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He won the trust of insurgent leaders. His book should be a model for all our analysis of intervention, from Libya to contemporary Iraq. The first part of the book lays out the lives of 3 Afghanis that serve as the groundwork for the whole book, which ultimately runs from the 1980s through the present day.

Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. That war had unfolded mostly in the countryside, and people in Kabul spoke of it the way they spoke of foreign countries, as something far off and vaguely interesting. Instead of bombing them, we should be encouraging Muslims who share their views to emigrate to ISIS-held territory, and not letting them return.

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A devastating, well-honed prosecution detailing how our government bungled the initial salvo in the so-called war on terror, ignored attempts by top Taliban leaders to surrender, trusted the wrong people, and backed a feckless and corrupt Afghan regime. It is ultimately the most compelling account I've read of how Afghans themselves see the war. He follows a Taliban commander, who rises from scrawny teenager to leading insurgent; a U. Through their dramatic stories, No Good Men Among the Living stunningly lays bare the workings of America's longest war and the truth behind its prolonged agony. A devastating, well-honed prosecution detailing how our government bungled the initial salvo in the so-called war on terror, ignored attempts by top Taliban leaders to surrender, trusted the wrong people, and backed a feckless and corrupt Afghan regime. It is ultimately the most compelling account I've read of how Afghans themselves see the war. He follows a Taliban commander, who rises from scrawny teenager to leading insurgent; a U. Through their dramatic stories, No Good Men Among the Living stunningly lays bare the workings of America's longest war and the truth behind its prolonged agony. When teenager Noor Ahmed arrived that day in Gayawa to buy firewood, he knew it immediately: there was no call to prayer. But for the first time that he could remember, there was not a sound. The entire place seemed lifeless. He walked down a narrow goat trail, toward low houses with enclosures of mud brick, and saw that the gates of many of them had been left open. The smell of burning rubber hung in the air. Near a creek, something brown lying in the yellow grass caught his eye, and he stopped to look at it. It was a disfigured body, caked in dried blood. Noor Ahmed took a few steps back and ran to the mosque, but it was empty. He knocked on the door of a neighboring home. It, too, was empty. He tried another one. Then he came upon an old mud schoolhouse, its front gate ajar, and stopped to listen. Stepping inside, he walked through a long yard strewn with disassembled auto parts and empty motor oil canisters. Finally, when he pushed his way through the front door, he saw them huddled in the corner: men and women, toddlers and teenagers, more than a dozen in total, clutching each other, crammed into a single room. The Taliban had planned a surprise attack on Gayawa, but the villagers had known for days that the raid was coming, and those who could had hired cars or donkeys and moved their families down into the valley. But this had been a hard, dry, unhappy summer. Times were not good and many villagers could not afford to leave, even though they knew what might await them. Of those who stayed, only the few hiding in the schoolhouse, where the Taliban soldiers never thought to look, escaped untouched. The rest met an unknown fate. Back then, Gayawa was near the epicenter of a brutal, grinding war between the government of Afghanistan, controlled by the Taliban, and a band of rebel warlords known as the Northern Alliance. In their drive to crush the resistance, government troops waged a Shermanesque campaign, burning down houses and schools, destroying lush grape fields that had for generations yielded raisins renowned throughout South Asia, and setting whole communities in flight. In the region surrounding Gayawa, the Taliban enforced a blockade, allowing neither food nor supplies to enter. Those who attempted to breach the cordon were shot. The troubles dated to 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded a largely peaceful country and ushered in a decadelong occupation that left it one of the most war-ravaged nations on Earth. The Russians withdrew in defeat in 1989, and in their wake scores of anti-Soviet resistance groups turned their guns on each other, unleashing a civil war that killed tens of thousands more and reduced to rubble what little infrastructure the country still had. Rival gangs robbed travelers at gunpoint and plucked women and boys off the streets with impunity. In 1994, a fanatical band of religious students—the Taliban—emerged to sweep aside these warring factions and put an end to the civil war. On a fierce platform of law and order, they forcibly disarmed and disbanded many of the militias that had been terrorizing the populace and brought nearly 90 percent of the country