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OEF

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DeathcomesatDawn

On July 13th, 2008 nine u.s. soldiers were

killed when 200 taliban attacked their small

outpost in wanat,

afghanistan. by greg jaffe

as they could carry and someone popped a yellow smoke grenade to cover their movement. The two soldiers sprinted into enemy fire.It was a predictable reaction from the 24-year-old lieutenant -- coura-geous, reckless, impulsive. When Brostrom joined the military, his father, a retired colonel and career aviator, had tried to steer him away from the infantry and toward flying helicopters. “I don’t want to be a wimp,” the son chided his father.Brostrom and Hovater dove into the observation post. A sergeant who was too hurt to fight handed Brostrom his M240 machine gun. As the lieutenant turned to set up the weapon, someone spotted an insurgent: “He’s inside the [exple-tive] wire!” Nine U.S. soldiers were killed and 27 were wounded dur-ing the July 13, 2008, attack, which

raged for several hours and was one of the bloodiest of the Afghan war. Among the dead was Brostrom.In recent months, the battle of Wa-nat has come to symbolize the U.S. military’s missteps in Afghanistan. It has provoked Brostrom’s father to question why Jonathan died and whether senior Army officers -- including a former colleague and close friend -- made careless mis-takes that left the platoon vulner-able. It has triggered three investi-gations, the latest initiated last week by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chair-man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.And it has helped drive a broader reassessment of war strategy among top commanders in Afghanistan, who have begun to pull U.S. troops out of remote villages where some of the heaviest fighting has oc-curred. Senior military leaders have concluded that they lack the forces

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“the radio crackled. about 50 yards from the base’s perime-ter, nine u.s. soldiers manning an ob-serva-tion post were on the verge of being overrun.”

0420hrs The rocket-propelled grenade and rifle fire was so intense that most of the soldiers spent the opening minutes of the battle lying on their stomachs, praying that the enemy would run out of ammuni-tion. They had been in the tiny Afghan village of Wanat, near the Pakistani border, for four days. The command post of their remote base was still just a muddy hole sur-rounded by sandbags. The radio crackled. About 50 yards from the base’s perimeter, nine U.S. soldiers manning an observation post were on the verge of being overrun. Several soldiers were already dead. “We need to get up there!” screamed 1st Lt. Jonathan Brostrom, the platoon leader at the main base. He and Spec. Jason Hov-ater grabbed as much ammunition

to wrest these Taliban strongholds away from the enemy and are in-stead focusing on more populated and less violent areas.To some soldiers and their families, this decision amounts to retreat. A few weeks before Brostrom was killed, a military historian asked him about the successes he had witnessed in Nurestan province, where he had spent most of his tour. He gave a prescient reply. “It is almost a lost cause up in Nurestan,” he said flatly. “There needs to be a lot more than just a platoon there if you want to make a big difference.” He thought some more about his frustrating tour, leading the 40-man 2nd Platoon of Chosen Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Air-borne), 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team. “We killed a few Taliban,” he said, “so I guess that is a success.”Brostrom, who grew up on Army bases throughout the United States, was charming, athletic and a little bit immature. He arrived in Af-ghanistan in July 2007 and spent a couple of uneventful months in a battalion staff job before tak-ing over a platoon that occupied a small outpost in Nurestan’s Waygal Valley. The outpost’s location, near the tiny village of Bella, was chosen in 2006 because it sat on a historic mujaheddin infiltration route from Pakistan. The idea was to stop en-emy fighters in the remote moun-tains before they made their way to more populated areas.This account of Brostrom’s time in Afghanistan and his final battle is based on interviews with his troops and commanders, as well as the

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Army’s 800-page initial investiga-tion. It also draws from the work of an Army historian whose draft study of the fight was reported by ForeignPolicy.com and The Wash-ington Post in July. Brostrom entered the war at a time when the Taliban was gaining strength. Shortly after he became platoon leader, his unit was sent to recover the bodies of six U.S. soldiers and a Marine who were gunned down while returning on foot to Bella. One soldier had fallen more than 500 yards down a steep ravine, and it had taken Brostrom’s troops and circling at-tack helicopters more than 15 hours to find him. After the attack, the other soldiers rarely ventured far from their base. “We felt like we’d been backed into a corner,” said Staff Sgt. Jonathan Benton, one of the soldiers from the platoon. “Nothing ever felt safe out there.”

