When an 82-millimeter mortar round slammed onto a bunker at this mountaintop post last week, its explosion signaled more than the start of another attack on an American position overlooking an arc of hostile Afghan villages. It marked the end of a particular harvest.
In eastern Paktika Province, near the border with Pakistan, September and early October are pine-nut season. Much of the able-bodied population in rural villages is busy gathering cones from forests on mountain slopes.
But several slopes that yield rich harvests face American military positions, which presents an annual problem: pine-cone pickers risk being caught between two warring sides.
This year, as villagers worked the slopes in front of this new American-Afghan outpost, the risks to civilians were reduced in a starkly practical way — the Taliban and Haqqani fighters declared a unilateral cease-fire, American officers say.
'Pine-nut truce'
Guerrilla war can have its own rhythms and take ever-shifting patterns and forms. The “pine-nut truce,” as it became known among soldiers who found an unexpected respite from the exhausting grind of daily contact, underscored a pair of simple facts: Waging war requires labor, and when local labor is busy with other work, fighting can subside. In sections of Paktika Province, the decline in violence was clear and steep.
Throughout the summer, Taliban and Haqqani fighters fired on this observation post regularly, hitting it with 82-millimeter mortar rounds and 107-millimeter rockets, and sometimes with machine-gun or rifle fire, too.
“For two months we basically received contact daily or twice daily,” said Capt. Craig A. Halstead, who commands Company B, Second Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, which rotates platoons through the post.
In the month of August, the company’s data shows, there were only two days when the outpost was not under fire. The fighting continued through Sept 8.
On Sept 9, the hills were quiet. The company took no fire.
On Sept. 10, the soldiers intercepted radio chatter, including the voice of one of the fighters talking to others about the harvest. “We will not shoot for 15 days so the people can collect pine cones,” the voice said, according to the translated transcript.
By then, Afghan villagers were visible on the slopes that surround the post.
Not a shot fired
For three weeks, using long poles that end in hooks to pluck each cone, local men filled sacks with their harvest and brought them down the hills for sale in Orgun, the nearest city, or to Afghan buyers who canvass the harvesters in their villages.
Throughout this time, not a single shot was fired at Observation Post Twins.
Why the Taliban and Haqqani fighters decided to hold their fire is not fully understood.
There are two theories, which are not mutually exclusive.
Captain Halstead said one assumption was that the fighters did not want to start firefights or indirect-fire duels, drawing mortar and artillery barrages, endangering the pine-cone pickers.
Slideshow 24 photos
Afghanistan as the war begins
The observation post, built late this spring, overlooks the so-called Naka bowl, a small and low-lying agricultural area where several Taliban and Haqqani commanders were born. The insurgent commanders, Captain Halstead said, appeared to be concerned about alienating their neighbors, who did not want to be caught in the daily cross-fire while busy harvesting.
“Our reporting indicates that they are losing the bowl as a safe haven,” he said. “So what do they need? Civilian protection. They don’t want to risk losing it.”
Temporary manpower shortages
This analysis, and the underlying assumption that Taliban and Haqqani commanders had met with villagers to coordinate the fighting and harvesting schedules, found currency among many of the soldiers.
“They didn’t want anyone to get hit while they were in the mountains, and didn’t want an open war,” said Specialist Elijah D. Nott, a medic. “That was actually really interesting. They were showing some concern.”
Another factor behind the cease-fire, the soldiers said, was rooted in temporary manpower shortages.
Many of the fighters are local men, the soldiers said, as are many of those who support them. With the harvest demanding as many hands as possible, fewer men were available to plan attacks, to fight, to carry ammunition, or to serve as spotters to watch the Americans’ movements and protect the fighting cells.
The labor demands of the pine-cone harvest were evident in late September in another insurgent-controlled area, the Charbaran Valley, where another infantry company landed by helicopter and swept the valley and some of its slopes. In tents throughout the forests, entire families were encamped with saws and picking poles.
The men’s hands were blackened with dirt and pine sap, and the soldiers’ traffic stops often found tractors stacked high with sacks of cones. The infantry company, as it moved, was fired on only once in two days.
A similar pattern has been visible in Afghanistan’s poppy-growing provinces.
Fighting in and near the poppy fields is often intensive in midspring, as vegetation grows thick and temperatures climb. In late spring, in these same places, local men and migrant laborers crowd the fields for the poppy harvest. Fighting can all but stop.
A few weeks later, the poppy harvest is over, the migrant workers are gone, and fighting often erupts.
$17 per kilogram
The labor demands for the pine-nut harvest are similarly high.
Mir Jhan, an elder in nearby Zerok, beside a larger American post, said that that the three villages that make up Zerok had 5,000 people each and that “all of our people are involved in pine nuts.”
The mountain forests, he said, are divided by local agreements and tradition into separate tracts, where each village and each family has plots to harvest.
The nuts, once removed from the cones, fetch 1,500 Pakistani rupees per kilogram, he said, or roughly $17. (In much of eastern Paktika Province, people use the currency of Pakistan, not Afghanistan.)
Mr. Jhan was guarded about discussing why the fighting had abruptly stopped.
“It’s a good question,” he said. “But the civilian people, especially me, we don’t know about the fighters.”
But he also suggested that the fighting could soon resume. “Right now, the pine-nut season is ended. It had its one-month time, when everyone was in the mountains, and now it is over.”
Up on the observation post, for several days, the slopes no longer were crowded with pickers. Captain Halstead said that soon he expected the old patterns would return.
The observation post is kept alive by helicopters, which bring the soldiers’ supplies. When one of the helicopters arrives in the days ahead, he said, the insurgents’ mortar and rocket crews were likely to fire again, trying to time the impact of their munitions with the aircraft’s landing.
“When they hear the next bird coming,” Captain Halstead said, “it will probably entice them back into fighting.”
This article, "," first appeared in The New York Times.