Takeaways From a Times Correspondent’s Return to Afghanistan

Asia Pacific|Our Reporter Returned to Afghanistan, Seeking Lessons and Secrets

The Talib looked as ragged as his outpost, a trailer banked on a snowy mountain pass. Holes were bored into its sides to ventilate a sputtering wood stove.

Upon seeing foreigners, the Talib, with an unkempt beard and layers of ill-fitting sweaters, ordered us out of the car.

For more than an hour, my colleague Bryan Denton and I waited on the trailer floor as he reviewed our documents. Beside him, two guards slept beneath heaped blankets. It smelled as if they had been there a while.

The Talib asked questions: Why had we come to Afghanistan? Where were we going? What were we doing?

We told him what we had told so many other Taliban members. I covered the war as a New York Times correspondent and bureau chief. Now I wanted to see the war from another perspective, to see what lessons — and secrets — the United States left behind.

Most Talibs had been, if not friendly, at least open to the idea. A few longtime American sources had vouched for us in Kabul, the Afghan capital, with Taliban members they knew. But this was thousands of miles away, and this Talib, marooned in a frontier outpost, was suspicious.

I began to wonder if our luck had run out. Bryan turned to me and frowned.

The guard began recording us with his phone, sending our hearts racing. Almost no recording of a foreigner in similar circumstances has ended well this century.