Free Is This Your First War? by Michael Petrou Page B

Twenty-five thousand people attended his funeral a week later, which was held, fittingly, in the Panjshir Valley.
    â€œThe murder plot had been meticulously planned by al-Qaeda,” writes Rashid in Descent into Chaos . “If the attack had taken place a few weeks earlier, as planned, and the Northern Alliance had been destroyed by the Taliban offensive, the Americans would have had no allies on the ground after 9/11 took place. For the first time in more than a decade, the trajectory of Afghanistan’s sad, desperate history was to cross paths with a major international event, and Massoud was not alive to take advantage of it.”
    The Northern Alliance was devastated by the loss of Massoud, but the Taliban offensive did not destroy them. Massoud was officially succeeded by General Mohammad Fahim. And now, finally, the Americans were joining their long war against the Taliban. When I visited Afghanistan’s lacklustre embassy in Dushanbe, however, it was Massoud’s face that peered from posters lining the walls. It was easy to understand why so many foreigners swooned. Massoud was very handsome. But he had refused to play the role of a globetrotting revolutionary extolling his cause on speaking tours and from university podiums. He had commanded the loyalty of so many Afghans because he didn’t leave their side even during Afghanistan’s darkest hours. Now the soldiers who had fought for him squatted on the curb outside the embassy while I picked up my visa inside. Their uniforms looked as though men unused to needlework had sewn badges and patches on generic green tunics. We looked each other over as I left the embassy. It wasn’t the last time I would underestimate their skill as fighters.
    I had been told a convoy would be leaving in a couple of days. There wasn’t much to do in the meantime but wait and wander. Dushanbe was a bleak city. Most people couldn’t afford to drive, and those who could drove SUVs. They were either drug runners or staff at the various NGOs and United Nations agencies clustered in a posh and gated area of a town. The international aid types drove white SUVs. The drug runners had more diverse tastes. That’s how you could tell them apart. I also called the Citizen ’s office manager and insisted that the newspaper wire me more money. They agreed to a few more thousand dollars, which pushed my total back over five grand.
    I spent the day before the Northern Alliance convoy was scheduled to leave in a neighbourhood of Dushanbe inhabited by Afghan refugees. They had made homes here that were more permanent and comfortable than the ones their countrymen found in the refugee camps outside Peshawar. A market catered specifically to their unique appetites. But all were anxious to leave.
    â€œAs soon as the Taliban are defeated, we’ll go back to Afghanistan. It’s our motherland. We have to go back. If they were defeated today, we’d leave today,” a man named Sharif told me. He had once been an engineer in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but fled when the Taliban took the city. Now he sold tea and shoes in a market stall.
    â€œThey wash themselves with juice instead of water before they pray,” he said of the Taliban, meaning they claim to act in the name of Islam but are not true Muslims. “America must help us defeat the Taliban. But we don’t want them to stay. We don’t want any other country to rule us. We want to govern ourselves.”
    From a nearby stall another Afghan named Mohammad Hakim beckoned me to follow him. We wove our way through the market, past a smoking fire pit where a young boy was cooking a large pot of plov , a Central Asian rice pilaf. Gusts of wind blew walnuts off the branches of overhanging trees. They clattered off the tin roofs of market stalls and onto the ground where children scrambled to pick them up. We entered a darkened hallway and emerged in a room where several Afghan