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“NO GOOD MEN AMONG THE LIVING” REVIEW
BY NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION—Reposted from www.Newamerica.net
Late last month, 2014 Schwartz
Fellow Anand Gopal’s book “No Good Men Among the Living” went on sale and
received a rave review in the New York
Times. In the book, Gopal tells the story, through the lives of three
Afghans, how the the United States had triumph in Afghanistan, and then brought
the Taliban back from the dead. Below is an excerpt provided by the New America
Foundation:
Early in the morning on September 11, 2001, deep amid
the jagged heights of the Hindu Kush, something terrible took place. When
teenager Noor Ahmed arrived that day in Gayawa to buy firewood, he knew it
immediately: there was no call to prayer. Almost every village in Afghanistan
has a mosque, and normally you can hear the muezzin’s tinny song just before
dawn, signaling the start of a new day. But for the first time that he could
remember, there was not a sound. The entire place seemed lifeless.
He walked down a narrow goat
trail, toward low houses with enclosures of mud brick, and saw that the gates
of many of them had been left open. The smell of burning rubber hung in the
air. Near a creek, something brown lying in the yellow grass caught his eye,
and he stopped to look at it. It was a disfigured body, caked in dried blood.
Noor Ahmed took a few steps back and ran to the mosque, but it was empty. He
knocked on the door of a neighboring home. It, too, was empty. He tried another
one. Empty. Then he came upon an old mud schoolhouse, its front gate ajar, and
stopped to listen. Stepping inside, he walked through a long yard strewn with
disassembled auto parts and empty motor oil canisters. Finally, when he pushed
his way through the front door, he saw them huddled in the corner: men and
women, toddlers and teenagers, more than a dozen in total, clutching each
other, crammed into a single room.
“Everyone else is dead,” one said.
“If you don’t get out of here, they’ll kill you, too.”
In wartime Afghanistan, secrets
are slippery things. The Taliban had planned a surprise attack on Gayawa, but
the villagers had known for days that the raid was coming, and those who could
had hired cars or donkeys and moved their families down into the valley. But
this had been a hard, dry, unhappy summer. Times were not good and many
villagers could not afford to leave, even though they knew what might await
them. Of those who stayed, only the few hiding in the schoolhouse, where the
Taliban soldiers never thought to look, escaped untouched. The rest met an
unknown fate.
Finally, when he pushed his way
through the front door, he saw them huddled in the corner: men and women,
toddlers and teenagers, more than a dozen in total, clutching each other,
crammed into a single room.
Back then, Gayawa was near the
epicenter of a brutal, grinding war between the government of Afghanistan,
controlled by the Taliban, and a band of rebel warlords known as the Northern
Alliance. In their drive to crush the resistance, government troops waged a
Shermanesque campaign, burning down houses and schools, destroying lush grape
fields that had for generations yielded raisins renowned throughout South Asia,
and setting whole communities in flight. In the region surrounding Gayawa, the
Taliban enforced a blockade, allowing neither food nor supplies to enter. Those
who attempted to breach the cordon were shot.
America’s war had yet to begin,
but on that September 11, Afghans had already been fighting for more than two
decades. The troubles dated to 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded a largely
peaceful country and ushered in a decadelong occupation that left it one of the
most war-ravaged nations on Earth. The Russians withdrew in defeat in 1989, and
in their wake scores of anti-Soviet resistance groups turned their guns on each
other, unleashing a civil war that killed tens of thousands more and reduced to
rubble what little infrastructure the country still had. Rival gangs robbed
travelers at gunpoint and plucked women and boys off the streets with impunity.
Years later, I visited Gayawa to
try to understand the Afghan world as it had appeared on the eve of 9/11. Some
of the Taliban’s old, rotting observation posts were still standing, and many
houses remained abandoned. Memories of those war years lingered, and the rancor
echoed in conversation after conversation. “The Taliban were evil. They were
tormentors,” Noor Ahmed told me. After finding those survivors in the
schoolhouse on the morning of September 11, he had fled the area, returning
only months later after a new government had assumed power. “They weren’t
humans. The laws you and I abide by, they didn’t mean anything to them.”
