In One Afghan District, Peace From 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. |
The cease-fire in Panjwai, a district in southern Afghanistan's Kandahar Province, went into effect at 8 a.m. Sunday. My colleagues Baryalai, Fahim, Jim, Taimoor and I arrived about an hour and a half later. There was no decree or official announcement, nor posts on social media. Panjwai's district mayor, Haji Mahmood Noor, told elders in the bazaar, and from there the news spread by word of mouth. |
 | | A police officer and soldier looking over farmland from a hilltop outpost in Panjwai.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
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Farmers were finally able to return to their fields to trim their grape vines and water their orchards that so desperately needed irrigation to survive. This year's harvest of pomegranates and grapes — staples in Kandahar — had been all but written off. It was a strange feeling, having first arrived in 2008 in Afghanistan to fight in the war as a Marine and then return as a journalist years later to cover it. Now I was covering peace, or at least some version of it, after local Afghan officials and Taliban fighters agreed to stop fighting.* |
But there certainly was that feeling. Once-closed roads were open; the bazaar was teeming with people. But more important, the sounds of war were quiet. Just the day before, gunfire had been sporadic, but ever-present. The joint army and police outpost we had visited Saturday was targeted by Taliban sniper fire while we were there, sporadic pops reminding the soldiers milling around, many in sandals, that the Taliban were watching. Now, on Sunday, there was practically nothing. Just the wind and the birds and the distant thud of artillery in a neighboring district. |
Jim Huylebroek, the photographer for the trip, and I had just sat down at a plastic blue table, chatting quietly with the commando commander. His unit had been hamstrung into defending what was once a police outpost after so many of them collapsed during the Taliban's fall offensive. |
The Taliban's sweep in the fall was the same one that cut so many people off from their homes and livelihoods, forcing them to flee. Those who returned during the cease-fire would have to navigate the insurgent's homemade bombs buried in their fields and the errant shelling from the Afghan security forces we would soon witness. |
The soldiers around us had not heard of a cease-fire, they said, though they noted it was strangely quiet. We asked multiple times, even telling them that the mayor had announced it three hours before. |
So when a soldier pulled an 82-millimeter mortar shell from its cardboard covering and began fixing the charges needed for a longer range to its tail, Jim asked — in Persian — why they were about to fire. "A sniper," one soldier pronounced, though there had been no shooting. The mortar tube had just been cleaned, re-affixed to its base and its traversing knob spun as if it were a roulette board, not a mechanism needed for precise measurements to accurately fire a weapon that lobs high explosives thousands of meters through the air at a target often out of sight. |
| READ THOMAS'S REPORTING FROM PANJWAI DISTRICT. | | |
The soldiers peered over the wall, waiting for the shell to land, scanning the Taliban-controlled territory to the south until they saw the plume of smoke and heard the explosion after a second or so. |
And then they walked away. Some meandered back to where Jim and I were sitting, pouring chai, laughing. |
We found out we were watching the last few minutes of someone's life only some six hours later. |
Around sunset, after we had made it back to Kandahar city and ate a late lunch, we met with Mr. Noor again. He had little time as he was set to drive back to Panjwai before nightfall. One of our first questions was if there had been any cease-fire violations on that first day. |
One, he told Fahim: A single mortar round had hit a house roughly 3,000 meters south of the district center, nearly the same distance and direction from the outpost we had visited at 11 that morning. The blast killed one man and seriously wounded another. |
Mr. Noor knew the family who lived in the house, some members of which were part of the Taliban, but some were not. It only cemented the reality that hours earlier we had most likely watched someone get killed who by all accounts, in that brief sliver of a cease-fire, didn't have to, like so many others in the last 40 years of war in Afghanistan. |
Mr. Noor insisted that the security forces, including the soldiers at that outpost, were aware of the cease-fire. Which left open the question: Why fire? Has the war gone on so long, in so many different iterations, that it's all those soldiers have ever known? |
When the ringing in my ears stopped, the dust settled and the chai the commandos had poured was cool enough to drink, it was clear on that once-quiet day: This war wasn't ending anytime soon. |
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a correspondent in the Kabul bureau and a former Marine infantryman. |
| Taimoor Shah, Fahim Abed, Jim Huylebroek and Baryalai Rahimi contributed reporting. |
Afghan War Casualty Report: March 2021 |
 | | Afghan Police vehicle wrecks, most destroyed by Taliban roadside bombs, littered the Police Headquarters parking lot in Panjwai, Kandahar, Afghanistan on March 6.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
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