In January 2008, Brostrom’s platoon sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Kahler, was fatally shot by an Afghan security guard as he returned to the outpost from a foot patrol. One of Kahler’s jobs had been to teach Brostrom, who was technically his superior, how to lead troops in combat. On a cloudless day at the Bella outpost, Brostrom delivered a simple eulogy for his 29-year-old friend and mentor.He talked about Kahler’s love for his wife and 4-year-old daughter, his patience with young soldiers, and his passion for punk music. “I can’t even begin to list all the good qualities Sergeant Kahler had, because it would be impossible,” he said, squinting into the bright mid-day sun and fighting back tears. “I think Sergeant Kahler knew every-thing.”Brostrom’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. William Ostlund, had concluded months before Kahler’s

death that keeping troops at the Bella outpost no longer made sense. Enemy fighters coming from Pakistan had long ago learned to maneuver around the base.But Ostlund wasn’t ready to give up the surrounding Waygal Valley, which was home to a largely illiter-ate and deeply religious population. The isolated valley offered an ideal haven for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “It was a popu-lation I really had a hard time understand-ing and did not respect,” Ostlund said. “But I really did believe that they needed to be connected to the central government and that would be the first step to making them better people, less of a threat to themselves and Afghanistan.”Ostlund, square-jawed and intense, had a reputation in the Army as a high flier. He enlisted at age 17 and earned his bachelor’s degree from the Univer-sity of Nebraska in only four semesters. In the 1990s, he served as a platoon leader for then-Lt. Col. David H. Petraeus, who had risen to become the top commander in the Middle East. “Bill was one of those rare individuals who could truly inspire others,” Petraeus recalled. “Whatev-er the task, his platoon stood out . . . and the tougher the task, the more they stood out.” Ostlund went on to earn a master’s degree in interna-tional relations from Tufts Univer-sity and to teach at West Point.He decided to relocate Brostrom’s platoon from Bella to a new base

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at Wanat, which was home to the valley’s district governor and police chief. The troops would establish a security bubble around the village and then win the support of local officials with $1.4 million in recon-struction projects.Ostlund had lost eight soldiers in the Waygal Valley and had twice been ambushed there himself. But he thought that U.S. troops could

win the allegiance of the people there. “Americans are hard to dis-like for an extended period of time,” he said. “I really believe that.”His plan was also animated by the same stubborn resolve that caught Petraeus’s eye. “To accept defeat and have that population destroy my will to continue my mission just wasn’t on the menu of options,” he said.Before Brostrom moved to Wanat, he went home on leave to see his

parents in Hawaii, where they had settled after his father retired from the Army. One evening, he showed his father videos from Afghanistan. Most of the clips were of Brostrom and his troops under fire at the Bella outpost.In one video, Brostrom’s battalion fired artillery and white phospho-rus, an incendiary weapon, at a distant campfire in the mountains

where it had killed insurgents earlier that day. Someone had come to collect the bodies. The soldiers were determined to kill them.“Here comes a mighty big explosion on this little candlelight ceremony that the Taliban is having for their buddies that died there earlier,” one of the sol-diers says on the video. “This is going to be glori-ous. It is going to be a bloodbath.”A few seconds later, the moun-tainside ex-ploded with fire, and the soldiers let up a raucous cheer.Human rights groups have criticized the United States for employing white

phosphorus to kill enemy fight-ers, but this type of use is permit-ted under military rules. The elder Brostrom weighed his words care-fully before he spoke. “How do you know those people dragging the bodies away weren’t villagers com-ing to get their relatives?” he asked.“They are all [expletive] Taliban up there,” the son replied.The father continued to press his doubts. The son maintained that the hard-nosed approach was the

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only thing keeping him alive in a hopeless corner of Afghanistan. Fi-nally, the young lieutenant snapped. “You don’t understand,” he said.“You’re right, son. I don’t,” the father replied. “I don’t understand it. But I am worried. I am really worried.”A few days later, Brostrom returned to Afghanistan. His platoon didn’t get its final order to establish the Wanat base until early July. The battalion was only two weeks from returning home, but Ostlund and his superiors wanted to make sure that the outpost was in place for the next unit.The day before he left, Brostrom confessed his doubts about the mission to Lt. Brandon Kennedy, his closest friend in the Army. Brostrom worried he didn’t have enough men to hold off an enemy attack and complained that the pro-posed base’s location, surrounded by mountains, would make it hard to defend, Kennedy wrote in a statement for Army investigators.“He said he knew he was going to get [expletive] up, because the last four times he had gone up there, he had been ambushed every time, often with very good effects,” Ken-nedy wrote.Nothing about the Wanat mission went as planned. Brostrom and his soldiers were supposed to have 16,000 pounds of construction material to build defensive bunkers, big earthmovers to fill seven-foot-tall Hesco barriers, and a five-day supply of water, a senior military official said.But the Afghan construction firm that was supposed to ferry the construction supplies and build the base refused to make the four-mile drive into the valley because it was

