Second in an eight-part series.
DASHTI QALA, Afghanistan - The children danced on the sunbaked clay that day, pointed to the sky, and sang: “The plane, the plane!’’
The men shielded their eyes, hoping to catch a glimpse of an American jet as it knifed through the sky and dropped its bombs. They cheered as dark plumes emerged from the dun-colored ridge across the shallow, silvery valley of the Kokcha River, where the army of the Taliban was dug in.
It was October 2001, and the Americans had joined the fight. To the jubilant crowd in this farming town, at the edge of the only corner of northern Afghanistan that the Islamists had not conquered, the warplane provided hope that they might never suffer the Taliban’s austere tyranny.
From his makeshift mud-brick embattlements on the front lines, Abdul Hanan, a veteran of Afghanistan’s civil wars and commander of a ragged band of Northern Alliance rebels, cheered, too. The Taliban, he thought, was doomed.
But the Taliban has returned to those arid hills where the first bombs fell, and Hanan is heartbroken.
“I am confused,’’ said Hanan, who turned in his weapons after the Taliban surrendered 10 years ago and now works in construction. “I fought 17 years. I didn’t die. But now I fear the Taliban will kill me.’’
When the Taliban began to reemerge in the north three years ago, they met with little resistance from the United States and its allies, who believed the north had been secured; the allied focus, instead, was and still is on the larger insurgency in the south. But the lawlessness that followed its defeat in the north gave the Taliban the opening it needed to creep back.
Uniformed Afghan security forces command little popular trust, and armed militias loyal to no one rob and terrorize the population. The insurgents have levied taxes on farmers, executed violators of their strict interpretation of Islamic law, and ambushed Afghan police and their US allies with roadside bombs and gunfire.
Hanan’s growing fear is as good a barometer as any of the progress toward the most elusive quarry in Afghanistan - belief in a secure future. The ramp-up of the US presence under the surge strategy has yielded successes in eastern and southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is strongest.
But this sliver of parched mountains and fertile lowlands along the country’s northern border offers a glimpse of how hard it can be to keep the peace when the fighting stops - and the perils that may lie ahead as President Obama prepares the withdrawal of most troops from Afghanistan by 2014.
Ten years of war have been hard on hope, and harder still on some assumptions behind the US-led intervention.