy hospital. There weren’t enough antibiotics or antiseptics. Little girls who wouldn’t live through the night were stacked two to a cot, covered in blood. A baby with its head caked in scab and pus and one eye full of blood cried in the listless arms of a young, young girl. A little boy who had lost his arms, his eyesight, and his family lay motionless in the hot afternoon. The rooms smelled of sweat and infection; flies and woolen blankets. All of it coming down from those American planes.

  We drifted out of the hospital. In the car I tasted metal. After a long time, Brian spoke.

  “That was pretty bad.” He cleared his throat.

  “Yeah.”

  We looked out the window, and the driver turned up the music. The sunlight and the dust were gilding everything to silver. The spindly dome of trees cupped the road, bicycle spokes flickered and goats plodded in the blue fog of exhaust. Afghans were rushing home from the market, arms loaded with fresh meat and vegetables to break the Ramadan fast. The hotel room was dark and cold. I opened a pad of paper and tried to make some notes. This is what I wrote:

  I didn’t mean to really see these things. I didn’t know how it would be.

  Late one night, bombs fell on the village of Kama Ado, a tiny, isolated hamlet of mud houses. I interviewed people who were hauled from the wreckage. I wrote a story about it. I fell asleep.

  By morning, my story wasn’t the same. Instead of leading with the news of the crushed village, the top of the story had Pentagon officials denying reports of the bombing. The first voice in the article was no longer that of an Afghan victim. Instead, it was a Pentagon official who said: “This is a false story.”

  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the same: “If we cannot know for certain how many people were killed in lower Manhattan, where we have full access to the site, thousands of reporters, investigators, rescue workers combing the wreckage, and no enemy propaganda to confuse the situation, one ought to be sensitive to how difficult it is to know with certainty, in real time, what may have happened in any given situation in Afghanistan, where we lack access and we’re dealing with world class liars.”

  I read it once. I read it twice. Were we to believe the village had spontaneously collapsed while U.S. warplanes circled overhead?

  Every man in this village is a liar.

  Jalalabad slipped out of the Taliban’s hold as easy as a boiled tomato loses its skin. No bloodshed, just a lot of abandoned buildings and cars, ripe for the grabbing by guerrillas who rushed down from the mountains. The mujahideen swarmed the streets, dirty children run amok in an empty house. They were old and weary, or young and wild; the middle-aged men were mostly dead. Mujahideen is Arabic for “strugglers,” but it’s understood to mean “holy warriors.” In Afghanistan, they are the men with guns, the ones who sleep where they lie and fight for their tribal patriarchs in a senseless string of conflicts.

  Stoned on hash and hopped up on war, draped in ragged smocks and blankets, the young mujahideen lingered on every corner, fired into the night skies to hear the guns scream in the empty streets. They imposed curfews, lit bonfires in the middle of the roads, and lorded it over the city until sunrise. They beat people to feel powerful, to watch the peasants scamper away from their clubs in the bazaar.

  One day I was in an abandoned Al Qaeda compound with a French reporter. We pored through trunks of documents and the mujahideen stood around smirking at our interest in worthless paper. The sun was hot and they were fasting for Ramadan, irritable and armed to the teeth. They bickered, and then they were screaming and I heard the safeties click off and looked up. Patrice let out a roar and lunged at them just before they start shooting. “No, no, no!” he hollered. “You stop that! You will kill us!” They looked at his white hair and slowly lowered their weapons in deference to his age and gender. Like lion cubs, they responded to shows of dominance.

  For a long time, it didn’t matter what happened. I was high on Afghanistan. The aching beauty of rock and sky, and the thick light smearing everything like honey. The jangle of tongues, confusion of smells, every human enterprise a cheap trifle of origami against this massive, unchanging earth.

  War cannot be innocent, but sometimes it is naive. At first the fight in Afghanistan felt finite and comprehensible. There had been an attack, an act of war, and America responded with conventional warfare against an objectively violent and repressive regime. You could disagree with the choice to invade, you could question the sense and bravery of bombing a country built from mud, but at least there was an internal logic, the suggestion of a moral thread, of cause and effect. And so we plunged forward, and our eyes wer
e bound in gauze. I was acutely aware that in witnessing war I was experiencing something both timeless and particular. I expected awful sights and I accepted them when they came. The war was an adventure and an exhilaration, an ancient, human force that had found its shape for this country, in this age. Perhaps only by comparing it with all that came later can I remember it as naive. Death was everywhere, in the fields full of land mines, the villagers who hobbled without a leg, without an arm, staring from crutches. When I came to Afghanistan I had decided to look at the deaths of others, and to risk my own life. I had expected everything from war, danger and blood and hurt, and the war produced all of it.

