Out of the Mountains Read Online Free

building the road or asked what services they needed, nor offered local people jobs on the project.” 8
    â€œOne of the big problems that the contractors face and one reason they get attacked is because they bring people from other villages as laborers and security guards,” said Haji Abdul Ahad Khan, an elder who on Friday was attending the funeral of one of the slain security guards. “They do not ask our villagers to participate in these projects or hire them to do any of the labor. This makes our people angry,” he said. “And they start projects in our area without consulting the village elders. They start cleaning our canals for us, or building a road for us. I don’t want a road, why would you build that? We need a school or a clinic.” 9
    In other words, both the insurgents and the local population had a common interest in disrupting the road project. In addition to his rather entitled attitude, it’s interesting to note that the local elder, Abdul Ahad Khan, implies (though he’s careful not to say so directly) that the elders’ anger against outside contractors may actually have led to the attack. The Taliban may have been responding to popular grievance and economic discontent, they may have acted on the basis of a shared interest with the community in stopping the road from coming into their area, or the elders may have actually asked the insurgents to mount the attack or struck a financial deal with them to drive out the contractor.
    Something like this may also have happened during the battle of Wanat, which I mentioned earlier. An investigation by the U.S. Army’s Combat Studies Institute found that the Waygal elders might have deliberately drawn out a meeting that had been called to discuss the site for the new American outpost, keeping the officers from 173 rd Airborne talking long enough for an ambush to get into place to attack the Americans as they left. 10 The same study found that the local community, for historical, ethnic and economic reasons, had a strong incentive to stop the U.S. Army building a road into their valley—a traditional buffer zone between two antagonistic local population groups, Nuristanis and Safi Pashtuns, who competed politically and economically and had a long history of violent conflict. 11
    As in Helmand, the Waygal elders and the insurgents had a common interest in preventing the road project. The elders opposed the road because it would have connected them to ancestral enemies, undermining their safety and autonomy, while the Taliban and their sponsors in Pakistan opposed it because it brought our troops within striking distance of the major infiltration routes from their bases across the frontier. The army’s report found evidence that the elders might actually have instigated the Wanat attack or at the very least might have been fully aware of it ahead of time, and perhaps their local men played a supporting role in the fighting. One of the first warning signs that something was wrong at Wanat came five days before the battle, when the Pashtun contractor from Jalalabad hired to construct the defenses (but intimidated by previous attacks on his people and equipment) failed to even turn up—a win for the Nuristani elders, who strongly opposed outside contractors, especially those using labor from the rival ethnic group rather than their own young men. During the battle, the Wanat police detachment was also suspected of providing covering fire to the Taliban attackers from within the grounds of their compound. These police were mostly young men from the village or the local district, so their loyalty to local elders (rather than the Taliban) may have played a role in their decision to support the insurgents against both the Americans and the Afghan National Army.
    Economically driven incidents of violence have, unfortunately, become extremely common across the south and east of Afghanistan, while even in the relatively