In a defiant press conference at the embassy the following afternoon, Ambassador Ryan Crocker downplayed the siege, calling it "not a very big deal." This was from a man who, as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, had lived through the insanity of the worst violence in Baghdad, and from a military standpoint it was true—the insurgents had inflicted little substantial damage. But his comments outraged many Afghans, especially those who lived near the diplomatic quarter and had endured twenty hours of terror. Psychologically and symbolically, if not militarily, the siege had certainly been a big deal.

In the days after the assault, the embassy’s maintenance staff cleaned the waiting room, mopping up the blood, patching up the shrapnel holes, painting over the scorch marks. Howell proudly reopened the consular section that Saturday, missing only two business days—not bad for taking a rocket through the front door. Customer service was priority number one, she joked.

The attack had actually improved morale, for the most part, among the embassy staff. A major rotation of new personnel had just come in at the end of the summer, and the shared experience of the danger had formed new bonds among them. Those beyond the embassy’s walls were less fortunate. An estimated twenty-five Afghans died in the fighting that day, not counting the insurgents.

[#image: /photos/558305f63655c24c6c956b54]||||||

The unfinished high-rise on Abdul Haq Circle

from which insurgents rained down gunfire

and RPGs.

On September 22, in testimony before the Senate, Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the Haqqanis "a veritable arm" of the ISI and said that Haqqani operatives had planned and carried out the siege of September 13 with Pakistan’s support. The allegation ignited a media firestorm. It’s not as if senior U.S. officials hadn’t publicly connected the Taliban and the ISI before, but Mullen’s charge was shockingly blunt: Mullen was suggesting that an ostensible ally had by proxy waged war on an American embassy.

The White House and State Department subsequently walked back Mullen’s statement, taking great care to reiterate that they remained intent on working with Pakistan to confront the threat of the insurgency in the border areas. But the fiction of common interests that has underpinned U.S.-Pakistani relations is wearing thin.

A U.S. air strike on a Pakistani border post on November 26 killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers after an exchange of fire between the two sides. The United States expressed regret and said that it was accidental, but the incident reinforced the impression that, in some sense, America and Pakistan are locked in a deadly struggle. A dire truth is increasingly becoming utterable: The 9/11 era, in which Pakistan’s military was forced into a reluctant alliance with the United States against the Taliban, is coming to a close.

For most of the past decade, the violence in Afghanistan was largely contained to provincial battlefields. No longer. Kabul is now a wounded city that reels from blow to blow. A week after September 13, Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the High Peace Council, former leader of the Northern Alliance and onetime president of Afghanistan, was killed by a suicide bomber in the most high-profile assassination since the fall of the Taliban. About two weeks after the siege, on September 26, an Afghan guard employed at the embassy opened fire on a CIA office, killing one contractor and injuring another. And in October, a Toyota Corolla packed with explosives struck an armored shuttle bus in Kabul, killing twelve Americans, more than any other single strike in the city since the beginning of the war.

The Haqqanis were also blamed for the shuttle-bus blast, though, as with the embassy siege, there was no public evidence released, and plenty of other groups are capable of carrying out such operations. The recent increase in violence suggests that the attacks will only get worse as the post-9/11 settlement between Washington, Islamabad, and Kabul breaks down, and the insurgency grows both more powerful and more fragmented. On December 6, in an act of sectarian violence unprecedented for the city, a suicide bomber struck a crowded Shia religious gathering in Kabul, killing at least seventy men, women, and children. A Taliban spokesman denounced the bombing and blamed the U.S.-led coalition. A Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e Jhangvi, is suspected. They had never been known to operate in Afghanistan before.

There was one American casualty during the siege of September 13—the little girl in the waiting room, whose parents had come to the embassy that morning to apply for visas. Although she was born in Afghanistan, her father had U.S. citizenship, making her a U.S. citizen, too. She has since fully recovered from her injuries.

But 7-year-old Yasser, the most egregiously wounded of the Qureshi boys, is still partially paralyzed from the waist down. He screams and weeps when strangers enter his room, thinking they are doctors bringing more painful tests and examinations of his damaged spinal cord. At night, he dreams of writhing snakes that feed upon his legs. He and his brothers can’t bear to hear the sound of sirens.

There is little doubt they will hear them again soon.

Matthieu Aikins has been reporting from Afghanistan since 2008. This is his first piece for GQ.