Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau: Afghanistan ... Ten Years of War in a Land Where Your Enemy Will Fight You Forever
Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and has been covering the region for the magazine the past 10 years.
Holed up at a mud-brick house in eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous Paktika province, 28-year-old Mujahid Rahman says he can’t remember how long he’s been battling the Americans. Seven or eight years is his best guess. The past three years have been particularly tough, the Taliban subcommander says. He tells of being held prisoner by the Americans at Bagram Airfield from early 2009 to August 2010, and then enduring an even grimmer month and a half at an interrogation center run by the Kabul government’s intelligence agency. He speaks of comrades who have been killed, disabled, or captured, and how he and his small band of fighters were driven away from their home base in neighboring Ghazni province. He sounds worn out, on the verge of giving up.
But he stiffens when a Newsweek reporter asks if the Taliban should strike a deal with the Americans and the Kabul government. “No!” he practically shouts. The fight will continue until the Americans are defeated, he insists, no matter how long it takes and what the sacrifices. He recalls a prison guard at Bagram who was gleefully preparing to return home to America. The soldier gave Rahman a bottle of juice as a farewell gift and asked how long the Afghan expected to remain behind bars, and what he hoped to do afterward. “Time in jail and time in the jihad mean nothing to us,” Rahman claims to have told the American. “Your watch’s battery will run down, and its hands will stop. But our time in the struggle will never end. We will win.”
His words continue to haunt us. We’ve covered the war in Afghanistan from the start, and we’ve always been fascinated by the contrast between the two sides’ attitudes toward the conflict. It’s summed up in an expression often attributed to a captured Taliban fighter: “You have the watches. We have the time.” The insurgents seem utterly confident that both God and time are on their side. Everything else is irrelevant detail: the anniversaries, deadlines, and timelines, and all the economic, financial, and political constraints that occupy the waking hours of U.S. policymakers. The insurgents show no interest in numbers or statistics or schedules; they focus only on the victory they’re sure will someday be theirs...