By Azam Ahmed
Photographs by Bryan Denton
Azam Ahmed, a former Kabul bureau chief, made repeated trips to the Waygal Valley of Afghanistan, an area that was once off-limits.
The New York Times
Dec. 13, 2024, Updated 9:33 a.m. ET
The United States killed its own allies, sabotaging itself in a part of Afghanistan where it never needed to be.
The Taliban war hero scans the crowd, searching. From the back, he snatches a man with a flop of dusty hair and a face marred by shrapnel.
The man’s head is bowed, and he is missing an arm and an eye. Something has happened to him, something awful.
“This,” the Taliban commander says, shaking the man a bit too hard, “was the last ally of the Americans here.”
In this remote province, the commander carried out one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a pitched battle that sounded an early warning of a conflict terribly off course and altered the history of the war.
Now, years after the Americans abandoned this valley, and Afghanistan altogether, the commander jerks the man from the crowd to explain how the United States lost both.
Clutching the empty arm of his jacket, the commander spins him around like a marionette. The man’s sheared limb and ragged scars tell only half the story: His family was killed next to him, massacred as they fled the Taliban.
“This man was my sworn enemy,” said the Taliban commander, Mullah Osman Jawhari.
“But do you know who did this to him?” the commander asks, a garish smile spreading over his face.
“It was his friends, the Americans.”
Turning Allies into Enemies
When the war in Afghanistan began, there were almost no Taliban here, just a couple of bearded misfits the locals laughed at.
Then U.S. forces showed up, and this valley in Nuristan Province, surrounded by mountains of alpine forest, became the site of some of the most violent attacks on American soldiers since Vietnam.
Historians, journalists and military officials have spent years trying to understand how the Americans lost the valley. Army investigators devoted hundreds of pages to the failures that allowed more than 150 insurgents to nearly overrun a nascent American base in the tiny village of Want in July of 2008, killing nine U.S. soldiers and injuring more than two dozen others.
The battle, waged by one of the most heavily decorated battalions in more than half a century, was “as remarkable as any small unit action in American military history,” said one investigator. Still, he blamed the officers for being caught off guard, while another investigator exonerated them, asserting that casualties were the cost of war.
Almost as soon as the United States withdrew, it largely washed its hands of Afghanistan. When former President Donald J. Trump returns to office in January, he will be the first president in a quarter-century who won’t be waging the war. To the contrary, he has used it as a political cudgel to blame President Biden for its chaotic end, despite setting the U.S. withdrawal in motion himself during his first term.
Four presidents and more than $2 trillion were consumed by America’s longest war. Yet the United States has never fully grappled with how it lost its way in Afghanistan, including the glaring intelligence failures that plagued the entire war effort.
The official inquiries into the battle of Want never answered the one question that no military could afford to ignore: How did a valley once free of Taliban become such a hotbed of insurgents? Or, put another way, why did so many of the people who welcomed the Americans suddenly want to kill them?
For more than a year, The New York Times visited villages in the once-inaccessible Waygal Valley, asking locals, Taliban officials and former fighters on both sides of the war for the answer.
Waygal, a large village deep in the Waygal valley, that American forces were never able to reach during their campaign in Nuristan.
By all accounts, the Americans virtually ensured their own defeat: They repeatedly bombed their closest supporters here, showing just how little the United States understood about the war it was fighting.
Civilian casualties are tragically common in war, in Afghanistan or anywhere else. But these attacks were different, residents here say. The Americans killed and maimed the very people who supported them most, swelling the Taliban’s ranks by turning allies into enemies.
Convinced that Nuristan would become a transport hub and hide-out for Al Qaeda and its allies, the Americans built bases and aggressively patrolled an area that, for the better part of a century, had been granted autonomy from its own government.
Nuristan was never destined to be a focal point of the war on terror. It is isolated, even by the standards of Afghanistan, a landscape of sheer mountain ridges, snow-capped peaks and river gorges, as beautiful as it is unforgiving.
The British mostly steered clear of the area in their doomed forays into Afghanistan that began in the 1800s. The Russians, in their own failed bid more than a century later, barely entered. Even the Taliban avoided it during their rule in the 1990s.
Only the Americans dared to encroach into the region, and in doing so created the very insurgent stronghold they feared most.
The United States dropped more than 1,000 bombs in a place it never needed to be. Instead of winning hearts and minds, the Americans unwittingly sowed the seeds of their own demise here in the Waygal Valley — just as it did in much of Afghanistan — then stayed for years to reap the harvest.
