When the Taliban are in your bed room and there’s {a photograph} of you on the wall holding an American flag, a rifle and dressed like a recruiting industrial for the Marines, you need to preserve it collectively.
Then there’s the kitschy mug in your desk that you simply picked up from a store simply as Bagram Air Base closed in July. It reads, “Been there … done that/Operation Enduring Freedom.”
And the empty beer can in your trash that you simply drank the night time earlier than Kabul fell in August once you had a sense this is likely to be the final beer you drink in Afghanistan for awhile as a result of the insurgents-turned-rulers don’t take kindly to booze.
And that picture of you in uniform? Taken simply earlier than the most important operation in opposition to the Taliban of the U.S. conflict in Afghanistan, once you had been a Marine in Helmand province greater than a decade in the past. That was when the insurgents had been shadows within the reverse tree line, however now, in October, they’re toes away, standing subsequent to your mattress, separated by a decade and a misplaced conflict.
As armed Taliban inspected the New York Times bureau in Kabul, they had been escorted by a journalist who was a U.S. Marine Ñ the picture of him in uniform was plain for all to see, and ponder.
But the Taliban aren’t right here to take something or kill you, although they’d loads of possibilities to just do that once you deployed in 2008, and in 2009. Or once you had been a journalist within the nation years afterward.
But they nonetheless managed to kill some guys in your unit and blew others in half, one thing not misplaced on you as they decide up and put again a memorial bracelet engraved with the names of your pals (Josh, Matt and Brandon) and a line from a John McCrae poem: “We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.”
These Talibs insist they’re right here to verify nothing has been stolen from what was as soon as The New York Times Kabul bureau, and that every part is correct the place we left it when all of the newspaper’s workers members fled the nation, like hundreds of different Afghans and foreigners did, in August because the Afghan authorities collapsed.
And every part is correct the place I left it. There’s the brand new Xbox I purchased at Dubai International Airport after I flew again into Afghanistan in late July, nearly two weeks earlier than Kabul fell, considering that Kabul wouldn’t fall and that I’d have loads of time to play Microsoft Flight Simulator. My soiled laundry is within the hamper. My mattress is made. There is a skinny layer of mud on every part.
This is the fact now: the top of the conflict and the brand new starting of the Islamic Emirate.
A can of soda is roofed with a layer of mud on the New York Times bureau in Kabul, Afghanistan, Oct. 28, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
The most distinct and reoccurring reminders of the lengthy U.S. presence are the black American-supplied rifles now cradled by Taliban at checkpoints and on amusement rides and slung on the again of their motorbikes. The acquainted and intrusive thunder of the helicopters flying into the U.S. Embassy is not any extra, as a result of the U.S. Embassy is not any extra, and the encircling Green Zone belongs to the Taliban.
The Green Zone, or worldwide zone, was blocks of concrete blast partitions constructed round what was as soon as an prosperous neighborhood with tree-lined streets, till it was become a fortress that related the American Embassy and NATO’s Resolute Support headquarters and a handful of different diplomatic missions.
Now all that infrastructure is only a skeleton of a 20-year conflict, misplaced by the diplomats and troopers who as soon as lived inside it: a museum to failure.
It’s the place The Times and different information businesses stored their bureaus, and the place I had returned final month to proceed protection of Afghanistan and examine what had occurred to our compound.
It’s the place the State Department contractors had a little bit base with a supposed Starbucks inside. It’s the place embassy workers members dared not enterprise away from as a result of the conflict was on. It’s the place armored vehicles had been deserted as Westerners scurried onto helicopters, in order that they may very well be ferried in a foreign country because the Taliban entered the town.
The Taliban now do what they please within the Green Zone. They’re investigating the deserted buildings, in search of spies and weapons or something that would hurt them as a result of the individuals inside the Green Zone as soon as did simply that, operating the conflict from behind its partitions. A blimp with cameras as soon as floated above it, watching every part within the metropolis in colour and infrared. At Resolute Support headquarters, American officers approved airstrikes that killed Taliban and civilians alike.
Why wouldn’t the Taliban search each nook? Look beneath each desk? To them, it’s nearly just like the Green Zone is the Dragon King Under the Mountain, one thing that would flip the conflict again on in the event that they in some way woke it up.
“Are there military weapons here?” one Talib asks us, standing on the second ground of The Times bureau in a room the place the safety supervisor as soon as painted miniature troopers. He carried a suitcase filled with them in a foreign country because it collapsed.
No, there aren’t any navy weapons.
One Talib factors to the physique armor on prime of a closet. “This is military, no?” he asks in near-perfect English. “Why would you need this?”
We wanted the physique armor as a result of we had been overlaying the conflict that simply ended, the place individuals killed each other with roadside bombs and artillery and airstrikes and Kalashnikovs. His query is nearly obscene, as if the violence his band of insurgents and the Western-backed Afghan authorities and NATO and the United States perpetrated had existed in some parallel universe.
We reply courteously as a result of our new landlords are carrying plenty of weapons with them.
I throw away a membership soda that has been sitting on the kitchen desk since August. The fridge is rancid. The backyard is overgrown.
The Taliban stroll by means of the bureau inspecting a house and workplace frozen in the intervening time of collapse. On the mattress within the room reverse mine is an open suitcase, half-packed, garments scattered about. In the small newsroom downstairs, the white board that marked the autumn of provincial capitals continues to be there, though ultimately, the nation fell aside too quick to trace.
On the wall is a map of the town of Kunduz and the place the Taliban entrance strains as soon as had been, with the insurgents held in examine for a number of transient weeks by the demoralized and depleted Afghan safety forces earlier than they evaporated and the town fell.
Now, in Kabul, the Taliban are driving round within the Afghan navy’s vehicles and Humvees and armored personnel carriers, and sporting their uniforms.
“Free cars,” one Talib had messaged me days earlier from the entrance seat of some armored SUV that had belonged to a contracting firm or got here from an deserted navy motor pool. He then despatched an image of his rifle, additionally free, with its markings circled: “Property of U.S. Gov. M4 Carbine. Cal 5.56 MM W0207610.”
This is what shedding a conflict appears to be like like. And the Taliban are nonetheless in my bed room.
One appears to be like about the identical age I used to be in that {photograph} on my wall the place I’m standing beside a huge and newly unpackaged American flag, holding that rifle and grinning, as a result of I assumed then we had been going to win the conflict or flip the tide or kill the fellows who at the moment are sifting by means of my wardrobe, pointing to a pair of sneakers in my closet. The very footwear had been the topic of an article we wrote: “In Afghanistan, Follow the White High-Tops and You’ll Find the Taliban.”
He smiles, factors and tries them on.