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. 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.
“This,” the Taliban commander says, “was the last ally of the Americans here”.
In this remote province, the commander carried out one of the deadliest attacks on US forces in Afghanistan, a pitched battle that sounded an early warning of a conflict terribly off course.
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.
“It was his friends, the Americans.”
Turning allies into enemies
When the war in Afghanistan began, there were almost no Taliban here.
Then US forces showed up, and this valley in Nuristan province 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 2008, killing nine US soldiers and injuring more than two dozen others.
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.
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.
Convinced that Nuristan would become a transport hub and hideout for al-Qaida 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.
The United States dropped more than 1000 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 they did in much of Afghanistan.
“You have to know when you are the problem,” said retired Colonel William Ostlund, the commanding officer of the men who fought the battle in Want (sometimes referred to as Wanat).
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-Qaida 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. 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.”
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.
At first, almost none of his neighbours understood his outrage. Then, a series of airstrikes hit the valley, changing it forever.
In October 2003, the CIA 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.
Rabbani’s political party, Jamiat-e-Islami, detested the Taliban – so much so that it had partnered with the Americans to overthrow it. In fact, that very night, 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 Rabbani’s son and daughter.
When US forces came to investigate the damage, one of 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.
For the rest of his life, the elder 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 Rabbani had been enemies. But at the funeral for the Rabbani family, Mullah Osman showed up to pay his respects.
He prayed with the family in the smouldering 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 anaemic 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.
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 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-Qaida. But our own people? What reason did they have?”
Self defeat
Ostlund arrived in Nuristan in 2007, inheriting the growing hostility toward the United States and the wild, impractical placement of the American bases. He marvelled at their remoteness, and how little sense they made.
By then, Mullah Osman had far more men at his disposal. He organised them in teams of 10, including a camera person to record every ambush.
He studied each battle. The videos became the centrepiece 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.
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 footpaths carved into the stony, vertical hillsides. Six Americans were killed, including a platoon leader, a devastating precursor of the violence to come.
In their 15-month tour, Ostlund’s men from the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade launched more mortars, dropped more bombs and engaged in more firefights in Nuristan and a neighbouring 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 towards the Americans – and the growing popularity of the Taliban.
“We didn’t have an understanding of the people, the culture,” Ostland said. “We didn’t really work with people or apologise for the bad things that happened. We got better at that, but it was too late.”
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.
The fleeing vehicles caught the eye of the Americans, who mistakenly believed the Taliban were marshalling forces for another attack.
US 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, with his arm, an eye and any semblance of support for the US 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. 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?
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 defence.
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 armouries for the cause.
Just after 4am 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.
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 levelled 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.
Realising the plight of the men at Topside, a US 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, 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 Wanat 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 Wanat.
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 it. 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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Azam Ahmed
Photographs by: Bryan Denton
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES