NAUBAD AND UMAKOI — On moonless nights, after the agony of a fuchsia and orange desert sunset fades to complete blackness, U.S. helicopters airlift Taliban fighters from Kandahar and Helmand to highly secretive drop areas on the sedimentary planes of northern Afghanistan.
Qaqa Satar, my opinionated driver from Mazar-e-Sharif, believes this. My host in Kabul, a shoe salesman, believes this. His daughter's fiancé, a freelance radio journalist, believes this, as does my old friend Mahbuhbullah in Dasht-e-Qaleh, the head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in Kunduz, and the turbaned elder of Naubad and Umakoi, two farming villages just outside the ancient, limestone walls of Balkh, their porous dry clay pale through the fields of unripe wheat like the bones of some prehistoric dragon.
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Do not rush to dismiss this far-fetched conspiracy theory as the unenlightened jabber of uneducated men. Consider it, instead, a byproduct of the grotesque failure by international donors and NATO to improve life here, despite the billions of dollars and tens of thousands of troops pumped into this country since the war began on Oct. 7, 2001.
Think of it this way: The notion of an unholy, clandestine partnership between the United States and the Islamist militia it has been trying, unsuccessfully, to defeat for eight and a half years is the only plausible explanation of a reality these Afghans find all but unbelievable -- that the Taliban is getting stronger. That for most people here, life is not changing for the better.
Eighty percent of Afghans today live in the same exact landscape Alexander the Great must have beheld when he sacked Balkh in 327 B.C., and Genghis Khan when he sacked it again in 1221: walls of straw and mud, half-gnawed away by weather and age; hand-sown fields tilled by doubled-over farmers in unbleached robes with knobbly, wooden tools. Most have no electricity. No clean water. No paved roads. No doctors nearby.
Naubad and Umakoi are like that. There, Ajab Khan, a turbaned elder in once-tasseled slip-ons that now are more mud than leather, demands that I explain to him why, despite the alphabet soup of relief agencies that operate in Afghanistan, despite the cutting-edge military technology that allows U.S. planes soaring invisibly high to precision-bomb tiny targets on the ground, despite cell phone towers that have sprung up all over the country, his people still live in the 11th century (if the 11th century had limited access to cell phones).
"The Taliban levied taxes on everyone," Ajab Khan says, "but" -- he holds up a gnarled finger for effect -- "there was order, there was security. There was no corruption. No theft."
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