The Forever War

by Dexter Filkins

They had been fighting for so long, twenty-three years then, that by the time the Americans arrived the Afghans had developed an elaborate set of rules designed to spare as many fighters as they could. So the war could go on forever.

War was serious in Afghanistan, but not that

serious. It was part of everyday life. It was a job. Only the civilians seemed to lose.

Of course, there were plenty of Taliban soldiers who wanted to fight forever. Fight to the death. They were the Pashtuns from Kandahar, for the most part, a different breed.

The one group of people who really took fighting seriously were the foreigners—that is, the Americans and Al-Qaeda. They came to kill.

The big toes on their bare feet were tied together, in the Islamic burial tradition, and their white turbans had been unfurled to reveal bullet holes through the tops of their heads.

Are you not shocked by the number of dead? Davis demanded of Dostum, of the ferocity of the fight inside the fortress? What is your explanation? Dostum seemed stunned at first, but he quickly recovered. “Jang,” he said with a shrug, using the Dari word for “war.” “Jang.”

They weren’t survivors as much as they were leftovers.

Following Saddam’s fall, Iraq became a theater of revenge, each murder inspiring another and then another.

“I’ve got a rifle from World War II. What can I do against American airplanes?”

A remarkable number of them didn’t even have translators. That meant that for many Iraqis, the typical nineteen-year-old army corporal from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying America’s goodwill; he was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance.

ELECTRIC DRILLS were a Shiite obsession. When you found a guy with drill marks in his legs, he was almost certainly a Sunni, and he was almost certainly killed by a Shiite. The Sunnis preferred to behead, or to kill themselves while killing others. By and large, the Shiites didn’t behead, didn’t blow themselves up. The derangements were mutually exclusive.