  Afghans lived on the edge of mortality, its tang hung always in the air, in their words. If death would come to us all, the Afghans couldn’t be bothered to duck. I was interviewing an Afghan commander one afternoon in the mountains when somebody started shooting at us. I backed down the ridge, lowered myself out of the line of fire. “Can you please ask him to come closer so we’re not getting shot at?” I asked the translator. The commander looked at me and laughed. He sauntered slowly down out of the bullets smirking all the way.

  “We are dust.” The mujahideen liked to say that. We are dust.

  One day, a messenger came to the Spin Ghar hotel. Zaman was inviting me back to his house for iftar, the sunset meal that broke each day’s fast through the holy month of Ramadan.

  Zaman was about to command the ground offensive in Tora Bora and was therefore the closest voice I could find to an American representative. I wanted the story badly enough to return to his turf, but I couldn’t go alone. I needed a foreign man, somebody Zaman would feel tribally compelled to respect. So I invited the AP reporter Chris Tomlinson. “Whatever happens,” I told him, “don’t leave me alone with him.”

  A flicker crossed Zaman’s face when he saw Chris. We settled onto velvet cushions, and Zaman’s servants heaped the floor with steaming flatbread, biryani, crisp vegetables, a shank of mutton. Chris and I had our notebooks at our sides, and we jotted away while Zaman held forth on the ground assault.

  Suddenly Zaman looked at Chris. “Would you excuse us, please?” he said icily. “We need to talk in private.”

  Chris stared at me, telegraphing: What should I do?

  I glowered back: Don’t leave.

  “Um, well,” Chris stammered, eyes flying around the room. He pointed at the door to the terrace. “I’m just going to step outside and smoke a cigarette. I’ll be right outside,” he added, looking at me.

  As soon as the door closed, Zaman announced, “You’re going back to Pakistan.”

  I laughed. “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes. My men will take you there.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s a joke. I’m not leaving.”

  “You can’t stay here anymore. Every time I see you, I forget what I’m doing. You are making me distracted.”

  Through the windows, I watched the lone red ember of the cigarette float up and down the terrace.

  “I’m sure you can control yourself,” I said slowly, trying to prolong the conversation. He was sliding my way on the cushions, his body closing the distance between us. His eyes were fixed on me, long face like a sly old goat.

  “I’m in love with you,” he said. “I love you.”

  “You’re not in love with me!” I spat out. “You don’t even know me.”

  “I do know you,” he assured me.

  I looked at him, his gray, dirty hair smashed down from his Afghan cap, lanky limbs swathed in yards of shalwar kameez, crouched in slippers on the floor.

  “Look, I’m very flattered, but we are from completely different worlds. Where I come from, you can’t just—”

  He interrupted me.

  “I want to see your world,” he said. “I want to go there. With you. To know your family …”

  I imagined Haji Zaman, decked in tribal dress, sipping coffee on my mother’s front porch in Connecticut, faithful AK-47 casually propped against the rocking chair. Haji Zaman and I, holding hands, peering over the rim of the Grand Canyon.

  “It’s completely out of the question. And so’s Pakistan.”

  With a sheepish look in my direction, Chris returned.

  “Thank you very much for dinner,” my words tumbled out. “We have to get going now, to write our stories.”

  Zaman protested, but I was already on my feet, swaying unsteadily on the pillows, tugging at the ends of my head scarf. We scrambled down the stairs and burst out into the orchards and vegetable gardens hemming the house, but the driver was nowhere to be seen.

  “I can’t believe he left us!”

  “It’s not too far back to town,” Chris said. “We can make it walking.”

  “Do you remember the way?”

  “I think so.”