too dangerous. A small Bobcat earthmover was delivered to the base by helicopter, but it ran out of gas after one day. Brostrom’s sol-diers, working in 100-degree heat, chipped away at the rocky soil with shovels to fill sandbags and dirt barriers.The five-day supply of water also never made it to Wanat, and by their second day at the base, most of the troops were “mildly dehy-drated,” one soldier told Army investigators.Two days into the mission, a Preda-tor surveillance drone -- one of only two in Afghanistan -- was shifted from Wanat. No attacks had occurred there during the opening days of the mission, and U.S. com-manders decided there were more pressing priorities.“There should have been a lot more done to help us,” said Sgt. 1st Class David Dzwik, who replaced Kahler as Brostrom’s platoon sergeant. “The real problem was arrogance. Everyone thought they knew the enemy.”

A few days after the platoon ar-rived, a Wanat village elder gave Brostrom a list of Afghans who had been killed in a helicopter attack the previous week. The dead in-cluded insurgents but also several local medical personnel who had worked closely with U.S. soldiers. The incident had infuriated people throughout the valley.On July 13, their fifth day at the Wanat base, Brostrom and Dzwik ordered all of the soldiers to rise at 3:30 a.m. and man their fighting positions. In Afghanistan, the hours just before dawn are typically the most deadly.Shortly after 4 a.m., an estimated

200 insurgents let loose a torrent of rocket-propelled-grenade fire, destroying the base’s anti-tank mis-sile system and its mortar tubes. Then they trained their guns on the observation post.The initial blast threw Spec. Tyler Stafford onto his back. He screamed that he was on fire. Next to him, Spec. Matthew Phillips was rear-ing back to throw a grenade when a rocket came roaring at them. The tailfin ricocheted off Stafford’s hel-met, leaving a jagged dent. When he looked up, Phillips was dead.A few feet away, Spec. Christopher McKaig and Spec. Jonathan Ayers prodded each other to raise their heads above the observation post’s sandbagged wall. “I am going to count to three and then we are both going to jump up and shoot at whatever we see,” McKaig recalled screaming.The two soldiers leapt to their feet, fired a short burst from their rifles and collapsed. When it came time to rise again, Ayers hesitated. So McKaig started counting. On three, the men rose and a bullet struck Ayers. He coughed up enough blood to fill a teaspoon and fell over

dead.A few min-

utes later, Brostrom and Ho-vater sprinted up to the ob-servation post. They were killed within minutes of their ar-rival.With the enemy closing in, Stafford, McKaig and Sgt. Matthew Gobble -- woozy from a loss

of blood -- abandoned the obser-

A few seconds lat-er, the moun-tainside explod-ed with fire, and the soldiers let up a raucous cheer.

“They are all (expleTive) Taliban up There”

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U.S. military deaths in the Afghan war have reached 2,000, a cold reminder of the human cost of an 11-year-old conflict that now garners little public interest at home as the United States prepares to withdraw most of its combat forces by the end of 2014. The toll has climbed steadily in recent months with a spate of attacks by Afghan army and po-lice — supposed allies — against American and NATO troops. That has raised troubling questions about whether countries in the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan will achieve their aim of helping the

government in Kabul and its forces stand on their own after most foreign troops depart in little more than two years. On Sunday, a U.S. official confirmed the latest death, saying that an international service mem-ber killed in an apparent insider attack by Afghan forces in the east of the country late Saturday was American. A civilian contractor with NATO and at least two Afghan soldiers also died in the attack, according to a coalition statement and Afghan provincial officials. The

U.S. official spoke on condition of anonymity because the national-ity of those killed had not been formally released. Names of the dead are usually released after their families or next-of-kin are notified, a process that can take several days. The nationality of the civilian was also not disclosed. In addition to the 2,000 Americans killed since the Afghan war began on Oct. 7, 2001, at least 1,190 more coalition troops from other countries have also died,

the toll.

