Read Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War for Free Online

were shivering and ravenous. “Come up and hold the line yourself,” he snapped. As daylight thinned, Zaman swepttriumphantly down the rocky mountain trail. His mujahideen thronged behind him, kicking up storms of dust. Gleefully they waved at the journalists, chins high as conquering heroes.
    “Don’t worry!” they shouted, skidding down on their heels. “Al Qaeda is over!”
    At sunrise the next morning, Tora Bora was quiet. A warplane circled in the sky overhead, spewing white rings against a vibrant blue. Silence swallowed the mountains like some foreign fog. For the first time in days, no bombs were falling. And for the first time, we reporters couldn’t get close enough to see anything. Afghan guards had closed the roads and trails leading up the mountain. I took this to mean that the Americans were up there. The Afghans would take us anywhere, straight into the line of fire, but the Americans didn’t want to be seen. When we spoke to them, they’d pull their tribal blankets tighter around themselves and pretend they didn’t speak English.
    It was still five minutes before the eight o’clock deadline when Haji Zaman’s pickup bumped its way down the mountain. I ran to the roadside and flagged him down. He rolled down the window. Tears stood in his eyes.
    “What happened? Why aren’t you at the surrender?” I asked.
    He shook his head. He didn’t say a word.
    “Are the Americans there?” I asked.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Did they tell you to leave?”
    “I can’t talk about it.”
    “Did they take over the surrender?”
    “I have to go,” he said. He rolled up the window, and drove on.
    A few minutes later, a crash echoed across the mountains, and the ground quaked. Warplanes pounded the hills with bombs. It kept up for hours, all day long. If the surrender had ever started, it was certainly over now.
    That afternoon, I found Zaman sulking in a bombed-out building in the abandoned village he sometimes used as a base. We paced up and down a chicken yard. The sky was huge overhead. He was quiet. Sometimes he said, “How do I know I can trust you?”
    “You can,” I said. I think we both knew the dynamic: he could trustme, but I couldn’t trust him. At least he was no longer hitting on me. That was all gone, replaced by this wary willingness to accord me more information than the others could get. But then, what good is information when everybody around you is lying? That day, he never explained anything.
    He made me wait until the next day before he told his story. By then, fresh fighting had erupted. Negotiations were more than dead; they were now viewed as an embarrassing faux pas on the part of the Afghans. Sitting in his pickup truck in Tora Bora, Zaman told me the story:
    “I told the Americans, take these men and question them, get intelligence from them. Let them surrender. And they said no. No negotiations, no negotiations, no negotiations. Americans wouldn’t accept the surrender. They wanted the Al Qaeda soldiers dead. I suggested we question them. I said, if you want them dead, we can put them in a farmhouse somewhere when we’re through questioning them, and bomb the house. Nobody will know. But the Americans said no, we want them dead immediately.”
    This may or may not have been one piece of truth, but Zaman was surely playing more hands than he’d admit. Other Afghans have since accused all three U.S.-backed warlords of helping the Al Qaeda fighters escape into Pakistan—for a fee, of course.
    It is possible, of course, that every one of those stories is true—that Zaman wanted to capture bin Laden, tried to broker surrender, and eventually helped him slip out the back door, stuffing his pockets at every turn. These things are not mutually exclusive. Very little in Afghanistan is mutually exclusive. It is also possible that none of it was true at all, that the real story of Tora Bora is something else that we’d never imagined.
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