WASHINGTON — From the rooftop of a mud house overlooking the Shomali Plain, the white explosions in the distance and the red streak of artillery fire and the occasional thunderclaps echoing across the valley announced the start of America’s war in Afghanistan.

But for the munitions, it was as dark a night as can be imagined on that cool October evening. We were warned not to use flashlights or light up a cigarette or even let the glow of our satellite phones be seen lest we attract Taliban fire. The only other light in view came from the headlights of a long string of vehicles across the valley ferrying civilians away from the bombing.

That was eight years ago last week and never on that night, as we watched the might of the world’s most powerful nation rain down on the primitive army of soldiers clad in rags and sandals, did it occur to us that America so many years later would still be trying to figure out how to win — or whether it even could. The journey from the rugged village of Topdara to the halls of the White House is a quintessential story about the limits of power and imagination.

That was brought home in stark terms on Friday as President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize just hours before meeting with advisers in the Situation Room to discuss escalating a war that has yet to be won. The lessons of the last eight years suggest that no matter what choice he makes and no matter what the Nobel committee in Oslo thinks, Mr. Obama may very well leave office after four or eight years and there will still be no peace in Afghanistan.

To cover the war from its opening moments in Afghanistan to this critical juncture in Washington is to try to reconcile a jumble of images and impressions, none of which adds up to the easy answers Mr. Obama wishes he could find. After all, the president came to office in search of a strategy, came up with one, and then six months later decided to cast it aside in search of another one. He seems to be grasping at ideas that have been regurgitated year after year now with limited success. If it were simple, of course, someone would have done it by now.

Perhaps this should have been obvious from the beginning, and in some ways it was. For those of us based in Moscow at the time of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the cliché about the ungovernable, unconquerable graveyard of empires was no theoretical abstract but the real life history of a generation of aging Russians. Nonetheless, we set out from Moscow and other points around the globe for the unforgiving terrain of Afghanistan to see if it could be done differently.

An old bucket-of-bolts Soviet helicopter flown by Afghan rebels far above its permitted altitude delivered a few of us from Dushanbe, Tajikistan, over the majestic Hindu Kush into the heart of the Panjshir Valley, the haven of the Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban government in Kabul to the south. Another helicopter had been shot down that day, or so we were told, but we made it safely.

European journalists were there, but it would be days before any other Americans showed up and longer before the C.I.A. arrived, not that we ever saw them. For the uninitiated, it was a biblical scene, a dusty tableau of hardened people living without electricity, running water or even furniture. And scattered in valleys and off the dirt roads were the carcasses of Soviet tanks.

The next eight months spent in Afghanistan and Pakistan would provide all sorts of clues about how intractable a situation the United States had just parachuted into. While America’s war began the night of Oct. 7, 2001, with the bombing north of Kabul, the Afghans had been at war more or less continually for more than two decades by that point.

On one of the first days in the Panjshir Valley, some Afghans took us to meet a Northern Alliance commander at the front in their long standoff with the Taliban. His base was a series of mud buildings with a well and a couple of 81-millimeter mortars surrounded by spent shells.

“You want to hear the Taliban?” he asked us.

He picked up a radio connected by cable to a Japanese car battery and switched frequencies, just a day after lobbing shells at the other side.

“Are all of your friends O.K.?” the rebel commander asked into the radio.

“Yes, all of my friends are O.K.,” the Taliban fighter on the other end answered.

They chatted for a few minutes before signing off. “He was my friend,” the rebel commander explained. “But now he is my enemy.”

The idea of clear lines and neat definitions does not apply in Afghanistan. Over the following few months, many of the themes of the last eight years would become clear. There were civilians killed by errant American bombs and intrigues among Afghans who ostensibly were our allies and common cause forged with a ruthless warlord who did just enough of the Americans’ bidding to stay on the payroll while waging his own private war for control of his local province.

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