SIOGERT, Afghanistan — From time to time, Qasim looks at me in the rearview mirror of his taxicab and plays tour guide.
"See this shrine?" He nods toward a green flag that flutters from a stake jutting out of the ground amid the white flashes of unpicked cotton. Behind it rise the breast-shaped clay roofs of the village of Siogert. "Seven brothers were killed here. They were Uzbek. They were fleeing the Taliban, in 1997. We were all fleeing then."
"See this flag?" Another stake, this one driven into a mud wall by the road. Short, diagonal grooves dimple the wall: the palm marks of the men who molded it by hand out of the desert. "One brother killed another brother here, over land. It was after the fall of the Taliban.
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Then someone killed the killer; I'm not sure who."
In rush hour Mazar-e-Sharif, Qasim's yellow-and-white Corolla crawls through a roundabout near the western gate of the Blue Mosque, the legendary burial place of Ali, the Prophet Mohammed's son-in-law. In the morning fog, the turquoise shrine shimmers, as if it were encased in ice. Men draped with thin camel-wool blankets stroll through the mist in reverent quietude to feed the 10,000 white doves said to flock here.
Qasim's eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. "In the time of the Taliban in this place they hanged a young man."
At an unpaved intersection several blocks away, Qasim's car rocks gently over a bomb crater. On this spot last July, a suicide bomber detonated a device strapped to his bicycle, killing four people. "See this?" Qasim says. "I was at a cafe down the block, finishing my lunch. Had I left a minute earlier, I wouldn't have been here today."
Each murder clings to the Bactrian plains like soot from a bukhari stove, like a patina of rot, until it becomes part of the landscape: indelible, unredeemable, conditioning people's memories and yearnings. Until it takes root in a land harrowed by centuries of village-scale ethnic cleansings and fratricides. "The problem is in this soil," a local police officer once told me, "and it keeps cropping up."
I have been coming here for a decade. At times, it has seemed possible to render the war that torments northern Afghanistan in simplistic terms. Ten years ago, with the help of a U.S.-led invasion, the region's secularists, monarchists, Islamic conservatives, soldiers of fortune, and armed hangers-on kicked the Taliban out of power. Recently, after several years of relative calm, the Taliban have made a comeback here. They are steadily claiming territory and facing little resistance from either NATO -- which is too busy fighting in the south -- or the locals, who feel betrayed and abandoned by the West and its kleptocratic protégés in Kabul.
But the violence that torments the Khorasan's infinite plains does not boil down to a fight between insurgents and a weak government backed by a NATO occupation, with millions of disillusioned, and mostly destitute, civilians stuck on the ever-shifting battlefield. Sometimes it emerges from a helix of revenge that began with a property dispute. Sometimes it is a suppuration of an ethnic wound inflicted decades or centuries ago but never truly healed. Sometimes it is all of the above, or none.
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