11 years after the u.s. launched it’s war in afghanistan military deaths have reached

2,000

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Attacks by Afghan sol-diers or po-

lice — or insurgents

disguised in their uni-forms —

have killed 52 Ameri-

can and other NATO troops so far

this year.

according to iCasualties.org, an independent organization that tracks the deaths. Julie Jacobson/AP U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan have surpassed 2,000, a grim reminder that a war which be-gan nearly 11 years ago shows no signs of slowing down despite an American decision to begin the withdrawal of most of its combat forces. According to the Af-ghanistan index kept by the Washington-based research center Brookings Institution, about 40 percent of the American deaths were caused by improvised explo-sive devices. The majority of those were after 2009, when President Barack Obama ordered a surge that sent in 33,000 additional troops to combat heightened Tali-ban activity. The surge brought the total number of American troops to 101,000, the peak for the entire war. According to Brookings, hostile fire was the second most common cause of death, account-ing for nearly 31 percent of Amer-icans killed. Tracking deaths of Afghan civilians is much more difficult. According to the U.N., 13,431 civilians were killed in the Afghan conflict between 2007, when the U.N. began keeping statistics, and the end of August. Going back to the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, most estimates put the number of Afghan civilian deaths in the war at more than 20,000. The number of Ameri-can dead reflects an Associated Press count of those members of the armed services killed inside Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion began. Some other news organizations use a count that

also includes those killed outside Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, the global anti-terror campaign led by then-President George W. Bush. The 2001 invasion targeted al-Qaida and its Taliban allies shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, which claimed nearly 3,000 lives. Victory in Afghanistan seemed to come quickly. Kabul fellwithin weeks, and the hardline Taliban regime was toppled with few U.S. casualties. But the Bush administra-tion’s shift toward war with Iraq left the Western powers without enough resources on the ground, so by 2006 the Taliban had regrouped into a serious military threat. Musadeq Sadeq/AP In addi-tion to the 2,000 Americans killed since the Afghan war began on Oct. 7, 2001, at least 1,190 more coali-tion troops from other countries have also died, according to iCasu-alties.org, an independent organiza-tion that tracks the deaths. Obama deployed more troops to Afghanistan, and casual-ties increased sharply in the last several years. But the American public grew weary of having its military in a perpetual state of con-flict, especially after the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq at the end of last year. That war, which began with a U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to oust Saddam Hussein, cost the lives of nearly 4,500 U.S. troops, more than twice as many as have died in Afghanistan so far. “The tally is modest by the standards of war historically, but every fatality is a tragedy and 11 years is too long,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a fellow at the Brook-ings. “All that is internalized, how-ever, in an American public that

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has been watching this campaign for a long time. More newsworthy right now are the insider attacks and the sense of hopelessness they convey to many. “ Attacks by Afghan soldiers or police — or insurgents disguised in their uniforms — have killed 52 American and other NATO troops so far this year. The so-called insider attacks are considered one of the most seri-ous threats to the U.S. exit strategy from the country. In its latest incar-nation, that strategy has focused on training Afghan forces to take over security nationwide — allowing most foreign troops to go home by the end of 2014. Although Obama has pledged that most U.S. combat troops will leave by the end of 2014, American, NATO and allied troops are still dying in Afghanistan at a rate of one a day. Even with 33,000 American troops back home, the U.S.-led co-alition will still have 108,000 troops — including 68,000 from the U.S. — fighting in Afghanistan at the end of this year. Many of those will be training the Afghan National Security Forces that are to replace them. “There is a challenge for the administration,” O’Hanlon said, “to remind people in the face of such bad news why this campaign requires more perseverance.”

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(left behind.)

30 years after the

soviet war with

afghanistan roughly 200 former red

army soldiers remain, living

amongst those they once

fought.

оставилBY JOHN WENDLE

life

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Even after three decades, Gennady Tseu-ma remembers the wavering call to prayer that went up clear over the hillside village. It floated out over the fields and river and pierced the early morning hush on the Bangi Bridge. Tseuma, then a Soviet soldier assigned to a small force guarding the river crossing in northern Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, recalls a feeling of dread when he heard the sound. Like many of the conscripts serving in the Red Army in Afghanistan, Tseuma was bored and undisciplined, and after 10 months of service, curiosity finally got the best of him.

