The Taliban Are Here - Does It Matter?

On the surface, the Karaghuzhlah to which I returned looks no different than the Karaghuzhlah I visited back in May, before the Taliban laid claim to the village -- unchanged, probably, for centuries. No black flags fly from Karaghuzhlah's mosques, and no cartoonish men in sinister black turbans whip their way through crowds of the immodest and impious. Kids still play in muddy ditches. Men still squat in the shadows of mosque walls to gossip and stare darkly at the road. Women still chase scrawny chickens away from tandoori ovens where conchas of unleavened bread bronze. There is still no power, no hospital, no decent roads. At first glance, only the seasons have changed: Instead of saccharine mulberries, unshucked almonds now dry in the sun on clay stoops.
Yet over this millennial Afghan landscape the insurgency casts a pall, a subtle anxiety that flits from one threshold adorned with hand-sewn taweez charms to another like the mynah birds that beset the village. Some villagers say, yes, the Taliban have been back several times in the last two months, always on motorcycles, always at night. Other say, no, we haven't seen them, we don't think they have been back. But one must stay circumspect nonetheless. "Even men no longer go outside after dark," an apricot farmer's wife tells me. Read more.