How America Turned Allies into Enemies in Afghanistan

The Taliban war hero scans the crowd, searching. From the back, he snatches a man with a flop of dusty hair and a face marred by shrapnel.

The man’s head is bowed, and he is missing an arm and an eye. Something has happened to him, something awful.

“This,” the Taliban commander says, shaking the man a bit too hard, “was the last ally of the Americans here.”

In this remote province, the commander carried out one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a pitched battle that sounded an early warning of a conflict terribly off course and altered the history of the war.

Now, years after the Americans abandoned this valley, and Afghanistan altogether, the commander jerks the man from the crowd to explain how the United States lost both.

Clutching the empty arm of his jacket, the commander spins him around like a marionette. The man’s sheared limb and ragged scars tell only half the story: His family was killed next to him, massacred as they fled the Taliban.