Most of village Porakh’s landowning elite, from the influential Stanikzai clan, gathered for a grand feast on October’s second last day of Jummah to mark a family wedding. Following a late lunch, the Stanikzai brothers—septuagenarians Engineer Taher Stanikzai, the middle one Sadeq, and Ruhullah, the youngest, in his sixties—took me for a walk around Porakh, the affluent village at the centre of south-eastern Logar province, local boys following us with their cricketing paraphernalia. Senior Stanikzai studied agricultural science in Dehradun around the time Sadeq spent years in prison during President Mohammad Najibullah’s rule.

The brothers guided me to a graveyard at the edge of the village—a quiet contrast to the afternoon’s festivities. Like any of Afghanistan’s about 40,000 villages, Porakh nestles at the foot of a monolithic reddish-black mountain, the Mes Aynak, with a generous scattering of Buddhist ruins and quality copper, and peppered with corn farms.

Ruhullah knelt by a grave with a white Taliban flag embroidered with the Shahada, clearing the dead leaves by hand. In a poor country, even the graves are poor—overgrown with bushes and rusting iron railings. As he whispered in Pashto, the once merry crowd of cricket players fell silent. Ruhullah, holding the crumbling railing for support, stood up, sobbing.

About a furlong from the grave, in the living room of his mud and stone house, Ruhullah said that the grave was that of his eldest son Hamdullah, killed by a US airstrike when he was 20 years young. Hamdullah was a Taliban Mujahid. Ruhullah’s other sons brought out a large polyester banner with Persian texts: “Our hero Hamdullah, may Allah accept your martyrdom.” It is an honour to have received a banner such as this, the villagers explained. “My son’s death didn’t go in vain.” Ruhullah paused, then said, “We have won,” holding my hand as we set to leave Porakh.

The Black Road

Variations of the phrase “We have won” are painted everywhere—from traffic signs and classrooms to notice boards and the towering walls along highways. The same message on the boundary walls of the shuttered American Embassy in Kabul serves as a reminder that the Taliban-led Islamic Emirate defeated its western adversaries in one of the century’s most brutal wars. According to Brown University’s ‘Cost of War Project’, approximately 0.6% of the population died; other losses remain impossible to calculate.

For millions of Afghans—particularly in the........

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