The New Yorker - 28.10.2019

32 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019

Children living in an encampment, in Jalalabad, after fleeing violence between ISIS

A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE AFGHAN WAY

OF DEATH

Trump upended peace talks. Civilian casualties

keep climbing. Afghans are suffering more than ever.

BY  LUKE    MOGELSON

I

n 2008, when Zubair was seventeen
years old, he left the refugee camp
in Pakistan where he’d grown up,
crossed into Afghanistan, and joined the
war against the Americans. Although he
and his family had fled the country dur­
ing the Taliban regime, everyone Zubair
knew seemed to agree that it was his re­
ligious duty to resist the foreign occupa­
tion of his homeland. One of his teach­
ers arranged his enlistment in the Taliban.
Zubair underwent a brief training pro­
gram in Kunar Province, in northeastern
Afghanistan, where his father had died
during the war against the Soviet Union.
He was deployed to his native village, in
the Korengal, a narrow, cedar­forested
valley that harbored one of the U.S. Ar­
my’s remotest outposts. For more than a
year, Zubair conducted ambushes, en­
gaged in firefights, and hid from jets and
drones. He lost eight friends. Forty­two
Americans were killed and hundreds were
wounded in the Korengal, which became
known as the Valley of Death. In 2010,
the Americans surrendered it to the Tal­
iban. Some of Zubair’s comrades remained
to launch attacks on Afghan government
forces; Zubair asked to be sent to neigh­
boring Nangarhar Province, where there
were still foreigners to fight.
In June of 2018, the Taliban and the
President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani,
announced a three­day ceasefire—the
first of the war—for the Eid al­Fitr cel­
ebrations at the end of Ramadan. Zubair
was in Shirzad, one of Nangarhar’s most
restive districts. In the provincial capi­
tal, Jalalabad, he had aunts, uncles, and
cousins he hadn’t seen for almost a de­
cade. The government promised the Tal­
iban freedom of movement during the
festivities, but Zubair’s commander for­
bade him to leave. On the second day,
Zubair hopped on a motorcycle and
went anyway. Unsure what to expect,
he wore a pistol under his vest. He’d
passed through Jalalabad only once, at
night, and he’d never visited any other
city. He had spent most of his life on
the front lines of the insurgency, where
it was a given that urban Afghans were
infidels. He knew that many of them
despised the Taliban. Confronted with
them in the flesh, what would they do?
“I was amazed,” Zubair told me this
summer. “They welcomed us.”
It wasn’t only in Jalalabad—the
glimpse of peace offered by the ceasefire