On former front line in long Afghan war, an appreciation for peace

The young Afghan shopkeeper knows the high price of living in the line of fire.

Which means Nakibullah, who gives only his first name, also knows the precious value of peace, now that decades of war in Afghanistan have given way to victory for the Taliban.

For years, his family’s roadside kiosk straddled one front line in Wardak province, one of Afghanistan’s most hotly contested areas, southwest of Kabul.

Now, surrounded on a late-winter day by the shop’s boxes of vegetables, nuts, and dried mulberries, his shawl wrapped tightly against the chill, Nakibullah points south down the rutted, dusty road to the remains of a military base less than 100 yards away.

It was from there that American troops, and later, Afghan security forces, fought to stamp out Taliban insurgents. For miles around, mud and wattle villages, their high-walled compounds wrecked by explosions and scarred by bullet holes, are testament to years of intense fighting.

Civilians routinely got caught in crossfire, and Nakibullah – at 22 years old, his beard still growing – describes how, two or three times a day, “we closed up and ran, when fighting was getting near.”

He then points to the ground near his feet.

“My father was shot dead right here,” he says matter-of-factly, about the bullet from a government sniper fired five years ago. “They were always shooting innocent people. I don’t know the reason.”

Such trauma for Nakibullah’s family has made them – and all residents of these districts, whether they stayed or fled – connoisseurs of the new age of nonwar that Afghanistan finds itself in.

Although the chaos of the rushed American exodus last August brought an ignoble end to the United States’ longest-ever war after 20 years, for Afghans emerging from four decades of near-constant conflict, the Taliban takeover has brought an unaccustomed peace.

Problems still abound for Afghanistan’s latest rulers: from haphazard and opaque leadership styles, and attempts to impose hard-line directives on issues such as women’s rights and education, to Western sanctions and an acute lack of funds and food.

But for many Afghans, like those in once-embattled Wardak province, the absence of war is more important than who is in charge.

“War destroyed our homes, our villages, and our youth,” says Rukamdin, a white-haired elder with a beige shawl who also gave only his first name, in Salar Bazaar, a village and cluster of roadside shops 60 miles southwest of Kabul.

And now that war is over? “God is great,” he says.

Better sleep, better business

Rukamdin recalls fighting Soviet troops in the 1980s, and points to where his cousin’s house nearby was destroyed much more recently by an American airstrike. He says he knows the family, that “they are not Taliban,” and that all survived because of an underground bunker built during the Soviet occupation.

“Now we are very happy. We get better sleep at night,” says Rukamdin. “Before we were waiting for airstrikes. Now this is a good moment.”

“Business is much better now,” says shopkeeper Nakibullah, despite his being forced to close his kiosk for three months as the Taliban advanced last year.

That is welcome news along this two-lane “highway,” which bends its way from the capital, Kabul, southwest through Wardak province toward Kandahar. It became one of the most contested and dangerous stretches of road in the country, where residents say war raged “every day.”

Craters scar the asphalt where Taliban jihadis planted improvised explosive devices to target U.S. and Afghan military convoys. Locals still recoil – and their voices sometimes gain a higher pitch, with fearful recollection – as they pass sections of road with thickets of trees on both sides: positions popular with the Taliban because they could attack, then safely hide from drones.

Former Afghan army and police posts are abandoned, their positions on commanding heights now looted by the Taliban. Bulletproof glass at lookouts is often shattered by multiple impacts.

Jokes at a Taliban checkpoint

The violence here carried on to the last days of conflict.

Taliban memorial flags today mark the spot on the road where an American drone strike last August killed some 15 Taliban insurgents who had blocked the retreat of Afghan police and soldiers trying to escape Wardak to the capital.

Today peace prevails, in the form of children sledding down hillsides or playing cricket in open fields. At one Taliban checkpoint, a uniformed soldier asks why a car from Kabul is going to a former battlefield.

“To visit, to have a picnic,” replies the driver, half-joking.

The Talib leans into the car for a look, and chuckles with everyone else.

In one “Mad Max”-like scene, Taliban gunmen who are packed into a captured green Afghan police pickup with a motorcycle thrown in the back quaff energy drinks and laugh, as they barrel forward at high speed.

“It’s a happy situation when we stand here, and are not afraid of being shot from this side or that,” says Rukamdin, at the Salar Bazaar.

Yet peace alone is not enough, he says, with Taliban rule displacing that of former President Ashraf Ghani, whose U.S.-backed government was underpinned by billions of dollars in Western aid that has now dried up.

“Of course, we have a lot of expectations of this Taliban government and the international community,” says Rukamdin. “We need food. ... I have high expectations that the situation should be better.”

A few hundred yards north, up the road from the Salar Bazaar, the low-slung settlement of Mali-Khil nestles beside a stream and is surrounded by fields. It is all but destroyed and nearly empty.

Fighting in recent years was so intense here, as Afghan government forces blasted houses where Taliban insurgents took cover, that bullets carved their way through the metal pump handle at a well.

“It doesn’t matter who is in charge”

That intensity found its way into the compound of Haji Hamdullah, a resident for 30 years, who recounts how the Taliban hid and set up defensive positions in his meeting room. That was three years ago, when the Taliban broke holes in the walls to create passages. The carpet was burned, and the roof.

“The Taliban came into this room and fired on the National Army. This room was destroyed,” says Mr. Hamdullah, his face deeply creviced by 70 years of farming hardship.

Sitting on cushions and carpets in the recently restored space, he recalls how he was injured in that firefight. His knee was broken and he was shot in the back by a government bullet, he says – and also hit by a piece of shrapnel – while he tried to run away.

He had reason to be angry with the Taliban, too, Mr. Hamdullah says. He had complained to the insurgents who confiscated his house about being rude to his daughter-in-law, and warned that any fighting would cause his cow to produce less milk.

“They captured me, because I complained,” he says. “They held me for one month, and beat me and used electrical shocks.”

But today? Those visceral memories seem to have faded, as Mr. Hamdullah appreciates the absence of war, and the start of rebuilding 150 wrecked houses.

“Now we’re better, because there is no military base” to either draw Taliban fire or fire back on the Taliban, he says.

“We are not related to the previous government, or the Taliban,” says Mr. Hamdullah. “We just want peace. It doesn’t matter who is in charge.”