under their control. For the first time in more than a decade, peace took root in much of the land. Criminality and warlordism vanished, and the streets became safe from rape and abduction. In the process, however, the Taliban instituted a regime of draconian purity the likes of which the world had never witnessed. Moral and spiritual decay had dragged the country into civil war, the Taliban believed, and a puritanical version of Islamic law offered the only hope for salvation. All music, film, and photography—which the Taliban regarded as gateway drugs to pornography and licentiousness—were banned. They caged up women in their homes, executed adulterers, and whipped men of flagging faith. They prohibited, with only a few exceptions, all female education and employment. They outlawed the teaching of secular subjects in school. In many cities, roaming packs of religious police under the authority of the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue saw to it that no one missed the mandatory five-times-a-day prayer. All men were required to wear a fist-length beard and were beaten and jailed unless they complied. Relatives of murder victims were invited to gun down the accused; thieves had their hands lopped off; and obscurantist religious clerics, often semiliterate, decided matters of jurisprudence. For the next five years, Taliban troops fought a bloody campaign to subdue the north, meting out the greatest punishment to villages along the front line, like Gayawa. Memories of those war years lingered, and the rancor echoed in conversation after conversation. After finding those survivors in the schoolhouse on the morning of September 11, he had fled the area, returning only months later after a new government had assumed power. He traveled a lot. He was one of the first to use a whip on us like that. After a while, all the Talibs started carrying whips. The very name spoke of the strange language that Afghans had acquired in decades of war. No one in Gayawa knew quite what had become of him. It was 2009, and more than one hundred thousand foreign soldiers were on Afghan soil battling an increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency. When I approached him, he was pacing uncomfortably in a park, hands in his pockets, his eyes shifty, a black turban stuffed into his pocket. Tall and lanky, he stood with his shoulders hunched, as if he were carrying some dangerous secret. He wore glasses, unusual for an Afghan. Tattoos flowed down his arms and henna dye covered his fingernails. When he smiled, gold teeth glistened. Only his thick, spongy beard and a missing eye, a battlefield injury, placed him unmistakably among his Taliban comrades. Even without such telltale marks, though, as an Afghan you can never truly hide—a cousin, or an old war buddy, or a tribal chieftain somewhere would know how to find you. So I had tracked him down, and after months of effort I finally convinced him to speak to me. I need the open spaces and fields to be able to think. Toyota Corolla station wagons and minivan taxis, with arms and heads poking out, rattled by. A Ford Ranger police truck passed us, making Mullah Cable nervous. He had slipped in from the surrounding countryside and was worried about being noticed. We took shelter in a taxi, moving slowly through the darkening streets as we spoke in the back. Almost a decade after battling the Northern Alliance, he was still fighting—now against the Americans. On numerous occasions, they had attacked American soldiers. This much I had expected, but he also surprised me. He could read only with great difficulty. Maps were a mystery to him, and despite his best efforts he could not locate the United States. He cared little for, and understood little of, international politics. He had no opinions about events in the Middle East or the Arab-Israeli conflict. And even though he had been a Taliban commander in the 1990s, after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 he had quit the movement and for a time actually supported the new US-backed government. This is what fascinated me most: How did such a person end up declaring war on America? Nor was he alone. I wanted to learn his story. At first he was skeptical. He could not state where exactly he had been born, although he believed it was somewhere on the squalid outskirts of Kabul. That war had unfolded mostly in the countryside, and people in Kabul spoke of it the way they spoke of foreign countries, as something far off and vaguely interesting. But the Russian retreat, followed by the outbreak of civil war in 1992, brought the conflict home to the capital, and eventually he enlisted in a local militia. He was one of them. The Taliban provided a welcome home for unsettled youths like him who were repulsed by the chaos. In their regimented order he found a sense of purpose, a communion with something greater. Everyone was talking about the Taliban. The whole world knew about the Taliban. We brought good to this country. Before we came, even a trip to buy groceries was a gamble. People stole, people raped, and no one could say anything. By 2001, he