“You have to know when you are the problem,” said retired Col. William Ostlund, the commanding officer of the men who fought the battle in Want (sometimes referred to as Wanat).
“We talk about lessons learned but we continuously relearn the lessons learned, and who pays for it?” he asked. “Our young men, who we put in harm’s way.”
For the Taliban, the battle of Want punctured the myth of American invincibility, proving that hardened resolve could overcome even the greatest superpower.
But there is another lesson, too, whether or not the Americans ever fully learned it: the consequences of trampling blindly into a valley they badly misread.
Today, in an odd echo of history, the Taliban appear to be making some of the same mistakes. They are threatening the valley’s independence and risk squandering the good will of its people, much as the Americans did.
War Diaries
The school notebooks sit in bags scattered through the house, their bright jackets like tiny fragments of sky. They are part of Mullah Osman’s war menagerie, collected over two decades of conflict: compasses, rusted swords, duct-taped rifle cartridges — and dozens of light-blue Unicef notebooks.
Inside are the intimate details of his operations, battle plans and budgets: how many men, guns and bullets he assigned to each task. Along the margins are bits of poetry and hand-drawn roses, doodled in the idle hours of war.
This is a history known only to him, the war diaries of a famed Taliban commander.
Tall and rangy with a slender build, Mullah Osman has deep-set eyes and a purple scar above his cheek from a sledding accident, of all things.
Chased for years by the Americans, Mullah Osman vanished not long after the war ended. I tracked him down in his native village of Waygal, in his home of hewed wood and river stone, perched on the edge of a cascading river.
As he flips through the notebooks, he stops on a dog-eared copy: The Battle of Want.
Inside are maps and detailed renderings of the valley and routes into Want, mountain passes where his men smuggled weapons to avoid drone detection. The homes of allies and enemies are marked with Xs; looping arrows sweep up and down the page.
Sensing our interest, Mullah Osman shakes his head. The battle of Want did not start here, he says, pressing the torn cover between his thumb and forefinger.
“It began many years before.”
A trail of fire and smoke
The early days brimmed with optimism.
Nobody wanted the backward vision of the Taliban, not when the Americans were offering a bright and shining alternative.
The United States had just knocked the Taliban out of power, and Al Qaeda was on the run. The United States had a small presence in Afghanistan, with limited operations mostly focused on tracking down Osama bin Laden.
It wasn’t until 2003, the same year that the Pentagon optimistically declared an end to “major combat” in Afghanistan, that Americans even entered the Waygal Valley looking for Al Qaeda — and were received with open arms.
During an early patrol in the area, an American soldier fell from the side of the mountain, cascading down a stony chute. Villagers recall bringing him to the home of a local elder, where he was cared for until the Americans could retrieve him.
“The people didn’t care that he was an American,” Mullah Osman recalled. “They just wanted to help him.”
Mullah Osman had no way of convincing them that the Americans were the enemy. He had not been interested in the Taliban, either, until the war began, an affront he said he could not ignore.
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His father and uncles had fought the Russians for the same reason. Back then, he was a boy, studying in a madrasa and intent on becoming an Islamic scholar. After the Soviets withdrew, setting off a civil war, Mullah Osman appreciated the Taliban for putting an end to the fighting. But he had no desire to join them until the Americans invaded his country.
At first, almost none of his neighbors understood his outrage. Then, a series of airstrikes hit the valley, changing it forever.
In October 2003, the C.I.A. launched an attack against a suspected terrorist in a mountaintop village, sending a trail of fire and smoke into the ink black sky.
Gunships strafed the forests where residents had run for safety. A cluster of wood-frame homes and a mosque were decimated; seven people were killed, some while fleeing.
The Americans declared the strike a success, a refrain that would become so common it would lose meaning.
In reality, the attacks had failed. Not only was their target not there, but the homes and mosque they struck belonged to a staunch American ally, a former governor of Nuristan named Mawlawi Ghulam Rabbani.
Mr. Rabbani’s political party, Jamiat-e-Islami, detested the Taliban — so much so that it had partnered with the Americans to overthrow them. In fact, that very night, Mr. Rabbani was in Kabul as part of a delegation of pro-American forces.
The only people sheltering in the mountainside home were his family and friends. Of the seven killed, most were women and children, and they included Mr. Rabbani’s son and daughter.
