NEWSWEEK contributing correspondent Sami Yousafzai has been covering the conflict in Afghanistan for the magazine since 2001. Working with NEWSWEEK's Ron Moreau, Yousafzai has over that time developed and maintained contact with dozens of Afghan insurgents. In the following gallery, written in September 2009, six of them tell their stories of the fight against U.S. forces in the weeks and months after the 9/11 attack (See bios of the six here). Because they continue armed stuggle, the men would not be photographed for this story; instead, the photographs that accompany their words are scenes from Afghanistan and Pakistan, during the time of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and up to today.
In the time since these interviews were conducted, the Taliban have grabbed headlines with continued insurgent attacks, including most recently the Mumbai-style rampage at Kabul’s Inter-Continental Hotel in June 2011, the 20-hour siege outside the U.S. Embassy on September 13, 2011, and the suicide-bomb assassination of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani by a supposed Taliban peace envoy on September 20, 2011. Now ten years after the start of America’s war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are not disheartened by the anniversary, but rather continue their struggled with an attitude that can be summed up in an expression often attributed to one captured Taliban fighter: “You have the watches. We have the time.”
