{"id":28539,"date":"2025-08-12T14:00:37","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T09:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeyar.tv\/?p=28539"},"modified":"2025-12-01T01:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T20:44:09","slug":"%da%86%d8%b1%d8%a7-%d8%a8%d8%af%d9%88%d9%86-%d8%b4%d9%84%db%8c%da%a9-%d9%be%d9%8f%d8%b3%d8%aa%d9%87-%d8%b1%d8%a7-%d8%aa%d8%b1%da%a9-%da%a9%d8%b1%d8%af%db%8c%d9%85%d8%9f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/28539\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Abandoned the Outpost Without Firing a Shot?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>I won\u2019t use my real name. You may write: \u201ca former police officer from a southern border district.\u201d 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\u2014though limited\u2014was still arriving. After 25 Hamal 1400, things began to shift slowly, not suddenly, like a lamp that dims before it goes dark.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The chain of command was the first to quietly collapse. The radios were more silent than active. When we called, the answer was usually, \u201cWait, orders are coming.\u201d 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 \u201csurrender\u201d 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: \u201cThe frontline has shifted. We\u2019ll maintain active defense. No unnecessary withdrawals.\u201d But there was nothing \u201cactive\u201d about it. We simply stayed and counted: how many bullets, how many men, how many hours until the diesel in the generator ran out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Earlier that year, our salaries had already begun to dry up\u2014two 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\u2019t 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 \u201cwithout a fight,\u201d no one would be harmed. These whispers changed minds faster than bullets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The third blow was the collapse of support\u2014the same support that had been our backbone for years. In the past, if we were surrounded, we were promised \u201cair support\u201d 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: \u201cthree bullets per man.\u201d Three bullets mean a symbolic fight, not a real defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The bazaar told its own story. The village imam began arriving with Taliban \u201camnesty letters.\u201d He said that if we didn\u2019t fight, no one would touch us. The shopkeepers would say, \u201cWe need bread. Why should you keep fighting?\u201d On the last weekend before the district fell, we rewrote the list of personnel in the post logbook, noting each man\u2019s father\u2019s name and village. Then we burned the extra documents\u2014not to hide anything, but so they wouldn\u2019t fall into anyone\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the final night, some village elders came. They said, \u201cYou 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.\u201d Our commander said, \u201cWe took an oath.\u201d One elder replied, \u201cAn oath is also to protect lives.\u201d We discussed it for an hour. No one said, \u201cWe fight to the last bullet.\u201d No one said, \u201cWe are cowards.\u201d Each of us saw our home, our sick children, and the news from neighboring posts in our heads. In the end, the commander said, \u201cWe will go, but on one condition: the government weapons must be handed over at headquarters, not in the bazaar.\u201d They agreed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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, \u201cThis is no longer your concern; stay calm.\u201d That night, we were in our homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I do not write this to justify myself. If someone asks, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you fight?\u201d my answer is simple: fighting requires three things, and we had none of them that day\u2014clear 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\u2014just once\u2014we would have believed we weren\u2019t alone. Maybe if the provincial commander had said on the radio, \u201cI\u2019m here,\u201d our hearts would have steadied. But \u201cmaybes\u201d cannot hold a frontline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That night, I learned a bitter truth: collapse doesn\u2019t happen on the map first; it happens inside people. When the bazaar says, \u201cPeace is better than war,\u201d when schools empty out, when the shopkeeper says, \u201cWho will pay your debt?\u201d, when your wife says, \u201cCome home, the baby is sick\u201d\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If I could return to that morning, would I make the same decision? I don\u2019t know. Maybe if I were certain that my defense would save someone\u2019s life, I would have stayed. But that morning, fighting would only have placed more lives at risk. We abandoned the outpost without firing\u2014not out of fear of bullets, but out of fear of futility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2014not heroes, not traitors\u2014just humans with ten bullets, two children, and a radio that no longer answered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I won\u2019t use my real name. You may write: \u201ca former police officer from a southern border district.\u201d 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,5075],"tags":[67,5084,1029,5083,5085,641,279,5082,1228],"class_list":["post-28539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-your-letters","tag-67","tag-5084","tag-1029","tag-5083","tag-5085","tag-641","tag-279","tag-5082","tag-1228"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28539"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37715,"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28539\/revisions\/37715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeyartelevision.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}