These were the early days of war, before civilian deaths from airstrikes became a flashpoint in U.S.-Afghan relations. When U.S. forces came to investigate the damage, one of Mr. Rabbani’s surviving sons was there, wandering the scorched hillside, looking for remains.
“They acted like it never happened,” the son said recently from the family home. The remnants of the airstrikes still mar the landscape today.
For the rest of his life, the elder Mr. Rabbani would carry the trauma of supporting the very people who had robbed him of his family. Overwhelmed with grief, he would ask anyone he met what his family might have done to deserve such a cruel end.
Though the attack barely resonated in Kabul, much less in Washington, it changed the dynamic in the Waygal Valley. If people were not yet ready to give up on the Americans, they no longer saw them as infallible liberators. A creeping sense of resentment, and injustice, opened a crack for the Taliban’s message to grow.
Before the attack, Mullah Osman and Mr. Rabbani had been enemies, the spokesmen for opposing visions of their country’s future. But at the funeral for the Rabbani family, Mullah Osman showed up to pay his respects.
He prayed with the family in the smoldering remains of their former mosque. Touched by his outreach, the surviving children gifted him a two-way radio — a means of communicating across the valley.
“Up to that point, the area was very peaceful. It was safe for everyone, even the American military,” Mullah Osman said.
“But after the attack on the Rabbani family,” he said, “the Taliban took over. And the uprising began.”
‘Worse than the Americans’
Young men came out to join Mullah Osman’s anemic ranks, driven by bitterness over the Rabbani killings.
Not that the Americans noticed. For the next three years, they largely left Nuristan alone, distracted by the fighting elsewhere in Afghanistan and by the new war in Iraq.
The Americans returned in 2006, convinced that Al Qaeda and its allies were sheltering in the mountains, but the valley had already been transformed. The Taliban was no longer a sideshow.
The Americans started building bases in the valley, giving Mullah Osman exactly what he wanted — a chance to prove that, whatever development the Americans promised, they would bring death.
And they did. In their search for Al Qaeda, they detained farmers and shepherds, dropped enough bombs to level a mountain and killed innocents, including a vehicle full of teenagers who failed to stop at a checkpoint.
With public outrage growing, Mullah Osman’s popularity soared. He took more risks, ambushing foot patrols and lacing the dirt roads with explosives. With each skirmish, he spotted the tendencies and the vulnerabilities of the Americans.
Still, not everyone opposed the Americans. One family in particular stood out as the United States’ greatest proponents — and beneficiaries.
From the moment the Americans arrived, Rafiullah Arif’s family embraced them, much as the Rabbanis once had. The family leased the Americans land to build a base, and even offered their sons to assist with security, logistics, whatever needed doing.
Rafiullah, tall with a thick mop of black hair, became a loyal fixer for the Americans, helping with transport and supply and, at least according to Mullah Osman, intelligence gathering.
“These guys were worse than the Americans,” Mullah Osman said. “The Americans came for bin Laden, for Al Qaeda. But our own people? What reason did they have?”
Mullah Osman and Rafiullah became sworn enemies in a high-stakes game of local politics with global implications. The more the Americans alienated the people of the Waygal Valley, the closer they grew to the Taliban.
And the closer the locals grew to Mullah Osman, the more the Americans needed allies like Rafiullah.
Self Defeat
Colonel Ostlund arrived in Nuristan in 2007, inheriting the growing hostility toward the United States and the wild, impractical placement of the American bases. He marveled at their remoteness, and how little sense they made.
They had to be resupplied by helicopter in stark ravines where insurgents could fire at them freely and the weather could change in a flash. He worried constantly that a Taliban rocket would down a helicopter loaded with his men.
The mountains ran in excess of 10,000 feet, erupting from the river with such suddenness they nearly eclipsed the sky.
Though Colonel Ostlund and his men had come to fight, they had no desire to do so at such a staggering disadvantage.
By then, Mullah Osman had far more men at his disposal. He organized them in teams of 10, with an imam, a team leader, a spotter with binoculars, a radio man, a gunner — and a cameraman to record every ambush.
He studied each battle, reviewing the tapes like a football coach. The videos became the centerpiece of his propaganda campaign, shared widely over mobile phones and on social media, evidence of the Taliban’s effectiveness against the United States.
But Mullah Osman wanted to do more — he wanted to overrun an American base and kill everyone inside.
And he almost did.
