Vanessa Gezari, for the Pulitzer Center

DOORAI, Afghanistan – The Taliban rolled into the village at dusk. The call to prayer had gone out over the cold fields, and the dirt lanes were empty. The men were in the mosques, the women and children gathered in their homes. Shadows lengthened as the late winter sun slipped behind the mountains. In the main mosque, the men knelt on a reddish-brown carpet, a recent gift from the American soldiers who had built their base a few miles down the road. The village elders had been hesitant to accept anything from the Americans. The soldiers had offered to dig a well in Doorai, but the elders feared that the Taliban would punish them. The same went for a clinic, which would make the whole village a target. “What about something for your mosque?” one of the Americans finally asked. At first, the elders said no. Then they started talking among themselves. “It’s not a gift for us,” one man finally said. “It’s for God.” The Taliban wouldn’t be angry over a gift for God. Or would they?

The Americans, members of Delta Company of the Second Battalion, Second Regiment, First Infantry Division, known as Task Force 2-2, had something they called a “mullah kit.” It included two kinds of carpeting, paint and a loudspeaker system that could be used to refurbish a mosque. The villagers agreed to take it, and the Americans celebrated a minor victory. This was their first breakthrough in Doorai, a small farming village on the Kandahar-Helmand border in a Taliban-controlled stretch of southern Afghanistan. If they could improve villagers’ lives, the soldiers thought, they’d have a shot at winning them over. And under the new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, winning the cooperation of a single village is worth more than dozens of dead Taliban.

On a foggy morning two weeks later, the Americans pulled into Doorai with a truck full of supplies. They unrolled a long piece of tan carpeting on the rocky ground, measured and cut it to fit the inside of the village’s main mosque and two smaller ones. Out of respect, the Americans didn’t step inside the mosques. Instead, Afghan soldiers and police carried the carpet inside and laid it on the packed earth floors, unrolling a richly dyed reddish-brown rug on top. They showed the villagers how to hook up the speaker system so they could broadcast the call to prayer.

Five days later at sunset, as the men of Doorai prayed, a small convoy of cars and trucks pulled into the darkening web of lanes. A group of men got out and walked into the main mosque. They tied and gagged the village men or, according to another account, locked them in a small room in back. Then they loaded the carpets, paint and loudspeaker system into their trucks and drove off.

When the Americans visited a few days later, the elders gave them the news. Normally their meetings in Doorai were held outdoors, the Americans and Afghan police and soldiers sitting next to the villagers on the thorny grass, but on this day, rain forced them into an abandoned outbuilding. In the small mud room, Captain Michael Soyka, commander of Delta Company and organizer of the mosque kit handout, could feel the villagers’ fear.

“We can’t take anything from you guys anymore,” one of the elders said.

“Where did they come from?” Capt. Soyka pressed. “How many were there? What did their vehicles look like?”

“We’re farmers,” one of the villagers told him. They were scared, he said. They didn’t want to risk a fight with the Taliban.

Seated among the U.S. soldiers that day was a member of an experimental Army program called the Human Terrain System, which embeds civilian anthropologists and other social scientists with frontline units to advise soldiers about local culture. A 31-year-old with a master’s degree in Central Asian studies, he went by the nickname “Spen,” an Afghan approximation of “whitey.”

Back at the U.S. base, Spen talked over the theft with one of his teammates, an Afghan expert who had served with the Spetsnaz, the Russian Special Forces, when the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s. “The Russian,” as his teammates called him, was a piece of living history, as storied a figure as any in the Human Terrain program and a source of particular fascination to the soldiers who worked alongside him. He spoke Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two main languages, and often translated when the American soldiers met with local officials, many of whom had helped drive the Soviets out.   Now the Russian considered the theft of the mosque kit. He suggested using an element of Pashtunwali, the obscure and primitive tribal code of southern and eastern Afghanistan, to convince the villagers to turn over the thieves. The Russian and Spen, who speaks some Pashto, the main language of Afghanistan’s south and east, consulted a list of Pashtunwali terms downloaded from a Pashtun nationalist web site. Then Spen wrote a report for Capt. Soyka and his supervisors, highlighting some relevant concepts. Zere, Spen wrote, was “spy money” that could be paid secretly to an informant who supplied details about a theft.  There was also belga, which refers to stolen items found in someone’s house that can be used to prove his complicity in a theft; and chagha, a local tribal militia “raised spontaneously on the occasion of dacoity, robbery, lifting away of cattle and other offenses of the sort.”

The following week, the Americans went back to Doorai. Seated with village elders on the grass, one of the soldiers mentioned the concept of zere, and whether they appreciated the reference to Pashtunwali or just felt like opening up, some of the men started to talk.

The mosque kit thieves came from the south, they said. They were driving a couple of small pickups, a white station wagon and a Toyota Corolla. There were 15 or 20 of them, wearing dark clothes and black or white turbans. Some covered their faces with scarves. The villagers didn’t recognize anyone.          

That night and several nights thereafter, Delta Company patrolled the area around Doorai. The soldiers took a position on the ridgeline where they could see vehicles approaching from the south. They didn’t find the thieves. But for Capt. Soyka, any lead, even an inconclusive one, was better than nothing.