Contact Admin. Then, last September, having quit the team because of Taliban threats, the young stonemason and his family tragically found themselves on the wrong end of that intelligence. Shrapnel from a U. The stonemason, Saidaa, who, like many Afghans, uses one name, fled with his family last fall to the Taliban-free village of Kama, a collection of mud-walled houses arrayed around a lush, quiet plain two hours east of Kabul.
The transfer of fighting responsibilities to Afghan government forces by the end of next year will mark the conclusion of the U. But for Afghans whose towns and villages remain battle zones, the looming withdrawal of U. Can Afghan forces subdue the Taliban? Will the United States continue to back the Kabul government with financial and military aid? He looks more like a schoolteacher than a militiaman, with a neatly trimmed beard and a gentle handshake.
But he quickly produces a certificate of completion of a four-week U. Six years ago, when the U. Equipped with night-vision goggles and GPS devices, the Afghan teams set out under moonlit skies into towns and villages on both sides of the frontier, Saidaa says, recording the locations of reputed militants.
Although he says he never fired a weapon β the one time they encountered insurgents on a mission, their CIA bosses radioed not to attack β he became a target from the moment he joined the team in late Insurgents seeded the road to the U. He started walking once a month from his village of Chinar to Asadabad, three hours each way, until the Americans decided to ferry him and others to the base via helicopter. But it was no secret to the Taliban. Stop supporting the Americans, or else.
For the next two years he worked odd jobs in Kabul β laying bricks, hawking snuff. He assumed his war experience would help him land full-time work, but there was little market for a lightly educated man whose main skill was reading GPS coordinates. He was in Kabul that September morning when the call came: His sister, Bacha Zarena, barely 15, had been gravely wounded in a drone attack.
