Neil Shea

Tallyban

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The soldiers at the gate are not pleased that I have invited a Taliban commander for tea.

“What the fuck?” the say, laughing but sort of not laughing. “You mean we gotta search that motherfucker? Man, shit. I mean, if he’s like, wearing a belt.”

By belt they mean bomb. Suicide vest. Like the one an attacker detonated a few days ago on a base in another province, killing five CIA operatives and two American contractors. It is on their minds as the soldiers stand cold and bored beside the only road through this winter valley, searching each local laborer who enters the base to lay stones in the mud or slather cement onto the rocket-resistant buildings. They know that by the time they noticed a bomb, ruffling their hands through the folds of an Afghans’ clothing, the future would already be decided.

I don’t think he’ll be wearing a vest. This commander has sworn off war, and that’s why he’s interesting. The soldiers are not convinced. But when the man finally arrives, small, thin, a scarecrow of a man, their worry fades.

“This guy? A Tally-ban? Really?”

He is searched, we shake hands, and with an armed escort we walk into the base, past the barracks of the Afghan National Army, the smell of pot lifting up from them. The scent is surprisingly thick, but not so thick as in the summertime, when the fighting was at its worst, when you could stand there in the dark and the humidity and close your eyes and imagine that you were passing a joint inside those plywood fishbowls or anywhere really, anywhere else at all but here. My guest doesn’t seem to notice; maybe his fighters were high all the time, too.

In a special room furnished in Afghan style, the commander chooses a floor cushion against a wall. His beard is thick and dark. He wears a round cap of beige wool and a beige blanket over his shoulders. His traditional shirt and pants are pale green and large, he disappears in them. On his wrist a loose silver watch.

His name is Noor Muhammad and he sits calmly, expressionless and heavy-lidded, as though ready to nap. While we talk a stillness settles through the room; the soldier who has accompanied us begins nodding off in a corner, rifle in his lap. The man exudes no menace. He lulls his former enemies into sleep. On the street, he would be invisible.

———————

But Muhammad was a dangerous man. He once controlled an entire valley, commanded some 60 fighters. He ordered assaults against the infidels and against the Afghan army and police. Islam forbids Muslims from killing other Muslims, but in training camps in Pakistan, Muhammhad had been shown a path around this.

The Pakistanis told him that by working with the Americans, Afghan cops, soldiers, and government officers became mortal sinners. It was a theological mutation, an argument many Muslims reject. Muhammad accepted it. In his mind, ideology and action merged. Afghans who worked with the Americans were fair targets. Killing them was not a problem.

For a while, things ran smoothly. Muhammad planned attacks and evaded the Americans hunting him in the mountains. During this time he often took instruction from Pakistani agents, folding their desires into his missions. But over time Muhammad began to see his mentors and their orders differently. His faith in his former teachers eroded.

“They started telling me to blow up schools and bridges,” he says. “I know what Islam says. At first I had thought ‘the Americans are destroying my country.’ But then I thought ‘Pakistan is destroying it.’ I started to see them as un-Islamic. So I started to change my mind.”

This was around 2006. The Taliban had been routed quickly in 2001, but in the years after they had been allowed to regroup, rebuild. They streamed down from the mountains stronger than before, they crept back into the cities. The resurgence took the US by surprise. At home, people began talking of losing the war. After a while, even generals were talking that way.

But Noor Muhammad’s fight was over. He had come to hate the Pakistanis, and possibly he was tired of fighting. Elders from his region had asked him to stop the violence. The provincial governor did, too. So Muhammad decided to reconcile with the Afghan government and rejoin society through an amnesty program.

He surrendered a cache of weapons—automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, boxes of bullets. And he brought five of his fighters in with him. In return, the government promised safety and compensation. Muhammad began considering a new life because he could not return to the mountains, at least not while his former Taliban comrades controlled them.

The government gave Muhammad a plastic ID card and single sheet of paper detailing what he had done, announcing to all who could read that he was no longer an enemy. The paper is virtually worthless near his home; most people are illiterate. But it was official, it looked important. Muhammad carried it to our interview and he repeatedly offers it to me. I can’t read the Arabic, either.

Muhammad received nothing more for his defection. Soon he found the government didn’t back its promises, and soon the Taliban began killing his relatives in revenge. Violence follows him still: around New Year’s, the Taliban beheaded one of his nephews.

———————

Today Muhammad lives in a rented house beside the grey Pech River, not far from the American base—a place he once would have attacked. His hands are rough, his fingers thick; a laborer’s hands. This is his work now, when he can find it. He tells me life has gotten worse.

“Yes, I regret it. Up there, I was a commander.” He waves a hand at the mountains. “Now I’m a laborer. I thought I would be able to convince others to stop fighting, but now they say ‘Why should we? Look what happened to you.’ If the government kept its promises, more fighters would come down.”

An American soldier told me that sometimes reconciliation doesn’t work. Sometimes fighters who come out of the mountains looking for peace end up rejoining the Taliban because they couldn’t find work, or the government treated them badly. I ask Muhammad if he would fight again.

“No,” he says. “My heart won’t let me do it. I hate them both—the Taliban because they killed my relatives and the government because they broke their promises. If I wanted to go back, I would not have turned in all my weapons. What I need is work. My men need work, too.”

For now he seems to inhabit a no man’s land, or at least it is the territory where many other Afghans live, between the crush of armies and ideas, fearing or hating both sides, the horizon a border at which new enemies may tomorrow appear. Still, it has been four years since Muhammad left the Taliban and he has not returned to them. A good sign. Perhaps he truly doesn’t want to; perhaps he hasn’t hit bottom yet.

Our interview ends. We walk to the gate, past smoldering piles of trash, past the stoned Afghan soldiers in their shacks. Mountains rising in grey-green chevrons before us, fields of boulders numerous as the stars, Muhammad’s old home somewhere among them. I remember the guards at the gate and how they worried before Muhammad’s arrival then mocked him when he appeared less than monstrous. It is tempting to feel sorry for him, he has portrayed himself as a kind of victim.

During the interview I had been watching for sign of the war commander, the man the Americans feared and the fighters respected. The man who crossed mountains to kill for God. There is only a hint of it, in the flatness of his eyes, the look that has not lifted since we met. He does not appear troubled before or after his actions. He seems mostly to live in the moment of each decision. Perhaps this is the most dangerous kind of man.

For some reason, as we shake hands and say goodbye, I imagine being captured by Muhammad’s fighters and brought before him. His face unsentimental, serene in faith and purpose. It occurs to me the Americans and the Afghans should work harder to ensure Muhammad does not return to war.