PETER BAKER - ESSAY


Clear lines and neat definitions do not apply in Afghanistan.


FROM THE ROOFTOP of a mud house overlooking the Shomali Plain, the white explosions in the distance and the red streak of artillery fire and the occasional thunderclaps echoing across the valley announced the start of America’s war in Afghanistan.

But for the munitions, it was as dark a night as can be imagined on that cool October evening. We were warned not to use flashlights or light up a cigarette or even let the glow of our satellite phones be seen lest we attract Taliban fire. The only other light in view came from the headlights of a long string of vehicles across the valley ferrying civilians away from the bombing.

That was eight years ago and never on that night, as we watched the might of the world’s most powerful nation rain down on the primitive army of soldiers clad in rags and sandals, did it occur to us that America so many years later would still be trying to figure out how to win - or whether it even could. The journey from the rugged village of Topdara to the halls of the White House is a quintessential story about the limits of power and imagination.

That was brought home in stark terms as President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize just hours before meeting with advisers in the Situation Room to discuss escalating a war that has yet to be won. The lessons of the last eight years suggest that no matter what choice he makes and no matter what the Nobel committee in Oslo thinks, Mr. Obama may very well leave office after four or eight years and there will still be no peace in Afghanistan.

To cover the war from its opening moments in Afghanistan to this critical juncture in Washington is to try to reconcile a jumble of images and impressions, none of which adds up to the easy answers Mr. Obama wishes he could find. After all, the president came to office in search of a strategy, came up with one, and then six months later decided to cast it aside in search of another one. He seems to be grasping at ideas that have been regurgitated year after year now with limited success. If it were simple, of course, someone would have done it by now.

Perhaps this should have been obvious from the beginning, and in some ways it was. For those of us based in Moscow at the time of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the cliche about the ungovernable, unconquerable graveyard of empires was no theoretical abstract but the real life history of a generation of aging Russians. Nonetheless, we set out from Moscow and other points around the globe for the unforgiving terrain of Afghanistan to see if it could be done differently.

An old Soviet helicopter flown by Afghan rebels delivered a few of us from Dushanbe, Tajikistan, over the majestic Hindu Kush into the heart of the Panjshir Valley, the haven of the Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban government in Kabul to the south. Another helicopter had been shot down that day, or so we were told, but we made it safely.

European journalists were there, but it would be days before any other Americans showed up and longer before the C.I.A. arrived, not that we ever saw them. For the uninitiated, it was a biblical scene, a dusty tableau of hardened people living without electricity, running water or even furniture.

The next eight months spent in Afghanistan and Pakistan would provide all sorts of clues about how intractable a situation the United States had just parachuted into. While America’s war began the night of October 7, 2001, with the bombing north of Kabul, the Afghans had been at war more or less continually for more than two decades by that point.

On one of the first days in the Panjshir Valley, some Afghans took us to meet a Northern Alliance commander at the front in their long standoff with the Taliban. His base was a series of mud buildings with a well and a couple of 81-millimeter mortars surrounded by spent shells.

“You want to hear the Taliban?” he asked us.

He picked up a radio connected by cable to a Japanese car battery and switched frequencies, just a day after lobbing shells at the other side.

“Are all of your friends O.K.?” the rebel commander asked into the radio.

“Yes, all of my friends are O.K.,” the Taliban fighter on the other end answered.

They chatted for a few minutes before signing off. “He was my friend,” the rebel commander explained. “But now he is my enemy.”

The idea of clear lines and neat definitions does not apply in Afghanistan. Over the following few months, many of the themes of the last eight years would become clear. There were civilians killed by errant American bombs and intrigues among Afghans who ostensibly were our allies and common cause forged with a ruthless warlord who did just enough of the Americans’ bidding to stay on the payroll while waging his own private war for control of his local province.

The quick success in pushing the Taliban out of power in Kabul disguised how hard it would be to push them out of Afghanistan. While Al Qaeda was a foreign body, the Taliban, cruel and despotic as they may be, were part of the culture. When we were chased by grenadethrowing militants or shelled late at night, the geopolitical assumptions of Western capitals seemed remote.

The questions we hear being asked in the Situation Room these days are not all that different from the ones we asked eight years ago: What are American interests in Afghanistan? How can they be achieved? Who are our friends and who are our enemies and how can we tell them apart? Is the very idea of victory a futile concept? Yet what are the consequences of defeat?

And perhaps the biggest question of all: With the Nobel medal staring down at him in the White House for the next three years or perhaps seven, will the designated peacemaker eventually figure out just what peace means in a land without it? Will he earn the prize he has already received?


TYLER HICKS/GETTY IMAGES / President Obama is struggling to resolve issues that were simmering when a Northern Alliance soldier cheered the defeat of the Taliban in Kabul in 2001.