  The black night opened its mouth and swallowed us whole. Darkness quivered before us, taut as a stretched canvas, demanding to be filled. Our feet fumbled forward. I couldn’t remember the way; I hadn’t been paying enough attention. I’d been letting myself get carried along in days, flooded by experience, and now I was lost. Stars glittered overhead, brilliant scattershot. Beyond the road sprawled unseen fields, and land mines festered in the dirt. Figures moved in houses. A flush of light bruised the edges of black in the distance, and we kept walking toward it. The light grew and swelled, a distant peach rising into the night. Finally we could see the road ahead, the lights of cars swimming.

  On the road, we flagged down a bicycle taxi. “Spin Ghar hotel, please.” We climbed into the tiny carriage, and the man pedaled off. Everything was color and light, chasing the black from my eyes. Music was playing somewhere, night rushing past. No steel car doors, no glass, no roof split us from the world. The bicycle cab trembled over ruts, plastered with diamond-shaped mirrors, gaudy with pink and blue and yellow paint. Strings of coins jangled as we careened through the electric wildness of open air. The night pressed cool hands against my hot cheeks, ruffled my hair. Wind caught in my throat and then I was laughing, laughing to think that luck can change, just like that. The night was right there, choked with mysteries, shadows sliding down rutted roads, smells of sweet and dank from cooking pots, and the vastness of countryside. For a few minutes, death fell away, and it felt like freedom.

  TWO

  CHASING GHOSTS

  It had been weeks since Kabul had fallen to the Northern Alliance, and plans were already under way for a loya jirga, the tribal conference that would divide power in post-Taliban Afghanistan. American newspapers and television brimmed with self-congratulatory features: women taking off their burqas, fathers and sons flying kites, little girls heading back to school. But the war was not gone.

  There in the east, tension still laced the faces of the triumvirate of warlords who ran the region, each man boss of his own sumptuous headquarters. Every time one of the warlords saw a reporter, he pointedly reminded us that Osama bin Laden and his band of diehards were hiding in the mountains outside of town. They wanted the message to get back to Washington—bin Laden was an American problem, after all, and the United States had just invaded and occupied the country. The warlords were waiting for U.S. money, men, and supplies to flush out Al Qaeda, or so they said. These pleas started out quietly, discreetly. Then Zaman, the most tempestuous of the three, lost his patience and began calling noisily for America to pony up guns and cash. He sent word to the hotel one morning, inviting journalists to a bombed-out military base on the outskirts of Jalalabad. His men hauled an upholstered sofa down into a bomb crater, and Zaman reclined splendidly in the wreckage. We gathered on the rim, peering down at his majesty. The point, I think, was to display the shambles of Afghanistan’s virtually nonexistent military infrastructure.

  “We’re just like a new-bought car,” Zaman said that day. “We just need a drop of gas.”

  I kept remembering a U.S. official I’d interviewed back in Pakistan, and his palpable distaste for these warlords. “They’re parasites, this is how they make money,” he said. �
��What they love about foreigners is they can get something and there’s not a lot of likelihood they’ll have to reciprocate. Be it the CIA or whomever. If the CIA gives them a satellite phone they come out [of Afghanistan] and get it, then go back inside and say, ‘Oh, now I need guns.’”

  The warlords talked, and then they talked some more. They sent scouts to Tora Bora to spy on “the Arabs.” They muttered through midnight meetings and summoned tribal elders from obscure villages to secure promises of loyalty in the coming battle. They droned on about the victorious ground offensive they would prosecute when they finally sent the mujahideen up into the mountains to track down the terrorists.

  Time trickled on. We were all waiting for the war, but it didn’t come. A battle thundered slowly toward us, but it was dreamy, disarming. Like watching a race in slow motion: the leg rises, falls; the action is muddy as hallucination.

  One day Hazrat Ali, another warlord making a hard play for U.S. money, wandered through the hotel lobby. A plump, bearded fighter with twinkling eyes and a dramatic flair, Ali lacked Zaman’s gravitas, but he made up for it with moral authority: while Zaman had slunk off to France, Ali stayed put and fought an insurgent war against the Taliban. Now he’d been named local security chief; soon he would rise to power within Hamid Karzai’s government. Reporters clustered around him. The conversation went like this:

  Reporter: Where are the Taliban?

  Ali: What do you mean? They’re in their offices.

  Reporter: You mean your offices?

  Ali: Yes. We’re going to work with everybody in the new government.

  Reporter: So let me get this straight. The men working for you are former Taliban?