The soldiers at the gate are not pleased that I have invited a Taliban commander for tea.

“What the fuck?” they say, laughing but sort of not laughing. “You mean we gotta search that motherfucker? Man, shit. I mean, if he’s, like, wearing a belt.”

By belt they mean bomb. Suicide vest. Like the one a Jordanian double agent detonated a few days ago on Forward Operating Base Chapman in the province next door, killing several employees of the CIA. It is on the soldiers’ minds while they stand cold and bored beside the only road through this winter valley, searching each local laborer who enters their base to lay stones in the mud or slather cement onto the rocket-resistant buildings. They know that by the time they would notice a bomb, ruffling their hands through folds of Afghan clothing, the future would already be decided.

I bet he won’t be wearing a vest. This commander has sworn off war. He doesn’t want to blow things up, at least for now. The soldiers are not convinced. Dude, they say, lifting their eyebrows and shifting the weight of their rifles. In the distance, the high mountains are white with snow. When he finally arrives, small, alone, a scarecrow of a man, the soldiers’ worry fades.

“This guy? A Tally-ban? Really?”

With an armed escort we walk into the base, past the barracks of the Afghan National Army, the scent of pot drifting out. It is surprisingly thick, but not so thick as in the summertime, when the fighting was at its worst, when you could stand there at night in the dark and the humidity, under the heaviness of that smell, and you could imagine sitting inside one of those plywood fishbowls and smiling as the joint traveled to you. My guest doesn’t seem to notice. Maybe the fighters under him were high a lot of the time, too.

We enter a special room furnished with cushions and carpets; the smell now of cardamom and unwashed feet. The commander chooses a cushion against the rear wall and not below a large poster of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. His beard is thick and dark. A round cap of beige wool, a beige blanket over his shoulders. His traditional shirt and pants are pale green and so large he disappears in them. On his wrist a loose silver watch.

His name is Noor Muhammad, and he sits calmly, expressionless and heavy-lidded. A stillness settles through the warm room. In a corner, the soldier who has accompanied us begins nodding off, rifle in his lap. Muhammad exudes no menace; on the street he would be invisible. Soldiers working in intelligence later tell me that Taliban fighters rarely look imposing or dangerous, the way villains should.

Muhammad speaks slowly and deliberately, signs of a life spent among mountains. He possesses the sort of patience or resignation that often stems from faith in the omnipotence of God. He tells me what pushed him to fight the Americans, how he trained in Pakistan, and why he ultimately chose to stop his war. The story is complicated and long. Implied within it is a belief that few decisions are final, that such things as victory and peace are not decided by men. And this is interesting, because he is one of the few to have come down out of the mountains, to have defected from the Taliban. It is to men like Noor Muhammad that the US and its allies will pin their hopes for the future.

Winter changes war in Afghanistan. Violence slows, coagulates. Like sap it waits for a warmer time, for more plentiful food and easier travel, when it can explode again through the valleys and the mountain passes. Spring and summer are usually more violent, and together they’ve been named the fighting season. But like seasons this war has no hard calendar edges. In some places—southern Afghanistan, for example—fighting continues despite winter’s arrival; there the violence seems a measure of the war’s peculiar intensity and perhaps the desperation of all sides. Over large portions of the east, however, the winter calm has returned, and in it appears the other side of combat, all the chaotic work, the competitions for loyalty and good PR, the push to better civilians’ lives. Everything that is done without guns but that is equally important in the struggle for Afghanistan. Winter is sometimes given a name, too: the talking season.

In December and January, I traveled through three eastern provinces to see what this winter meant to the war. All the details of that noncombat work were intense and vibrating in the afterglow of the early-December speech President Obama had made on grand strategy. Withdrawal will begin in 2011, he said. Nothing is open-ended. Although its shape and timing remains unclear, an end is near. Afghans must assume responsibility for their present and their future. I began to see an understanding, or at least a common confusion, unfold between Afghans and Americans. It was linked to Obama’s plan and appeared in many conversations, in official or informal meetings, in cushion-lined rooms or the centers of tiny villages. In many voices civilians and soldiers were repeating it to each other: Now it really is just a matter of time.

