What I Learned From a Reclusive Taliban Commander

The Taliban commander wore sunglasses and a heavy wool coat, as if he might leave at any moment. Between us, on a plastic-covered table doused in fluorescent light, sat an untouched mountain of lamb and rice.

It was our first encounter, in the winter of 2022, and he had chosen a guesthouse on a busy street to meet. The shouts of merchants and the grind of traffic wafted through an open window as I explained why I had tracked him down.

More than a decade earlier, 150 Taliban fighters had laid siege to an American base in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain range. Nine soldiers died and two dozen were wounded in what became known as the Battle of Want (also referred to as Wanat), one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. forces in the entire war.

This man, Mullah Osman Jawhari, had led that assault.

It was a miracle that he was alive, frankly. During the war, midlevel Taliban commanders were regularly killed. But here he was.

I’d read every after-action report about the Battle of Want, every Lesson Learned. But now that the fighting was over, I wondered what we’d missed. Maybe I could gain some insight into how the war had ended so poorly for the United States (and for many Afghans, most especially women).

I wanted to see the war from the other side, to offer readers a view they might otherwise never see — a Lessons Learned from the only group that had not been asked: the Taliban.

After the war in Vietnam, whose parallels to Afghanistan are so myriad as to be cliché, decades passed before the United States engaged its former enemy. By that time, many of its military leaders were dead. Parts of history were lost, and likely forever, scholars say.

I had made this pitch to Mullah Osman twice before. The first had been through his bodyguard, who dressed like a Special Forces commando; the second, through an aide-de-camp, an untapped suicide-bomber-in-waiting whose services were no longer required.

Finally, I was seated before Mullah Osman himself.

When I finished, he said nothing. He didn’t even nod.

We stared at the rapidly cooling food in front of us until he motioned for his bodyguard to make ready. We were going to Want.

Into the Valley

Today in Want, the relics of the former American base remain, worn and frayed like a faded memory, its once-hard edges melting into the earth like a Dali painting.

He showed me the Taliban’s supply lines and firing positions, and he recreated the siege. But as Mullah Osman and I talked over the next several days, months and year, he convinced me that the Battle of Want had actually begun years earlier — the Americans just didn’t know it.

But then, American airstrikes, aimed at suspected militants, began killing innocent people.

That story is depressingly familiar. But this one had a twist: The Americans had killed and maimed the very people who supported them most.

Taliban recruitment began to pick up, Mullah Osman said, as the Americans turned allies into enemies.

“There were no Taliban here when the war started,” he told me on that first trip to his native village of Waygal, which sits deep in the valley, beneath soaring mountains dusted with snow. “It was only after the U.S. entered and built their bases and killed innocents that the people rose up and decided to fight back.”

Lessons Learned

Nuristan, a rugged region in northern Afghanistan, was never meant to be a focal point of the war on terror. It was not a natural bastion of Al Qaeda, or the Taliban. In fact, during their first turn at governance, in the 1990s, the Taliban had barely entered the area.

In my travels through the valley, I met American allies who had been disfigured by airstrikes, whose families had been wiped out. These people were reminders of how little the United States understood about the war it was fighting.

The Americans, it turned out, were wrong about Nuristan being an terrorist haven. But their bases became magnets for militants, like an insurgent “Field of Dreams”: The Americans built them, and the Taliban came.

By the time Mullah Osman led his team through the mountains to attack the base in Want, the valley had turned against the Americans, with tragic results.