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kebab.) Being a member of the same tribe also didn’t guarantee loyalty. For instance, the Kandahar governor was a Ghilzai—but everyone in Kandahar saw him as an outsider from Ghazni Province, two provinces away, practically a foreign country. And the tribes could be flexible based on self-interest. Some Noorzais supported Karzai; some were major drug traffickers allied with the Taliban; some were Taliban; some were everything. (The Taliban had banned poppies while in power, but had now started charging drug traffickers to transport drugs, which helped fund jihad, sow instability, and win the support of Afghans who depended on the drug economy for their livelihood.)

So how much did all the Pashtun tribal alliances and divisions matter? A lot—unless something else mattered more.

The Taliban didn’t just gain strength because they understood this, or because they exploited tribal jealousies, disillusionment with the local government, and the rising drug trade. Pakistan’s top spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), had also recruited for the Taliban, Khakrizwal insisted, in the endless ISI attempt to control Afghanistan. Ever since ISI leaders joined the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s, they had been reluctant to let go of Afghanistan. The spy agency had continued to meddle, largely to try to create some semblance of a stable, pro-Pakistan government as a hedge against rival India. That’s why Pakistan supported the formation of the Taliban in the 1990s, and why many Afghans believed Pakistan was now playing a double game, pretending to support the West in the war against terrorism by rounding up Al-Qaeda leaders, but allowing and helping the Afghan Taliban to regroup, even permitting training camps along the border. Every Afghan official had mentioned this repeatedly and publicly, even Karzai, who most recently had leveled the accusation the month before. Khakrizwal believed that his brother was killed because he didn’t listen to ISI warnings that he was too friendly with India. He even had the name of the ISI man who allegedly sanctioned his brother’s killing. (Other Afghans believed that Akbar Khakrizwal was killed because he opposed Karzai’s brother or because he opposed the drug trade. Or both.)

After Khakrizwal explained this to us as if we were small children, repeatedly and carefully, he complained that he had tried to explain this to the American soldiers and diplomats, repeatedly and carefully, while he was the provincial intelligence chief. He talked about how key ISI men had mastered the Pashtun rivalries and complexities long ago—and how even though some had retired or quit the ISI since the 1980s, they were still involved in manipulating what was happening in Afghanistan. Khakrizwal knew the key Pakistani spies and named them. He had known them for years.

“The main mistake made by the Americans is this—an American general comes here for six months. Then he’s replaced,” Khakrizwal said. “For four years, I was the head of intelligence in Kandahar. For six months, I’d work on an American—explaining who are friends, who are enemies—then that person was replaced by another American. Finally, my patience was over. I was tired of giving them advice.”

For lunch, we met various Alikozai tribal elders, sat on cushions on Khakrizwal’s floor, and ate a salad of cucumbers and radishes, a dish of rice mixed with raisins, carrots, and mystery meat, various meat dishes, and okra in oil. Each elder had lost family members in recent months, each feared the Taliban was winning. One elder described vividly how his two sons had been killed eighteen days earlier in a Taliban ambush. Tom and I looked at each other.

“That’s an incredibly sad story,” Tom said.

“I can’t even imagine,” I replied.

Khakrizwal soon gave us a challenge.

“Write down this date,” he said. “In one year, the situation will be worse than it is today. I’m telling Americans, if they do not bring changes in their policies, they will say, ‘My God, Iraq is a heaven compared to here.’ ”

It was June 13, 2006.

After we finished several rounds