I arrived at a small US Army base, called Combat Outpost Honaker-Miracle, slightly more than a week before Christmas, around the time news stories at home had begun to seriously cover shopping. Honaker-Miracle is named for two dead soldiers, and it sits roughly a dozen miles from the Pakistani border in Kunar Province. The base is a near clone of the many outposts strung like knots through the region, small encampments of mud and stone, plywood and concrete, encircled by blast barriers and watchtowers. Buildings with walls a foot thick and resident packs of feral dogs lounging beneath the barracks.

In its roughness and severity Honaker-Miracle mirrors the mountains surrounding it and the violence enduring within them. The Pech and its tributary valleys, including the Watapur and the Korengal, have seen some of war’s severest fighting. They are remote and rural, literacy is low, religious conservatism deep; although the distance between valleys and villages isn’t so great on a map, the lone road through the Pech was only recently paved and the hard-rock geology of the place, combined with invisible tribal boundaries, have meant isolation and little development for the valley and the province. The jihad against the Soviets was born in this landscape. Some Kunaris thought, upon seeing the first Americans, that they were simply Russians who had never left. The old ghosts lingering.

Since the days of the Russian war, Afghan fighters have in winter retreated over Kunar’s mountains to Pakistan to regroup, resupply, rest. Through the same passes the Taliban now travel, along with smuggled guns, drugs, and ideologies. American commanders told me that this year some fighters had indeed headed to Pakistan. But they believed there was more to the quiet: in the late fall special-operations attacks had killed several high-level commanders and fighters. Surviving fighters appeared to be disorganized and poorly trained. Frequently they fired mortars and grenades at the American bases, but they rarely seemed to do much damage. Soldiers often said they had killed the Taliban’s A-team; those remaining were the B-team, or even the D-team. In other words, a sergeant said, “They’re retards who can’t shoot very well.”

Attributing the pause in fighting entirely to “retards” or the cold or any single factor was nearly impossible, and everyone seemed to have a different theory. Lieutenant Colonel Brian Pearl, commander of 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, which “owned” the Pech, told me he thought the drop in violence had to do with American successes that had crippled the Taliban. He said several of the area’s Taliban shadow governors had not made the usual trek into Pakistan. They hung on, like fugitives, still attempting to influence and intimidate, still working to create a parallel government that could command obedience.

“You know what that tells me?” Pearl said one evening. “They’re working to recapture momentum. They know they’re on the ropes.”

We sat in his plywood office on a blacked-out base in the central Pech. He had just spilled coffee across his desk and then mopped it up with calm speed. His office was spotless.

“This year,” he said, “they can’t take a vacation to Pakistan.”

There was the sense everywhere of a tipping point, doubt as to which way it would go. Pearl believed the lull could outlast winter because his soldiers had made the Pech more secure. As long as they kept it so the Taliban would run out of steam. He would not let the shadows regain power. None of the Afghans I spoke with agreed. They thought fighting would return with spring; it always had. Pearl knew this, and it concerned him. Part of his job was to battle the very perception that fighting would resume. It was part of a wartime PR campaign, emblematic of the greater struggle here for loyalty, faith, and, as Pearl noted, momentum. To admit the lull was ephemeral would be to admit progress on the eastern front was limited, or worse.

Whatever the reasons, Pearl’s soldiers were occupying the calm, doing what they couldn’t do during the fighting season. They were sowing a winter crop of ideas and development projects, hoping they would take. Fighters still roamed the mountains and sheltered in the villages. Each time I traveled with soldiers while they patrolled the Pech on talking missions, Taliban fighters watched from hidden positions. We intercepted their radio calls, heard them discussing us, armed voyeurs debating when to stop watching and start firing.