I won’t use my real name. You may write: “a former police officer from a southern border district.” Our outpost sat on the edge of the bazaar, near the road where cargo trucks passed every morning and the dust settled on our flag. Until early 2021, despite the distant and close fighting, a minimal order held: the Rangers patrolled, our commander held a brief meeting every evening, and ammunition—though limited—was still arriving. After 25 Hamal 1400, things began to shift slowly, not suddenly, like a lamp that dims before it goes dark.
The chain of command was the first to quietly collapse. The radios were more silent than active. When we called, the answer was usually, “Wait, orders are coming.” Orders came less and less, often not at all. One night in Jawza, we requested support for the neighboring outpost. By morning, no answer. When we went there, we found the seal of “surrender” on their gate; their men had slipped away through the side roads to their villages. That same day, our commander told us in the meeting: “The frontline has shifted. We’ll maintain active defense. No unnecessary withdrawals.” But there was nothing “active” about it. We simply stayed and counted: how many bullets, how many men, how many hours until the diesel in the generator ran out.
Earlier that year, our salaries had already begun to dry up—two months unpaid, then one month paid, then nothing again. A single soldier might survive it, but someone with two children and rent to pay, someone whose shopkeeper no longer trusted him with credit, couldn’t leave his heart in the outpost anymore. And by then, rumors had started spreading: deals being made in the center, Taliban promising that if an outpost was handed over “without a fight,” no one would be harmed. These whispers changed minds faster than bullets.
The third blow was the collapse of support—the same support that had been our backbone for years. In the past, if we were surrounded, we were promised “air support” or at least ammunition from the center. After Saratan, those promises emptied out. Once, when a brief clash broke out, we issued an order to ration: “three bullets per man.” Three bullets mean a symbolic fight, not a real defense.
The bazaar told its own story. The village imam began arriving with Taliban “amnesty letters.” He said that if we didn’t fight, no one would touch us. The shopkeepers would say, “We need bread. Why should you keep fighting?” On the last weekend before the district fell, we rewrote the list of personnel in the post logbook, noting each man’s father’s name and village. Then we burned the extra documents—not to hide anything, but so they wouldn’t fall into anyone’s hands.
On the final night, some village elders came. They said, “You are ten men. They are coming from several directions. If you stay, blood will spill in the bazaar. You can leave today; tomorrow no one will harm you.” Our commander said, “We took an oath.” One elder replied, “An oath is also to protect lives.” We discussed it for an hour. No one said, “We fight to the last bullet.” No one said, “We are cowards.” Each of us saw our home, our sick children, and the news from neighboring posts in our heads. In the end, the commander said, “We will go, but on one condition: the government weapons must be handed over at headquarters, not in the bazaar.” They agreed.
The morning we left, the bazaar was still asleep. We walked through the side road toward the district center. No one fired at us. Only the sound of sparrows and our footsteps. I looked back at the outpost: its mud walls, the hot metal roof, the mulberry tree in the yard. A place where we kept guard for years now looked like an abandoned shack. It was neither conquered nor defended; it simply changed hands.
At the district center, no one was waiting. The headquarters office was locked. We placed our weapons in the storage room, put the key on the table, and each man took the path to his own village. By noon, the flag had changed. No loud sound, no announcement. One color fell, another rose. In the afternoon, the same imam carried the same letters to the villages and said, “This is no longer your concern; stay calm.” That night, we were in our homes.
I do not write this to justify myself. If someone asks, “Why didn’t you fight?” my answer is simple: fighting requires three things, and we had none of them that day—clear orders, reliable backup, and hope for an outcome. We had none. We were one small link in a chain that had already snapped from above. Maybe if ten other outposts had stayed and fought, we would have stayed, too. Maybe if air support had come once—just once—we would have believed we weren’t alone. Maybe if the provincial commander had said on the radio, “I’m here,” our hearts would have steadied. But “maybes” cannot hold a frontline.
That night, I learned a bitter truth: collapse doesn’t happen on the map first; it happens inside people. When the bazaar says, “Peace is better than war,” when schools empty out, when the shopkeeper says, “Who will pay your debt?”, when your wife says, “Come home, the baby is sick”—the outpost stops being a fort and becomes just a mud-walled room you must leave so no one dies. Maybe this angers some people, but it is our reality.
If I could return to that morning, would I make the same decision? I don’t know. Maybe if I were certain that my defense would save someone’s life, I would have stayed. But that morning, fighting would only have placed more lives at risk. We abandoned the outpost without firing—not out of fear of bullets, but out of fear of futility.
Publish this so no one thinks the fall was the fault of a few individuals. The fall was collective; a chain of silences, broken links, amnesty letters, exhaustion, and long-brewing despair. We were one link—not heroes, not traitors—just humans with ten bullets, two children, and a radio that no longer answered.
