The soldier asked whether Nader thought the Americans should stay in Afghanistan. “We don’t have a strong national army or police,” Nader told him. “When they are strong enough, the Americans can leave, but not now.” Nader suggested that the money the Americans spent on bombs might be better invested in construction projects that would create jobs for young people, so they wouldn’t be pressured to join the insurgency. “Next time you come to town, you can visit us in the Kandahar Press Club and we will prepare food for you, because you treated me well,” Nader said he told the soldier. “If I were in Afghan custody, I might have been beaten.”

When they let him go, they gave him back the equipment and Afghan currency they had taken from his house, along with 1,000 Afghanis, about $20, for taxi fare. Nader told me that about $300 in U. S. currency and some of his wife’s wedding jewelry, which were stored in the safe with the money, disappeared and were not returned. He complained to the Kandahar governor’s office, and someone promised to look into it.

Admiral Smith was not available to speak with me about the detentions. Instead, I was invited to interview his second in command, Navy Captain Gary Paul Kirchner. We met in a coffee shop at ISAF headquarters, a leafy compound in central Kabul ringed by towering blast walls. Kirchner is an earnest, mild-mannered reservist with a background in video production. In civilian life, he is a strategic communications consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, and he told me that his responsibilities at ISAF included “marketing.” He spoke optimistically about a roundtable that ISAF had hosted for Afghan journalists to discuss civilian casualties, and regular meetings over tea where Afghan journalists and NATO officials discussed the day’s top news.

I asked Kirchner to describe the Taliban’s media strategy. He laughed. “I would characterize it as fiction,” he said. “General Petraeus believes that we have to be the first with the truth, and that means that every time we do an operation, we write a press release on it.” ISAF has learned that if it doesn’t fill the early information void after an event, the Taliban will. And if ISAF’s message isn’t strong and clear enough—and usually it isn’t—the Taliban will win the day. “They have a very sophisticated operation,” Kirchner said of the Taliban media strategy. “They know what they’re doing.”

NATO officials routinely describe insurgent propaganda as “sophisticated,” but it isn’t the sophistication of the insurgents’ approach that makes it effective so much as its simplicity. There is such a thing as a good story, not in the moral sense, but in the sense that a story grips you and pulls you along, that it has a dramatic climax, that it paints good and evil in clear terms, that it satisfies some deep craving in the listener. The Taliban know how to tell a good story. NATO is stuck telling bad stories because it can’t tell outright lies. But it doesn’t tell any deeper truth, either.