The decision to investigate the call to prayer cost him the life he had known up to that point. “Our checkpoint was close to the village. Every morning the mullah did the call to prayer. It was totally new to me. I didn’t understand what was go-ing on. I thought maybe they were kill-ing people or something,” Tseuma tells TIME. “So, one day, early in the morning, I got off my base to take a look. When I got close to the mosque there was an old man sitting there. Then suddenly men with guns surrounded me and captured me. After that, the mujahedin told me to convert to Islam or they would kill me. I decided it was better to live than to die, so I became a Muslim.”For the past 29 years, Tseuma and maybe around a hundred other Soviet POW/MIAs have lived through some of the most violent history of one of the most violent countries on earth. After serving in the European-style Soviet army, they lived and sometimes fought as Afghans. Those of them still alive have an ex-traordinary window into Afghan society combined with unique insight into the historical parallels between the Soviet defeat and the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces at the end of 2014.

Life has improved in the past 10 years

but Tseuma — or Nek Mohammad as he was renamed after his conversion to Islam — senses grave dan-ger ahead. “I’m afraid. Right now there are roads and there is light. But let’s see what happens down the road. Then there won’t be lights. Then the war will start,” he says. “People will be gobbled up every-where. People will start killing each other. Then what will be here? Life will be here, but it will be bad.”

Mohammad switches off the TV set — he had been watching a Russian quiz show playing via satellite TV in the guest room of his mud-brick house on the edge of Kunduz city. He seems to be pondering both the past and the future with his quick, blue eyes — eyes that contrast with the white of his shalwar kameez — the traditional clothing of an Afghan man. “The Soviet government was looking for us, but I didn’t let them find me because I didn’t know what they would do to me,” says Mohammad in the soft-accented Russian of his native eastern Ukraine. The mujahedin pushed him to wage jihad against his for-mer comrades, but “I have not shot one bullet since I became a Muslim,” he says.

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Mohammad lived as a prisoner in the compound of a local mujahedin commander, which lies just a few miles from his old post with the Red Army. Many of the other shuravi — as the vets are known in the former Soviet Union — had similar experiences. “When they were captured, they became slaves. Psy-chologically, these guys are damaged,” Alexander Lavrentyev, the vice-chairman of Russia’s War Vet-erans Committee, tells TIME. “They are in their late 40s, but they all look like they are in their 60s.”In a vicious and confused war, the Afgantsy — an-other term for the Soviet vets — could disappear “like a puff of smoke,” says Lavrentyev. “Afghans were sitting, watching and you didn’t know if they were mujahedin or not. And that’s it. They’d pull you behind a wall and the troops would never find you again.” There are the stories of Soviet soldiers being stolen in the night, the stories of fighters disappearing after wandering onto remote corners of their own base, or the stories that begin and end with “they went to a village to buy cigarettes, and suddenly …,” Lavrentyev says. “And those were not isolated incidents.” Around 266 are still missing, he says. Some of those were buried in Afghanistan in unmarked graves — like the set of six uniformed remains accidentally unearthed by a bulldozer a few years ago at an old Soviet camp in Kunduz — now the base of the German Provincial Reconstruction Team. Lavrentyev has found 29 alive so far, and 22 have returned home. The rest have chosen to stay because they have family or because — to Lavrentyev at least — they have become more Afghan than Soviet.

But, Lavrentyev’s hopes of finding more of the vets alive are fading. Right now he estimates that only 20 to 40 of the 266 MIAs could still be alive and the trail is getting colder as time passes and history is forgotten. “Soon there will be no first-person mem-ory of this history because everyone who was young then will be 50 or 60 years old and life expectancy in Afghanistan isn’t that long,” he tells TIME during his most recent search mission.

After the Soviet army withdrew, Mohammad slowly gained his freedom and moved to Kunduz city and worked as a long-haul trucker, ferrying goods all over northern Afghanistan. He somehow survived the chaos of the Soviet pullout and the civil war that ripped apart the country from 1992 to ’96. Sur-prisingly, life under the Taliban was easier. “The Taliban never touched me when they were in power. They were proud of me because I became a Muslim,” Mohammad says. Today he is married to an ethnic-Ta-jik Afghan woman from a nearby province. They have two sons and a daughter. He is part of his community. But, as the U.S. and NATO withdrawal nears, he wor-ries for the future of his family — and he says his friends, neighbors and relatives are also worried, a sentiment echoed by the two other Soviet vets TIME was able to track down.

