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

fringes of Tora Bora. Zaman was petulant, griping about his American backers. Thirty-one days had passed, he told me pointedly, since Osama bin Laden had fled Jalalabad under the protection of a Pakistani tribal elder. “I’ve been telling America all along,” he said. “If America wants to capture bin Laden, why aren’t they trying?”
    I was in the mountains one day. The sky was white and gray and empty overhead. Bitter cold swept down from the north. I was close to the front line, but not quite there. Deep below, a river cut through the cliffs. There were land mines and gun skirmishes on these twisting trails. Sharp mountainsides plunged into deep valleys. It was hard to keep your bearings, hard to understand who was shooting at whom, and why. It was utterly confusing.
    Then a commotion of voices echoed through the valleys, and the Afghans began to race up the mountain. All of the reporters charged instinctively after them, choking for oxygen in the thin mountain air. At my side ran another woman, a reporter.
    “Where are we running to?” she gasped.
    “I don’t know,” I panted. “But it must be something.”
    She screwed up her face. “I think it’s really disturbing that we’re all running up the mountain and we don’t know where we’re going,” she yelled.
    She was right, of course. It was disturbing, random, and emblematic. But at the time, each of us squinted at the other as if she were dim-witted.
    She stopped running. I kept going, chasing my curiosity up the hill. But when I got to the top, there was nothing to see. We were charging after ghosts.
    When the end came, it came quickly. It was another bitterly cold afternoon in the mountains, and I sat listlessly on a rock, listening while the warlords squabbled. Zaman was in the middle of it all, nested in some boulders a short walk up the mountain, juggling two conversations.Languidly, he negotiated by radio with a representative from bin Laden’s encampment. In between, he argued with an enraged Hazrat Ali, who was listening in on the talks, convinced that Zaman was bungling negotiations. I watched Hazrat Ali pace in a grove of thorn trees, barking at Zaman by walkie-talkie.
    Zaman had wrangled a promise out of the shadowy Al Qaeda negotiator. The fighters would crawl out of their caves and surrender at eight the next morning. Zaman kept telling Hazrat Ali that this was a fair plan, a good compromise. “That gives them time to talk,” he urged a skeptical, irritable Ali.
    “Don’t give them time!” Ali exploded. “The Arabs are disagreeing! Three Arabs have three ideas!”
    Zaman and Ali hated each other. After battling for supremacy for years, they were now grudging allies, forced together by mutual dependence on American money. As far as I could tell, each was more interested in outmaneuvering the other than in fulfilling any duties on behalf of America. It all comes down to this, I thought. This is the tip of the spear. These slippery, wild-eyed figures are the men fighting on behalf of my country.
    Blackened tree stumps and bullet-torn car doors, detritus of war, lay strewn on the ashen hillside. Ali’s soldiers rooted busily under the trunk of a bombed-out pickup in search of salvageable parts and combed shattered bunkers looking for spare bullets. Soldiers giggled over the bodies of three dead Arabs. They had been shot to shreds by machine guns. The mujahideen thought it was hilarious.
    “We want to have safe passage out of your province,” the voice of the Al Qaeda spokesman scratched through the radio.
    “Your blood is our blood, your children our children, your wives our sisters. But under the present circumstances, you must leave my area or surrender.” Zaman never passed up an opening for flowery tribal flourishes.
    Ali was screaming at Zaman. He thought the whole thing was a trick. “Don’t give them so much time,” he urged the other warlord. “And don’t pull out of your positions overnight.”
    But Zaman’s soldiers