As I met more villagers in the
area, I found that many of their stories centered on a particular roving
Taliban unit, a feared team of disciplinarians who journeyed from village to
village demanding taxes and household firearms. “Their leader was a tall man
named Mullah Cable,” said Nasir, a local. “We heard his name on the radio. He
traveled a lot. He would search your house looking for weapons, and when you
swore you didn’t have anything, he’d bring out his whip, a cable. That’s where
his name comes from. He was a clever man—I don’t know where he was from, but he
was very smart. He was one of the first to use a whip on us like that. After a
while, all the Talibs started carrying whips.”
Mullah Cable. The very name spoke
of the strange language that Afghans had acquired in decades of war.
Mullah Cable. The very name spoke
of the strange language that Afghans had acquired in decades of war. No one in
Gayawa knew quite what had become of him. “When the Americans invaded,” Nasir
said, “all those Taliban vanished like ghosts.”
I first saw Mullah Cable on an
early winter evening in Kabul, the hour of dueling muezzins, dozens of them
crooning from their minarets. It was 2009, and more than one hundred thousand
foreign soldiers were on Afghan soil battling an increasingly powerful Taliban
insurgency. When I approached him, he was pacing uncomfortably in a park, hands
in his pockets, his eyes shifty, a black turban stuffed into his pocket. Tall
and lanky, he stood with his shoulders hunched, as if he were carrying some
dangerous secret. He wore glasses, unusual for an Afghan. Tattoos flowed down
his arms and henna dye covered his fingernails. When he smiled, gold teeth
glistened. Only his thick, spongy beard and a missing eye, a battlefield
injury, placed him unmistakably among his Taliban comrades. Even without such
telltale marks, though, as an Afghan you can never truly hide—a cousin, or an
old war buddy, or a tribal chieftain somewhere would know how to find you. So I
had tracked him down, and after months of effort I finally convinced him to
speak to me.
“I don’t come here often,” he
said. “Kabul is a strange place. I’m a village guy. I need the open spaces and
fields to be able to think.” As the typical Kabul evening smog settled in,
commuters headed home, many with their faces wrapped in handkerchiefs. Toyota
Corolla station wagons and minivan taxis, with arms and heads poking out,
rattled by. A Ford Ranger police truck passed us, making Mullah Cable nervous.
He had slipped in from the surrounding countryside and was worried about being
noticed. We took shelter in a taxi, moving slowly through the darkening streets
as we spoke in the back.
He fought, he told me, for “holy
jihad,” to rid his country of foreigners and to reinstate the Taliban regime.
Almost a decade after battling the
Northern Alliance, he was still fighting—now against the Americans. Though he
didn’t mention it, I later learned that the band of guerrillas under his
command in the province of Wardak, a few dozen miles southwest of Kabul, had
assassinated members of the US-backed Afghan government, kidnapped policemen,
and deployed suicide bombers. On numerous occasions, they had attacked American
soldiers. He fought, he told me, for “holy jihad,” to rid his country of
foreigners and to reinstate the Taliban regime.
This much I had expected, but he
also surprised me. He admitted to not having received a single day’s worth of
religious instruction in his life. He could read only with great difficulty.
Maps were a mystery to him, and despite his best efforts he could not locate
the United States. In fact, growing up he had only the foggiest notion of
America’s existence. He cared little for, and understood little of,
international politics. He had no opinions about events in the Middle East or
the Arab-Israeli conflict. And even though he had been a Taliban commander in
the 1990s, after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 he had quit
the movement and for a time actually supported the new US-backed government.
This is what fascinated me most:
How did such a person end up declaring war on America? Nor was he alone. It
turned out that thousands of Talibs like him had given up the fighter’s life
after 2001, but something had brought most of them back to the battlefield just
a few years later. I wanted to learn his story. At first he was skeptical. “I
don’t understand why it matters,” he said. “My story isn’t very special. I
think you won’t find it interesting.” I assured him that I would, and for a
year we met regularly in the backs of taxis, in drowsy dark offices in Kabul,
or out in the countryside. In his tale I found a history of America’s war on
terror itself, the first grand global experiment of the twenty-first century,
and a glimpse of how he and thousands like him came to define themselves under
this new paradigm—how they came to be our enemy.
SOURCE:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anand Gopal is a Bernard L.
Schwartz Fellow studying the evolution of insurgencies and revolutionary
movements in South Asia and the Middle East. He is working on a book about the
U.S. war in Afghanistan, and also has reported regularly from throughout the
Middle East, where he has covered the revolutions in Egypt, Libya and Syria.
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