Nearly one year before the battle of Want, the Taliban stormed a separate base, in August 2007. Mullah Osman’s fighters got so close to overrunning it that the Americans had to fight hand-to-hand until air support arrived — so close that the pilots were forced to bomb the base itself.
Mullah Osman was injured by a grenade in the attack, but no Americans died. Still, the point was clear: The Taliban controlled the valley, and the Americans were on borrowed time.
Mullah Osman ambushed them again about a month later, positioning his men along the foot paths carved into the stony, vertical hillsides. Six Americans were killed, including a platoon leader, a devastating precursor of the violence to come.
By any metric, the sheer amount of combat waged and endured by Colonel Ostlund’s men, from the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, was extraordinary. One of the Americans Mullah Osman ambushed, Kyle J. White, was awarded the Medal of Honor.
In their 15-month tour, Colonel Ostlund’s men launched more mortars, dropped more bombs and engaged in more firefights in Nuristan and a neighboring province than almost any other unit of the entire war, according to Wesley Morgan, whose book, “The Hardest Place,” chronicles the war in the Waygal and surrounding valleys.
But that violence only cemented the population’s hostility toward the Americans — and the growing popularity of the Taliban. Which left the Americans in a curious quagmire: The more they fought, the more violent things became.
“We didn’t have an understanding of the people, the culture,” Colonel Ostland said. “We didn’t really work with people or apologize for the bad things that happened. We got better at that, but it was too late.”
The Americans eventually consolidated forces to their base on Rafiullah’s family land, in village called Bella, but the Taliban followed. Mullah Osman began launching daily attacks there.
Colonel Ostland was fed up. He wanted to shift his forces to the village of Want, at the mouth of the valley, where it would be easier to defend themselves. He had spent months negotiating with village elders to buy land there and by July of 2008 finally had permission.
But in their haste to leave, the Americans had missed something fundamental: There was nowhere safe for them in the Waygal Valley anymore.
The Last American Ally
Perhaps the only person who stuck by the Americans was Rafiullah.
But his loyalty was growing untenable, and even the money his family was getting increasingly wasn’t worth it. Rafiullah and his family couldn’t even go to their local market without worrying that Mullah Osman’s men would kill them. Now, with the Americans preparing to leave his village, he and his family would be completely unprotected.
The Americans were coming under mortar fire for the second day in a row. Rafiullah and his family decided to leave for good.
They packed up their belongings and fled in a pair of trucks with other civilians, including several doctors who worked at the local clinic.
The fleeing vehicles caught the eye of the Americans, who mistakenly believed the Taliban were marshaling forces for another attack.
U.S. officers called in an airstrike, sending a hail of gunfire from two Apache helicopters at the convoy, destroying them and nearly everyone inside.
Rafiullah lost his father, mother, brother and nephew, along with his arm, an eye and any semblance of support for the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
The Americans, once again, declared the strike a success.
The Battle of Want
Mullah Osman and his men, exhausted from weeks of fighting, retired to the mountains. Under the canopy of a giant tree, Mullah Osman ordered them to go home. They needed rest.
One of his lieutenants objected. The Americans were exposed, and vulnerable.
Why not press the advantage, the lieutenant asked?
After all, the Taliban had fresh manpower — the Americans themselves had taken care of that. The deaths of Rafiullah’s family and the doctors in the convoy had inspired yet another wave of Taliban recruits.
Mullah Osman decided to seize the opportunity. Winning, he had come to believe, was all about the first five minutes.
He knew that the Americans expected brief, hit-and-run attacks. But this time would be different. The Taliban would stand and fight, pressing their advantage in the minutes it took for the Americans to rouse their defense.
In those five minutes, he believed, the entire battle could be won or lost.
Mullah Osman called on more than 150 men from nine villages to prepare. They borrowed weapons from the Taliban in other areas, but also from the local villagers, who were happy to empty their armories for the cause.
To get heavy weapons to Want undetected, they broke down .50-caliber antiaircraft guns, smuggled them over the mountains and reassembled them on hillside perches.
“Want is like a bowl,” Mullah Osman explained. On nearly every side, a severe mountain rises from the valley, like a stone amphitheater. “From up there, I could have thrown rocks at the Americans.”
The insurgents took their positions at night, roving like ghosts over the narrow footpaths, up and down near-vertical inclines, lugging hundreds of pounds of weaponry on a grueling route that avoided the single road through the valley, which they knew would be monitored by the Americans.
Mullah Osman planted men on the rooftops of buildings just a few yards from the base. He even placed some fighters in trees.
