Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Read Online Free PDF

to capture Osama bin Laden. Zaman, Ali, and Abdul Qadir, the third powerful anti-Taliban warlord, split responsibility for the Afghan troops, arguing and elbowing each other every step of the way.
    As the battle began, the mujahideen prowled the mountains underfed and shivering, clad in tattered tennis shoes and old sweaters. Many of them were young, and had spent their adolescence in a seamless stream of war. They didn’t know how to read. They didn’t know how old they were. When the tanks bellowed they leaped around and shouted and clapped hands. Their commanders spent their time arguing cartoonishly over who controlled which chunk of hillside, whose men should do what. The mujahideen mooned around, stroking one another lovingly and dreaming of their next meal.
    Watching the mujahideen, I tried to imagine how this war looked to them. Afghanistan was a sandbox for generations of men who wanted to play at war, one conflict bleeding into the next. The twentieth century was an ordeal of civil wars, unrest, and coups, culminating in the Soviet invasion. The U.S.- and Saudi-funded jihad against the Soviets had wedged the notion of holy war firmly into the contemporary Afghan consciousness, and armed and funded the men who would emerge as the Taliban in the chaos of civil war. The Taliban had sheltered Al Qaeda, which in turn plotted September 11 and drew the wrath of the Americans. This was the war God had brought them now, God and the Americans. And so they fought.
    I asked a twenty-two-year-old soldier when he had learned to fire arocket launcher. He let out a huff of laughter. “What do you mean? I always knew how. I learned when I was a baby.” He dropped his head and bounced his gun, testing its weight.
    “I never went to school, and I don’t know how to do anything. Just fighting.”
    The ground assault played out like a pantomime of war. The mujahideen hadn’t captured a single prisoner, and had no idea how many men they’d killed. The same patch of ground was gained and lost, over and over again. At night they lay on the earth under thin wool blankets, bitter wind coursing through the hills. They knotted rags around their wounds because they had no bandages. Sometimes, the television crews paid them to fire their tanks into the canyons, and happily the fighters obliged. The mujahideen got so hungry one night they broke into a television news trailer and stole all the food. These were the foot soldiers of the U.S. war on terror.
    One of the mujahideen thought he was twenty-two, but he wasn’t sure. His skin was drawn tight over pinched features. “We have no food or blankets. Our lives belong to God,” he said resentfully. “The Americans should come. They should be in the front line, and we will get behind them.”
    I learned more from the mujahideen than I did from the smooth-talking warlords. The mujahideen predicted that they would never take Tora Bora. The Soviets had pounded away at the honeycombed network of caves for years and never managed to get inside, they pointed out. The older mujahideen had fought from within the caves back when they had battled on the side of bin Laden and the Americans. In those days, Tora Bora was the epicenter of their jihad against the godless Russians. They thought this latest mission was a lost cause, even when the United States dropped the 15,000-pound “daisy cutter” bombs. The mujahideen talked every day about the Pakistani border, the ease with which the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters could escape. Even knowing the futility, the fighters didn’t flinch. They shouldered their Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers and trudged dutifully into the hills to fight the war set before them. They sat around camp and told folk stories about Osama bin Laden. He was spotted astride a red pony. He was seen playing with his small son. Somebody saw him crossing a stream late one night. He was melting into myth.
    After a week of fighting, the Afghan troops were still scrapping at the