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“We have to go, Kim,” Farouq said. Tom and I wanted to stay longer. “Now,” Farouq said. Farouq and Tom made a brief foray into the market, and we drove back to Kandahar without incident.

We then went to see Mohammed Akbar Khakrizwal, a tribal elder who lived in a town just outside Kandahar. The area was not safe; I again wore my burqa. He was the former provincial intelligence chief, and the brother of the former police chief in both Kandahar and Kabul, who had been killed in a bombing at a Kandahar mosque the year before. When Khakrizwal saw me, he laughed.

“Oh, what have you done to yourself?” said Khakrizwal, who, like most tribal leaders I knew, sported a bushy dyed black beard the color of shoe polish, a turban, and a tan salwar kameez. “For one hundred years, no one will recognize you like this. No one will touch you.”

He invited us to lunch the next day, along with elders from his Pashtun tribe, the Alikozais, known for their dissatisfaction with both the Afghan government and the Taliban. The Alikozais helped illustrate the complexities of the Pashtun tribal system. Khakrizwal repeatedly explained the Pashtuns to us, helping us draw flowcharts with as many caveats as NATO troops. The Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan were divided into two main branches—the Durranis and the Ghilzais. For most of Afghanistan’s history as a sovereign nation, when the country was run by a monarchy, some member of the Durranis had ruled. The Taliban, however, had originally derived most support from the Ghilzais—despite being a larger group, they were always less powerful than the Durranis and not necessarily happy about it.

(A caveat: That is a huge oversimplification. It doesn’t account for the fact that the Ghilzais were concentrated in the rural areas, where they had little access to the urban power centers and were therefore susceptible to rebellion. It doesn’t account for the fluidity of Afghan tribes, for all the clans and tribes that just seemed to go their own way. Plus, decades of war had chewed up a lot of formerly solid tribal markers and pushed out the onetime leaders.)

The Durranis were then divided into two major branches—the dominant Ziraks and the marginal Panjpais, who had typically been seen as troublemakers and who were sometimes even carved out of the Durrani-Ghilzai split. Many Pashtuns in Kandahar were growing upset at the fact that all contracts and money seemed to be funneled through the two most influential clans of the Zirak branch, which together had controlled the monarchy that led Afghanistan for about two hundred and fifty years—the Popalzais, Karzai’s clan, and the Barakzais, their sometime allies. The have-nots resented the power of Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who allegedly ran most business dealings in the south, including drugs. Even though the Alikozais also belonged to the Zirak branch and theoretically backed Karzai’s government, they had seen little benefit from the regime, marginalized and removed from key security positions.

Anger over tribal favoritism and corruption by government leaders and power brokers likely fueled the insurgency, causing some frustrated and jobless young men from the Alikozais, from another Zirak tribe called the Achakzais, and from the major Panjpai tribe of the Noorzais to sign up with the Taliban. Some of the Ghilzais, meanwhile, had turned back to the Taliban in Kandahar, but the Durranis also now played a major leadership role in the Taliban. (The Taliban seemed to recognize more than the government how important it was to treat all the prickly Pashtun divisions equally, or, more accurately, that it was important to simply ignore them. It was unclear how long the insurgent rainbow alliance could last—the Achakzais hated the Noorzais, and vice versa, even in the Taliban—but their collective hatred of the foreign troops and the Afghan government probably overrode their own Hatfield-and-McCoy disputes.)

Even then, it was not that simple. Making things more headache-inducing, about half the Popalzais and Barakzais were also supporting the Taliban, Khakrizwal said, part of the endless attempts to hedge bets and exact varieties of payback. (Some of the Barakzais were still upset about the removal of a previous governor, a Barakzai. And the pro-Taliban Popalzais? Who knows. Maybe drugs, maybe a bad kebab.) Being a member of the same tribe also didn’t guarantee loyalty. For instance, the Kandahar governor was a Ghilzai—but everyone in Kandahar saw him as an outsider from Ghazni Province, two provinces away, practically a foreign country. And the tribes could be flexible based on self-interest. Some Noorzais supported Karzai; some were major drug traffickers allied with the Taliban; some were Taliban; some were everything. (The Taliban had banned poppies while in power, but had now started charging drug traffickers to transport drugs, which helped fund jihad, sow instability, and win the support of Afghans who depended on the drug economy for their livelihood.)

So how much did all the Pashtun tribal alliances and divisions matter? A lot—unless something else mattered more.

The Taliban didn’t just gain strength because they understood this, or because they exploited tribal jealousies, disillusionment with the local government, and the rising drug trade. Pakistan’s top spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), had also recruited for the Taliban, Khakrizwal insisted, in the endless ISI attempt to control Afghanistan. Ever since ISI leaders joined the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s, they had been reluctant to let go of Afghanistan. The spy agency had continued to meddle, largely to try to create some semblance of a stable, pro-Pakistan government as a hedge against rival India. That’s why Pakistan supported the formation of the Taliban in the 1990s, and why many Afghans believed Pakistan was now playing a double game, pretending to support the West in the war against terrorism by rounding up Al-Qaeda leaders, but allowing and helping the Afghan Taliban to regroup, even permitting training camps along the border. Every Afghan official had mentioned this repeatedly and publicly, even Karzai, who most recently had leveled the accusation the month before. Khakrizwal believed that his brother was killed because he didn’t listen to ISI warnings that he was too friendly with India. He even had the name of the ISI man who allegedly sanctioned his brother’s killing. (Other Afghans believed that Akbar Khakrizwal was killed because he opposed Karzai’s brother or because he opposed the drug trade. Or both.)

After Khakrizwal explained this to us as if we were small children, repeatedly and carefully, he complained that he had tried to explain this to the American soldiers and diplomats, repeatedly and carefully, while he was the provincial intelligence chief. He talked about how key ISI men had mastered the Pashtun rivalries and complexities long ago—and how even though some had retired or quit the ISI since the 1980s, they were still involved in manipulating what was happening in Afghanistan. Khakrizwal knew the key Pakistani spies and named them. He had known them for years.

“The main mistake made by the Americans is this—an American general comes here for six months. Then he’s replaced,” Khakrizwal said. “For four years, I was the head of intelligence in Kandahar. For six months, I’d work on an American—explaining who are friends, who are enemies—then that person was replaced by another American. Finally, my patience was over. I was tired of giving them advice.”

For lunch, we met various Alikozai tribal elders, sat on cushions on Khakrizwal’s floor, and ate a salad of cucumbers and radishes, a dish of rice mixed with raisins, carrots, and mystery meat, various meat dishes, and okra in oil. Each elder had lost family members in recent months, each feared the Taliban was winning. One elder described vividly how his two sons had been killed eighteen days earlier in a Taliban ambush. Tom and I looked at each other.

“That’s an incredibly sad story,” Tom said.