Gunmen lay in wait at the base of the mountains, beneath conifers that offered cover from drones and satellites, and held their positions.
Just after 4 a.m. on July 13, the American soldiers at Want were preparing for a morning patrol when they spotted movement.
The crack of machine gun fire filled the valley as Taliban fighters unloaded magazine after magazine. The whistle and boom of rocket-propelled grenades followed from three directions.
From a boulder balanced in repose on the mountainside, Mullah Osman radioed his men to sustain the attack — to commit to the five minutes — because it might be all they had.
He targeted the heavy weapons first: a wire-guided missile system atop a Humvee, which burned like a pyre for the rest of the battle, and a munitions stockpile, which exploded into fiery debris.
Bullets pierced the base from every side. The volume of gunfire stunned the Americans, as did the intimacy of the battle. Opposing fighters were positioned so close they could see one another’s faces.
The most withering attack was levied against an American outpost called Topside, set on the hillside above the base. It had been hastily assembled in the days prior, and gave up high ground to the north and west. While most of the Americans were on the main base, only nine men were stationed at Topside.
The first volley was ferocious and accurate, killing, wounding or stunning every man at Topside. And that was just the start. With every wave of grenades and gunfire, the insurgents pressed closer, charging within yards of the outpost.
Realizing the plight of the men at Topside, an American lieutenant and a medic left the main base to help. They rushed through the village and up the hill as gunfire chased them.
The rescue was short-lived. Not long after they entered the outpost, at least one Taliban fighter breached the perimeter, opened fire and killed them both. Eight of the nine Americans who died that day lost their lives at Topside.
An hour into the fight, Apache helicopters came to the Americans’ aid. Not long after, planes arrived, along with reinforcements on the ground, shifting the battle decisively.
It is unclear how many Taliban died that day. Mullah Osman claims only three, which is almost certainly a gross understatement. American accounts detail numerous Taliban killed.
Whatever the number, it was a price Mullah Osman and his men were willing to pay.
“In Want, we decided to make a stand against the Americans,” the Taliban district governor of Want recalled. “Either kill us, or leave us in peace.”
The Americans, for their part, considered the battle of Want a tactical victory. The Taliban retreated, and the soldiers defended their base against a force many times larger than their own.
But a day later, the Americans left Want.
American Retaliation
The American withdrawal was not the final word on Want.
A series of raids and airstrikes followed the American departure. Residents described finding pieces of their children strewn on broken tree limbs.
“Who could commit such cruelty to a man?” one of them said, speaking in little more than a whisper.
Today, the landscape remains a ruin: trees splintered or sparsely regrown, homes cobbled together from the ruins, residents trapped in a trauma loop, as broken as their surroundings.
No one understands that better than Rafiullah.
After the attack on his family, Rafiullah fled the province. But when the Americans withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, he returned home.
The Taliban had claimed power, and granted a nationwide amnesty to their former enemies. They had even returned the land that his family had given the Americans for their base.
Though the Taliban spared his life, it is a half-life, the life of an outcast.
He bites his tongue about the new government; he still fears them. As the Taliban lingered nearby, monitoring his words, he focused his ire on the Americans.
“They say they came here to help us, but they wound up killing us,” he said, squinting into the sun with his good eye. “We supported their mission, and they betrayed us.”
Peace, and Taxes
The central bazaar buzzes with the sound of new construction, the scrape of concrete and sawing of timber as men huddle on rooftops, planning expansions.
“You can go anywhere in this country and no one will harm you,” Mullah Osman brags, sweeping his arm over the village of Want. “Now, the only people complaining are the coffin makers.”
At a newly opened stall selling soup by the market, the proprietor screws his face. Yes, he allows, selling soup in Want was not a viable business before the Americans left in 2021. But it’s hardly viable now.
“It’s safer now, but no one has money these days,” he whispers.
Driving out of the village, Mullah Osman stops his convoy at a mosque that hovers perilously over the roaring waters of the Waygal River.
It is prayer time, and others making the journey into the valley join to perform the midday ritual. A Toyota Corolla, out of place for the rugged terrain, pulls in behind him. Three men pile out, dressed in starched clothing and shiny dress shoes typical of a Kabul bureaucrat.
Though the Taliban has changed the upper ranks of government, it still relies heavily on the past government’s work force. These particular visitors are from the department of finance.
Mullah Osman stares at the men and asks them what they are doing in Waygal.
