the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

We said goodbye to the taxi driver to interview a man who came to the
circus to escape the headache of having two wives. We never saw the
taxi driver again.
But we did drive south to Khost, the eastern town that bordered the
tribal areas of Pakistan, to visit the family of the dead man he had
mentioned—Shayesta Khan, who had been about seventy-ve, a village
elder with a long white beard. This was the other side of the war from
my embed in Paktika, the side of “collateral damage,” the U.S. military
term for unintentional injury caused while pursuing legitimate targets.
Increasingly, such damage was becoming a problem throughout
southern and eastern Afghanistan, the areas dominated by the ethnic
Pashtuns and home to most insurgent activity. Anger about so-called
“civilian casualties” and house raids was starting to bubble up there.
Outside Kabul, in the places where public opinion mattered most, the
mood toward the United States was shifting. It was not just the hostility
displayed by Afghans upset at U.S. soldiers bursting into their
compounds. It was the new willingness to believe the worst, even the
most outrageous claims, without question. No one yet understood that
what mattered in Afghanistan was not reality—it was rumor, the stories
that raced from village to village.
The raid on Shayesta Khan’s house was nothing like the compound
visits I had observed, where the U.S. soldiers drank tea and tried to
respect Afghan culture. This was a nighttime, kick-in-the-door, suitedup
raid. An informant had allegedly told the U.S. military that bombs
were being made in the compound where about sixty members of
Shayesta Khan’s family lived. Who the informant was, I could never nd
out, nor could I find any other evidence that the claims were true.
In the early morning hours, U.S. soldiers had broken down the
compound’s side door, near steps that led to an open area outside
Shayesta Khan’s bedroom. Family members said they heard shouting,
then gunshots. Everything was a blur, and everyone had a dierent
story. The local Afghan intelligence deputy said Shayesta Khan was shot
reaching for a shirt. His sons said their father was shot trying to light a
gas lantern. In their initial news release, U.S. military ocials said an
Afghan man was shot after he ignored a warning from an interpreter
and a warning shot. The U.S. ocials said the man was in the home of
a known bomb-maker and kept moving toward a container on a dresser