was directing a force of a hundred or so fighters tasked with trekking through the mountains near Gayawa, hunting for rebel sympathizers. He was also chief of police for a district north of Kabul, occasional director of military transportation and logistics, and the sole authority responsible for disarming the population in any newly conquered territories. It was in this last duty that he acquired his nom de guerre, one that, in those days at least, he had carried proudly. For five years, the fighting between his Taliban forces and the Northern Alliance ground on. For every insurgent hamlet put down, it felt as if another sprang up in its place. Then, on September 9, 2001, in the first suicide strike in Afghan history, a pair of young Arab men posing as journalists assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary leader of the Alliance. Rebel forces were thrown into disarray. For the first time, Mullah Cable could sense the prospect of total victory. On September 10, he and other Taliban commanders launched an offensive across the entire front line. By the morning of the eleventh, they had swept into the strategic village of Gayawa. That was the biggest mistake that ever happened to us. As they stared at replays of the Twin Towers collapsing into an apocalyptic pile of burning ruins, President George W. To the most pragmatic among them, Osama bin Laden and his retinue of followers had been nothing but trouble since they had landed in 1996. The Arabs of al-Qaeda spoke a different language, practiced a distinct culture, and even followed a different form of Islam from their Afghan counterparts. Bin Laden railed against the West, and his acolytes bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, while the Taliban were seeking Western diplomatic recognition. The two sides met throughout the late 1990s in an attempt to work out a solution, but cultural and political divides proved insurmountable. The Taliban agreed to place bin Laden on trial, but Washington, not trusting the impartiality of Afghan courts, demanded his extradition to US soil. The Taliban, for their part, doubted the objectivity of the American legal system. They agreed to hand him over only to a neutral Islamic country for trial, which Washington rejected. The failed talks fueled Taliban hard-liners, who reminded their colleagues that bin Laden was helping bankroll the war against Alliance rebels. Both sides looked to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar for direction, but the enigmatic, one-eyed Commander of the Faithful, as he called himself, happened to be one of the most inscrutable and reticent heads of state in history. In his five years in power, he had never appeared on television; outside of a pair of grainy photographs, there is no visual record of his existence. During his reign, he traveled just twice to Kabul from his home in the southern city of Kandahar. He did not give speeches and avoided the radio. Indeed, to some Afghans he seemed a mythical figure conjured up by Taliban propagandists, an emblem of piety and virtue meant to serve as a focal point for Taliban rule. The reality, however, was far more mundane. A lowly village preacher and minor figure in the anti-Soviet resistance, Omar had found himself, through an unlikely turn of events, thrust atop a fledgling state. Omar was a religious parvenu, a small-time priest giving orders to bishops. Projecting theological credibility to his more lettered colleagues, and by extension to the entire Muslim world, was everything, and the symbolism of surrendering bin Laden to non-Muslims would have been damaging to the very soul of the Taliban project. Their legitimacy as a state, such as it was, rested upon the notion that Islamic law had saved the country. How then could Omar justify extraditing bin Laden and subjecting him to the vagaries of secular Western justice? They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate. Sinking into depression and paranoia, Omar was often on the verge of tears. He spent nights in a bunker underneath his home, a gas mask by his side due to rumors of an impending American chemical weapons attack. He restricted visits to his home to a few close aides and deployed troops to guard important armories and airstrips. Senior Talibs sent their families to Pakistan to wait out the inevitable. Then, in late September, two developments gave Omar a glimmer of hope. It was the opening move in a perilous double game that the Pakistanis would play for the next decade. Second, senior Taliban figures, who until then were a threat to defect, decided to toss their lot in with the regime. We took Kandahar together. We almost died against the Northern Alliance. Omar, meanwhile, kept himself and his family hidden in his bunker, passing messages to the outside world through a courier. On October 6, he received word from Pakistani agents that the American attack was imminent. That night, he gathered his senior lieutenants and delivered a last rousing address. In his bunker, Mullah Omar felt the house shake violently. The American war had begun. A missile had scored a direct hit on his