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As fortified Taliban audited the New York Times office in Kabul, they were attended by a intelligencer who used to be aU.S. Marine. The print of him in livery was plain for all to see, and consider.
KABUL, Afghanistan — When the Taliban are in your bedroom and there’s a snap of you on the wall holding an American flag, a rifle and dressed like a recruiting commercial for the Marines, you have to keep it together.
Also there’s the kitschy mug on your office that you picked up from a shop just as Bagram Air Base closed in July. It reads, “ Been there … done that/ Operation Enduring Freedom.”
And the empty beer can in your trash that you drank the night before Kabul fell in August when you had a feeling this might be the last beer you drink in Afghanistan for awhile because the mutineers– turned– autocrats do n’t take kindly to booze.
And that print of you in livery? Taken just before the largest operation against the Taliban of the American war in Afghanistan, when you were a Marine in Helmand Province further than a decade agone. That was when the mutineers were murk in the contrary tree line, but now, in October, they ’re bases down, standing next to your bed, separated by a decade and a lost war.
But the Taliban are n’t then to take anything or kill you, indeed though they had plenitude of chances to do just that when you stationed in 2008, and in 2009. Or when you were a intelligencer in the country times subsequently.
But they still managed to kill some guys in your unit and blew others in half, commodity not lost on you as they pick up and put back a honorary cuff engraved with the names of your musketeers (Josh, Matt and Brandon) and a line from a John McCrae lyric “ We lived, felt dawn, saw evening gleam.”
These Talibs contend they ’re then to make sure nothing has been stolen from what was once the New York Times Kabul office, and that everything is right where we left it when all of the review’s staff members fled the country, like thousands of other Afghans and nonnatives did, in August as the Afghan government collapsed.
And everything is right where I left it. There’s the new Xbox I bought at Dubai International Airport when I flew back into Afghanistan in late July, just about two weeks before Kabul fell, allowing that Kabul would n’t fall and that I ’d have plenitude of time to play Microsoft Flight Simulator. My dirty laundry is in the hinder. My bed is made. There’s a thin subcaste of dust on everything.
This is the reality now the end of the war and the new morning of the Islamic Emirate.
The most distinct and reenacting monuments of the longU.S. presence are the black American- supplied rifles now cradled by Taliban at checkpoints and on recreation lifts and slung on the reverse of their motorbikes. The familiar and protrusive thunder of the copters flying into theU.S. Embassy is no more, because theU.S. Embassy is no more, and the girding Green Zone belongs to the Taliban.
The Green Zone, or transnational zone, was blocks of concrete blast walls erected around what was formerly an rich neighborhood with tree-lined thoroughfares, until it was turned into a fort that connected the American Embassy and NATO’s Bent Support headquarters and a sprinkle of other politic operations
.
Now all that structure is just a shell of a 20- time war, lost by the diplomats and dogfaces who formerly lived inside it a gallery to failure.
It’s where The New York Times and other news agencies kept their divisions, and where I had returned last month to continue content of Afghanistan and check what had happed to our emulsion.
It’s where the State Department contractors had a little base with a supposed Starbucks outside. It’s where delegacy staff members dared not venture down from because the war was on. It’s where armored buses were abandoned as Westerners scurried onto copters, so they could be ferried out of the country as the Taliban entered the megacity.
The Taliban now do what they please in the Green Zone. They ’re probing the abandoned structures, looking for intelligencers and munitions or anything that could harm them because the people within the Green Zone formerly did just that, running the war from behind its walls. A blimp with cameras once floated above it, watching everything in the megacity in color and infrared. At Resolute Support headquarters, American officers authorized airstrikes that killed Taliban and civilians likewise.
Why would n’t the Taliban hunt every corner? Look under every office? To them, it’s nearly like the Green Zone is the Dragon King Under the Mountain, commodity that could turn the war back on if they ever woke it up.
“ Are there military munitions then?” one Talib asks us, standing on the alternate bottom of the Times office in a room where the security director formerly painted atomic dogfaces. He carried a wallet full of them out of the country as it collapsed.
No, there are no military munitions.
One Talib points to the body armor on top of a closet. “ This is military, no?” he asks in near–perfect English. “ Why would you need this?”
We demanded the body armor because we were covering the war that just ended, where people killed one another with roadside losers and ordnance and airstrikes and Kalashnikovs. His question is nearly stag, as if the violence his band of mutineers and the Western- backed Afghan government and NATO and the United States executed had was in some resemblant macrocosm.
We respond graciously because our new landlords are carrying a lot of munitions with them.
I throw down a club pop that has been sitting on the kitchen table since August. The refrigerator is rancid. The theater is grown.
The Taliban walk through the office examining a home and office firmed at the moment of collapse. On the bed in the room contrary mine is an open wallet, half– packed, clothes scattered about. In the small newsroom downward, the white board that marked the fall of parochial centrals is still there, though in the end, the country fell piecemeal too fast to track.
On the wall is a chart of the megacity of Kunduz and where the Taliban front lines formerly were, with the mutineers held in check for a many brief weeks by the demoralized and depleted Afghan security forces before they faded and the megacity fell.
Now, in Kabul, the Taliban are driving around in the Afghan service’s exchanges and Humvees and armored help carriers, and wearing their uniforms.
Free buses,” one Talib had contacted me days before from the frontal seat of some armoredS.U.V. that had belonged to a constricting company or came from an abandoned military motor pool. He also transferred a picture of his rifle, also free, with its markings circled “ Property ofU.S.Gov. M4 Carbine. Cal5.56 MM W0207610.”
This is what losing a war looks like. And the Taliban are still in my bedroom.
One looks about the same age I was in that snap on my wall where I ’m standing beside a gigantic and recently unpackaged American flag, holding that rifle and beaming, because I allowed also we were going to win the war or turn the drift or kill the guys who are now sifting through my wardrobe, pointing to a brace of lurkers in my closet. The very shoes were the subject of an composition we wrote “ In Afghanistan, Follow the White High-Tops and You ’ll Find the Taliban.”