“We are registering businesses,” one of them responds.
There aren’t many: a few roadside shacks selling dusty rolls of cookies and satchels of green tea, a few shepherds with flocks of marble-eyed goats.
The visitors could only mean one thing: taxation. And that would spell the end of a 100-year-old pact to leave the Waygal Valley alone.
Mullah Osman grimaces.
This was once known as Kafiristan, or the land of the nonbelievers. Its people practiced an ancient form of paganism and only converted to Islam in the 1890s, when the emir of Afghanistan conquered the territory and renamed it Nuristan, or the land of the light.
In that conquest, some regions converted peacefully, including the Waygal Valley, and were granted a special status by the emir. According to the locals, they were allowed to retain their resources in perpetuity — the land, water, minerals and timber. And they would be exempt from taxation.
Mullah Osman is loyal to the Taliban, but to Nuristan most of all.
“I would not support any effort to tax Nuristan,” he grumbles as the tax men drive away.
To his mind, he has already made enough concessions. When the new government came to power, they favored clerics over commanders, leaving the fighters who won the war jobless. Including Mullah Osman.
And then there is the amnesty.
For Mullah Osman, that has been both easy and impossible. His son-in-law was an Afghan Special Forces soldier in Kandahar, and still wears his uniform around Mullah Osman’s home. He is family, part of the messy and mysterious reconfiguration of alliances that often follows drawn-out conflicts in Afghanistan.
Mullah Osman has also forgiven the Americans, outsiders who never understood Afghanistan. Now that they are gone, so, too, is his enmity toward them.
But others are harder to forgive, like the Afghans who sided with the Americans in Nuristan, who took their money and supported their invasion. People he now must see every day, as though nothing happened.
People like Rafiullah.
Deeper into the valley, Mullah Osman walks through the remains of the American base in Bella, drawing a crowd of villagers as he lists the American atrocities they suffered.
The crowd nods in agreement, and then, suddenly, standing before us, is the last American ally in the valley, a walking casualty of war.
Forbidden from exacting revenge against Rafiullah, Mullah Osman grabs his sleeve and drags him like a prop — a living monument to American betrayal.
“You must meet my friend Rafiullah,” Mullah Osman says.
Turning on the People?
Mullah Osman sat on the matted floor of a Kandahar hotel, watching as a ceiling fan circulated the infernal summer air. He and other Nuristani elders had been granted a rare meeting with Afghanistan’s supreme leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada.
They had spent weeks rehearsing what to say.
In the months before, the Taliban had formalized the decision to tax Nuristan, an invasive move given the history of the province.
Now, the government was preparing to go further: It had told the people of the valley that it was reclaiming their land, water and mineral rights — in short, their independence.
Mullah Osman and the others had come in a last-ditch effort to beg the government to reconsider.
“I think this is just a misunderstanding,” Mullah Osman said, sounding less optimistic than he wanted to. “We just need to explain.”
When the United States launched its doomed foray in the Waygal Valley, it fundamentally misunderstood the place. They built bases where they didn’t need to, killed allies and summoned a Taliban presence that had never existed in Nuristan.
Posters of Taliban fighters killed during the war hang on buildings throughout the village of Waygal, where U.S. forces were never able to reach.
It was hard not to wonder whether the Taliban was making a similar mistake now, turning on the very people who had brought them victory.
When Sheikh Haibatullah arrived, dressed in white robes, he joined the Nuristanis on the floor, according to Mullah Osman.
Mullah Osman recounted how he pushed the supreme leader on the fate of Nuristani land. Others chimed in about Nuristani sovereignty, and its history of resistance.
At the end of the meeting, Sheikh Haibatullah promised a written decree granting the land to the people of the Waygal Valley in perpetuity, Mullah Osman recalled. The delegation left elated.
The group returned to Nuristan and waited. And then waited some more. A month passed without a decree. And then many months.
Earlier this year, the Taliban asked him to become the district governor of Waygal, his home village. A return to where it all began.
It was a lesser role than the one he had during the war, but at least it was in Nuristan, the only place that really mattered to him.
“It is better than staying at home,” he said.
He has resumed working on a history of Nuristan that he was pondering before the war began — a chance to review the past and its lessons.
But he is still waiting for the supreme leader’s decree.
Azam Ahmed is international investigative correspondent for The Times. He has reported on Wall Street scandals, the War in Afghanistan and violence and corruption in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. More about Azam Ahmed
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