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

black in the distance, and we kept walking toward it. The light grew and swelled, a distant peach rising into the night. Finally we could see the road ahead, the lights of cars swimming.
    On the road, we flagged down a bicycle taxi. “Spin Ghar hotel, please.” We climbed into the tiny carriage, and the man pedaled off. Everything was color and light, chasing the black from my eyes. Music was playing somewhere, night rushing past. No steel car doors, no glass, no roof split us from the world. The bicycle cab trembled over ruts, plastered with diamond-shaped mirrors, gaudy with pink and blue and yellow paint. Strings of coins jangled as we careened through the electric wildness of open air. The night pressed cool hands against my hot cheeks, ruffled my hair. Wind caught in my throat and then I was laughing, laughing to think that luck can change, just like that. The night was right there, choked with mysteries, shadows sliding down rutted roads, smells of sweet and dank from cooking pots, and the vastness of countryside. For a few minutes, death fell away, and it felt like freedom.

TWO
CHASING GHOSTS
    I t had been weeks since Kabul had fallen to the Northern Alliance, and plans were already under way for a
loya jirga
, the tribal conference that would divide power in post-Taliban Afghanistan. American newspapers and television brimmed with self-congratulatory features: women taking off their burqas, fathers and sons flying kites, little girls heading back to school. But the war was not gone.
    There in the east, tension still laced the faces of the triumvirate of warlords who ran the region, each man boss of his own sumptuous headquarters. Every time one of the warlords saw a reporter, he pointedly reminded us that Osama bin Laden and his band of diehards were hiding in the mountains outside of town. They wanted the message to get back to Washington—bin Laden was an American problem, after all, and the United States had just invaded and occupied the country. The warlords were waiting for U.S. money, men, and supplies to flush out Al Qaeda, or so they said. These pleas started out quietly, discreetly. Then Zaman, the most tempestuous of the three, lost his patience and began calling noisily for America to pony up guns and cash. He sent word to the hotel one morning, inviting journalists to a bombed-out military base on the outskirts of Jalalabad. His men hauled an upholstered sofa down into a bomb crater, and Zaman reclined splendidly in the wreckage. We gathered on the rim, peering down at his majesty. The point, I think, was to display the shambles of Afghanistan’s virtually nonexistent military infrastructure.
    “We’re just like a new-bought car,” Zaman said that day. “We just need a drop of gas.”
    I kept remembering a U.S. official I’d interviewed back in Pakistan, and his palpable distaste for these warlords. “They’re parasites, this is how they make money,” he said. “What they love about foreigners is they can get something and there’s not a lot of likelihood they’ll have to reciprocate. Be it the CIA or whomever. If the CIA gives them a satellite phone they come out [of Afghanistan] and get it, then go back inside and say, ‘Oh, now I need guns.’”
    The warlords talked, and then they talked some more. They sent scouts to Tora Bora to spy on “the Arabs.” They muttered through midnight meetings and summoned tribal elders from obscure villages to secure promises of loyalty in the coming battle. They droned on about the victorious ground offensive they would prosecute when they finally sent the mujahideen up into the mountains to track down the terrorists.
    Time trickled on. We were all waiting for the war, but it didn’t come. A battle thundered slowly toward us, but it was dreamy, disarming. Like watching a race in slow motion: the leg rises, falls; the action is muddy as hallucination.
    One day Hazrat Ali, another warlord making a hard play for U.S. money, wandered through the hotel