Sergei Krasnoperov says even the relative stability at the moment is not so great. Krasnoperov deserted after he was caught selling military supplies and faced stiff punishment. He went over to the mujahe-din, converted to Islam, was renamed Noor Mohammad and fought against the Soviets — even serving as a bodyguard to ethnic-Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. He is now married to an Afghan woman, has six children, works part-time for the local electricity department and also repairs truck parts in the city of Chaghcharan in Ghor province, near his old base.“Now you can’t understand who is working with the government and who is not — who is on which side is impossible to understand,” the Russian tells TIME in a crackly phone interview. “Even in the city, government power is not strongly felt. You can kill two or three people and jump on a motorcycle and that’s it. No one will say anything or come after you.” Even from his village point of view, he reflects widely held fears that the Afghan army and police will evaporate once foreign funding dries up — an idea denied by the U.S. and NATO. “Those [sol-diers and police who] are paid, they simply do not fight. They do nothing. When the month ends, they take their next pay and that’s it. They are not on any side — only on the side of the money.” His take on the current government is just as harsh, say-ing: “Corruption here isn’t very clear. I only understand right now what the government doesn’t do — they do nothing. They only take bribes and kill people. The government here is a joke. If the Americans weren’t here right now, there would be no power at all, it would just be a bunch of robbers.”

JOHN WENDLE FOR TIMEAlexander Levenets fled from his Soviet army base in Afghanistan after his com-manding officer caught him selling army supplies to local Afghans and threatened him with severe punishment. The mujahe-din took him in and he fought against the Soviet army. He converted to Islam and now goes by the name Ahmad. He went to Kunduz province in 1984. He has an Afghan wife and five daughters. He is infrequently in touch with his family in UkraineBack in Kunduz, Alexander Levenets, an-other of the shuravi, sees similar problems. After the Soviets left, he says, “the Afghan National Army was completely destroyed, but now we have an army and police. How-

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ever, those people get their salary from America. If America leaves, they will also be destroyed. There will be nothing of them left. There will be nothing here to control them and pay them.” Like Noor Mohammad, Levenets deserted and joined the mujahedin after selling supplies to the enemy and being caught by his com-manding officer. He fled, converted to Islam, took the name Ahmad and fought against the Soviets. Eventually he mar-ried an ethnic-Tajik Afghan woman and now has five daughters. He works as a taxi driver and his wife is a teacher.

Drinking green Afghan tea, Nek Moham-mad is less decided about the current state of affairs, but just as pessimistic about the future. “The Americans did not make a mistake coming here,” he says. “Before, I didn’t have electricity. Now I do. Before, there wasn’t a good road. Now there is. Before, there wasn’t a hospital. Now there is.” But he is not sure about what comes next. “When the Americans leave, it will become clear what will happen to Afghanistan. The Afghan Army can’t take their hands off the Taliban.”

In the end, he says, “The people will suf-fer. That’s what will happen. All of those people who work with the Americans, who work in the offices — when the Taliban comes, those people will be in danger, those people will be killed, because ev-erybody wants power. Everyone will want revenge.” As for the Afghan government, he is of the same mind as the other vets. “Karzai and everyone, they all say, ‘We will defend your country. No one will attack here. Everyone will stand with us. The foreigners will help us,’ but on what does this depend? They say it depends on God … Everything depends on God. What he created, will be. But that’s all just talk. The tongue talks, but we’ll see what really happens.”Possibly the most chilling comparison of all is made by Ahmad, the taxi driver, who

reaches back into the history he has seen in Afghanistan, saying: “When the Soviet army left it was peaceful until the Soviet govern-ment stopped giving the Afghan communist government money. When the money stopped, the war started. Everyone only fights and works for money. People do everything for money.”

As dusk closed around Nek Mohammad’s vil-lage on the edge of Kunduz city, he invited us to stay for dinner, but he was worried about our security. “This is an Afghan village, so I can’t say anything. I don’t know what will happen here. Anything could happen. You’ll leave late and this place is unreliable for foreigners,” he says, mixing Dari and Russian. “I’m afraid. I’d be very happy for you to eat here, but …” Walking us out of the house in the gathering gloom, he recited a Russian say-ing, “We need to pull our claws out of here” — meaning, We need to run away from here, he explains. Says the old soldier: “I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

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