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The Fight Goes On

DASHT-E-LEILI, Afghanistan — Three green police pickup trucks roared up a serpentine gravel road and disappeared in cumuli of dust, careening toward Kushteppeh, where a government outpost was under attack by Taliban fighters. Moments later, seven motorcycle riders in black turbans -- masked, and armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and at least one rocket-propelled grenade launcher -- inched out from behind a dune, pulled out onto Highway A76, and trundled in the opposite direction.

A decade ago, Jowzjan province became a grotesque symbol of Taliban defeat. In November 2001, U.S.-backed forces of Afghan General Abdul Rashid Dostum slaughtered up to 2,000 Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners of war here and dumped their bodies into unmarked pits, turning Dasht-e-Leili -- the "Lily Desert" in Dari, where skeleton plants' pale flowers push through the dunes toward an immense, bruised sky -- into the site of the first landmark atrocity in America's war against terrorism. The massacre's 3,014 survivors were taken to jail in the provincial capital, Shibirghan, and some were later transferred to Guantánamo Bay.
Ten years after the massacre, the Taliban are ruling entire districts in Jowzjan. They ride motorcycles fully armed through the province in daytime, set up impromptu checkpoints to levy taxes on travelers, and terrorize the province's meager police force. Likewise, the killing of Osama bin Laden, seen in Washington as a significant landmark that may somehow affect fighting in Afghanistan, has no more significance than any other war death in this loess vastness: just another element in the composite of violence that makes up the battered landscape of this graveyard of empires.
"Bin Laden was just one man. Why should his death bring any changes here?" said Colonel Nur Ahmad, the deputy police chief of Jowzjan province. "There are parts of the province where even the police can't go without risking death. Tell me: What does Osama have to do with it?"
That anyone should consider bin Laden's death auspicious to the course of the counterinsurgency is a surprising notion to many in northern Afghanistan, where the Taliban have been gaining rapid momentum over the past 18 months. In Balkh province, village elders, farmers, and taxi drivers have told me they saw no connection at all between the killing of al Qaeda's founder and war -- Afghanistan's near-permanent state for millennia, uninterrupted since the Soviet invasion in 1979. In Mazar-e-Sharif, where an enraged mob lynched 12 U.N. workers last month, Balkh provincial police chief, General Ismatullah Alizai, cackled with derision when I brought up bin Laden's name.

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