compound, destroying a section and grievously wounding his ten-year-old son. Desperately clutching the child, he ran outside and, with the rest of his family, squeezed into an old Corolla. They sped to the hospital, where Omar begged the doctor to help his son. On reaching the outskirts of Sangesar, everyone sprang out and hurried off on foot. Moments later, a missile slammed into the vehicle, blowing it to pieces. The Taliban leader and his relatives disappeared into the village. He would never be seen in public again. He found it, in an odd kind of way, beautiful. He could tell that the bombs were off in the distance—in Kabul, probably, where the Taliban had many military installations. He glimpsed his men watching the sky, their silent faces briefly exposed with each strike. No one knew what they would do should the bombs reach their camp, except retreat to their bunkers and pray. But not a single bomb fell anywhere near Gayawa that night, or the night following, or any other night that week. In serious wars, there was no substitute for living and fighting in the mountains, for planning ambushes, coordinating artillery, and storming the enemy by sight and sound and gut alone. By the fourth week of October, it was looking as if they would leave just as mysteriously as they came. Even when the strikes eventually hit the hills nearby during the first days of November, Mullah Cable remained unworried. His camp was too small, too insignificant to be picked out from above. Every night the planes would fly overhead without incident and disappear into the jagged country to the north, and the earth would tremble and the mountain peaks would light up, and his men would watch and talk about the pilots and wonder at their motives. It was only after one bomb struck close to their camp, in a neighboring valley, that they decided to go see for themselves what destruction the planes could bring. A group of the fighters assembled to investigate, but Mullah Cable opted to stay behind because his last pair of shoes had worn down to soggy rags. From his mountain perch, he watched his fighters drive their pickup trucks down the bluff away from the camp, then turn a corner and disappear. Over the radio, he heard them exchange greetings with another group of Taliban soldiers. At that moment, a jet shrieked past, turned sharply, and dropped a series of bombs just where they had gone. The explosions were massive and deafening. An enormous cloud of smoke rose above the mountains. All he could do was stand and watch. The walkie-talkie had fallen silent. He waited for hours for some word. Finally, he decided that he had no choice but to go see for himself. He drove into the basin and turned the corner and then stepped out of the vehicle. Oh my God, he thought. There were severed limbs everywhere. There were headless torsos and torso-less arms, cooked slivers of scalp and flayed skin. The stones were crimson, the sand ocher from all the blood. Closing his eyes, he steadied himself. In five years of fighting he had seen his share of death, but never lives disposed of so easily, so completely, so mercilessly, in mere seconds. Inside one, he found his good friend Khoday Noor. Mullah Cable took his hand. Can you hear me? His right side was paralyzed and blood was draining from a wound in his back. They loaded him onto a vehicle, but he died en route to the nearest town. The remaining men in the camp gathered for a dinner of naan and tea and offered theories about how the Americans spotted the convoy. Some said that they had advanced airplanes that could roam high above the clouds for days without refueling, picking out targets as they pleased; or that they could see every Talib in the country with a special type of flying camera, which beamed images back to commanders in the United States. Night washed over the mountains, the camp fell quiet, and Mullah Cable retreated to his bunker to try to catch some sleep. Eight hundred and eighty, he thought to himself—what kind of unimaginable power was this? Outside, his men stayed up, chatting anxiously until just before dawn, when villagers arrived with more grim news. They had found the body of the local Taliban governor—a powerful, feared man—cut clean in half. He needed to calm down and think clearly. That afternoon he retreated to his bunker for a short nap, but still sleep would not come. Instead, he stared at the ceiling for hours. A few of his fighters entered with rumors that whole Taliban units had defected up north. To defend his country he would take deadly risks, suffer cold mountain nights, go for months without his family—he would do it all, gladly, but martyrdom? Talk of martyrdom from a man in hiding? For reasons he did not fully grasp, the Americans were trying to kill him and everyone around him. The Northern Alliance was still trying to kill him. And now, he realized, his own leaders were encouraging his death. Then and there, he decided not to die in the service of hopeless causes. If his leaders were planning to abandon him to such machines, then he would abandon them first. He went over to see his men, who were busy