Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [13]
“What happened? Why aren’t you at the surrender?” I asked.
He shook his head. He didn’t say a word.
“Are the Americans there?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Did they tell you to leave?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“Did they take over the surrender?”
“I have to go,” he said. He rolled up the window, and drove on.
A few minutes later, a crash echoed across the mountains, and the ground quaked. Warplanes pounded the hills with bombs. It kept up for hours, all day long. If the surrender had ever started, it was certainly over now.
That afternoon, I found Zaman sulking in a bombed-out building in the abandoned village he sometimes used as a base. We paced up and down a chicken yard. The sky was huge overhead. He was quiet. Sometimes he said, “How do I know I can trust you?”
“You can,” I said. I think we both knew the dynamic: he could trust me, but I couldn’t trust him. At least he was no longer hitting on me. That was all gone, replaced by this wary willingness to accord me more information than the others could get. But then, what good is information when everybody around you is lying? That day, he never explained anything.
He made me wait until the next day before he told his story. By then, fresh fighting had erupted. Negotiations were more than dead; they were now viewed as an embarrassing faux pas on the part of the Afghans. Sitting in his pickup truck in Tora Bora, Zaman told me the story:
“I told the Americans, take these men and question them, get intelligence from them. Let them surrender. And they said no. No negotiations, no negotiations, no negotiations. Americans wouldn’t accept the surrender. They wanted the Al Qaeda soldiers dead. I suggested we question them. I said, if you want them dead, we can put them in a farmhouse somewhere when we’re through questioning them, and bomb the house. Nobody will know. But the Americans said no, we want them dead immediately.”
This may or may not have been one piece of truth, but Zaman was surely playing more hands than he’d admit. Other Afghans have since accused all three U.S.-backed warlords of helping the Al Qaeda fighters escape into Pakistan—for a fee, of course.
It is possible, of course, that every one of those stories is true—that Zaman wanted to capture bin Laden, tried to broker surrender, and eventually helped him slip out the back door, stuffing his pockets at every turn. These things are not mutually exclusive. Very little in Afghanistan is mutually exclusive. It is also possible that none of it was true at all, that the real story of Tora Bora is something else that we’d never imagined.
News writers depend upon the world to organize itself into some kind of tale, a story that can be told in short, recognizable form. People rise and fall; murder and redeem; cheat and reconcile. In Afghanistan, I kept waiting for a narrative to assert itself. A battle had begun, and so there must be a climax, there must be a resolution. I expected something to happen, in the end. The Afghans and the Americans would keep pushing forward, and sooner or later they would clash with the Al Qaeda fighters. Osama bin Laden would be captured, or he would be killed, or something else would happen. But whatever it was, we would see it and we would be able to recognize it.
Instead, events flickered, split, and rolled away like mercury. To write about the battle in an organized way, to shuffle the pieces, tap the sides, and square it into paragraphs and quotations was a fabrication. The mujahideen pushed forward until they became ghosts, thinning out into the mountain air. The battle never reached a climax. The other side was never seen, it melted away. Osama bin Laden flickered into a hologram, elusive as a lick of light, hidden somewhere behind the maddening maze of liars and heroes and hidden agendas. American officials talked about “the enemy” and “the evildoers” and it sounded odd, empty, like a legend. Even in the heights of Tora Bora, on the front lines of this vague new war, the enemy was nowhere to be seen. He was just a rumor, secreted in shadows, and sometimes