checking provisions and talking among themselves. He knew that the scent of cowardice in his decision was unmistakable. He gathered them together. Jets were shrieking overhead and the mountains echoed with booms like some otherworldly storm, and a few of his men were already in tears. By morning, messages from other commanders were flooding in over his walkie-talkie, proclaiming battle plans and announcing this or that new mission. They formed the quintessential elements of their argot, forged from years fighting the Russians and the Northern Alliance warlords. Yet it was only talk, aired for their superiors and perhaps for each other. Mullah Cable figured that in reality, Talibs everywhere were probably defecting. He was sure that only the Arabs of al-Qaeda and their foreign allies would fight to the death because they had nowhere else to go. Retreating to their home countries was simply not an option. This was how things had gone for decades. As Mullah Cable stood shoeless atop his mountain base, he considered his fate. If he somehow could make it out alive, he promised himself that he would abandon politics forever. But getting there would not be easy. Chaos reigned: rumors were pouring in of fighters across the front lines throwing their weapons in ditches and fleeing. They were bribing locals for shelter, or heading off to their home villages—and often dying in the effort. The enemy was barreling toward Kabul—at this pace, Mullah Cable figured they might reach it any day—and he knew that he had to get there first to have any hope of making it into the city. The fifty-mile journey along serpentine dirt roads through the mountains was hazardous and unpredictable. Capture by the Northern Alliance would mean detention and possibly death, a logic he understood all too well given how the Taliban had treated their own captives. And if his own superiors caught him fleeing, he would fare no better. Worst of all, with fighters switching sides in droves, he could trust no one. It was every man for himself, a world with no comrades, only enemies. He walked over to the few fighters still in the camp. He hugged each in turn, boarded a Toyota HiLux pickup truck, and drove off alone. The first winter winds were gusting through the valleys and avalanches were tumbling majestically down the distant peaks of the Hindu Kush. But driving through small mud villages, past fields of wheat and corn, Mullah Cable kept his eyes fixed on the road. The trip proved humiliating. Whenever locals glimpsed his HiLux, a signature Taliban vehicle, gunshots soon followed. In one village, he saw even housewives firing out from their windows. From then on he opted for the spine-jarring back roads, and eventually he made it to Parwan, the next province. 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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. Mullah Cable scanned the darkness for an escape route. 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. 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. 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. 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. A Taliban officer stepped forward. 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. The driver took it and let him in. 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. He found a hollow city. 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. The stench of sulfur and human waste was smothering. 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. He hoisted up his sore feet and told them everything, and they listened with great concern and admiration. 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. 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. He, his wife, his daughter, and two other relatives squeezed into a minivan taxi. Mullah Cable watched as men climbed out of the castle windows, weapons in hand. 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. I was thinking, What will happen to me? I pressed my face against the glass. It felt like the sky was falling. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Every so often a Pakistani military vehicle trundled by and Mullah Cable ducked his head out of view. 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. 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. 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. 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. Copyright © 2014 by Anand Gopal Prologue 1 PART ONE? The Last Days of Vice and Virtue 5? The Battle for Tirin Kot 28? The Sewing Center of Khas Uruzgan 73 PART TWO? No One Is Safe from This 101? To Make the Bad Things Good Again 118? Black Holes 132 PART THREE? The Far End of the Bazaar 169 PART FOUR? Back to Work 183? No-Man's-Land 215 PART FIVE? The Leader 251 Epilogue 268? A Note on Sources 277? He has a deep knowledge of the rural south, took great risks in visiting some of the most dangerous insurgent areas and has conducted thousands of hours of interviews.... His book should be a model for all our analysis of intervention, from Libya to contemporary Iraq. Of all the recent books on Afghanistan, this one stands out like a bright shining light, revealing the truth of the war from the ground up. Breathtaking and magnificent, this is a must read. It is a devastating, well-honed prosecution detailing how our government bungled the initial salvo in the so-called war on terror, ignored attempts by top Taliban leaders to surrender, trusted the wrong people and backed a feckless and corrupt Afghan regime. The book has its flaws, minimizing the role of neighboring Pakistan in the Taliban's resurgence and letting the Taliban off too easy. But it is ultimately the most compelling account I've read of how Afghans themselves see the war. Gopal spent hundreds of hours interviewing a Taliban commander, a member of the U. He presents a stirring critique of American forces who commanded overwhelming firepower, but lacked the situational knowledge to achieve their objectives. Men with the ear of American commanders often took advantage of their credulity to destroy their enemies, making little effort to determine their affiliations. Heela, the housewife, has the most remarkable story of the three: in closing pages of the book she becomes a senator, unaware until winning that she was even in the running. Gopal reveals the fragility of the tenuous connection between intention and destiny in a war-torn land. The author clearly demonstrates that within months of the U. However, for a variety of reasons, chief among them false intelligence from corrupt Afghan warlords, the United States did not take this unique opportunity to end the Taliban insurgency in that country. Thus, what Gopal considers to be Washington's missteps allowed the Taliban to resurrect and strengthen itself, as the insurgency continues to destabilize Afghanistan. VERDICT Policymakers and informed readers will benefit immensely from this illuminating book. Beginning in 2008, Gopal, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, spent four years traveling throughout Afghanistan. Bearded, dressed as a native and speaking like one, he heard stories from fighters, tribal elders, young boys and government officials that challenged his ideas about the war and how we fought it. The author argues that the United States sees the world in black and white—friend versus enemy, good versus evil, etc. He presents his analysis of Afghanistan through three individuals: Mullah Cable, a Taliban commander; Jan Muhammad, a member of the U. His portraits of these three and their tumultuous lives are rich in detail, as are his descriptions of their stark and war-ravaged land. Gopal puts the present Afghanistan in perspective by describing the civil war that followed the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the emergence in 1994 of the Taliban, who disbanded warring militias and imposed a regime of harsh Islamic law, and the regrouping of the militias in 1996 as the Northern Alliance, which continued to fight the Taliban for the next five years. The chaos that followed has seen power struggles and shifting alliances; attempts to bring stability and root out corruption have failed. American contracts with local power brokers have created a new class of warlords whose militias are known as private security companies. What will happen, Gopal wonders, when the Americans leave and the money dries up? A grim picture of a complicated and troubling situation. Read it and weep. This is must reading to understand the US Afghan war. It's too late for Afghanistan, but hopefully this book might help future US regimes to avoid this sort of thing in the future. Or maybe not - war can be very profitable.

Later that afternoon he was pressed back into service. Although she was a transplant, Heela herself had been limbo into this last category as the demands of the household and her growing family consumed her. In many cities, roaming packs of religious police under the authority of the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice no good men among the living Promotion of Virtue saw to it that no one missed the prime five-times-a-day prayer. She turned away, wondering how Muslims could have done this to themselves. It had all been done by his people, by the movement he had sworn his life to, but he saw none of it. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their con principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. The way the book is written is so personal, evocative and powerful that it really stands as unique literary achievement in its own right. To learn more about how we use and protect your data, please see our. Some civil that they had advanced airplanes that could roam high above the clouds for days without refueling, picking out targets as they pleased; or that they could see every Talib in the country with a special type of flying camera, which beamed images back to commanders in the Responsible States. This also has domestic implications: How would one design a robust legal system for people who don't believe they go to hell if bearing false witness. Finally, Gopal follows Heela, an Afghan woman forced to move with her family from Kabul to rural Khas Uruzgan during the Note civil war.