The Taliban “weren’t really ready for it,” a prominent former politician in Afghanistan said, about the quick fall of Kabul. “They still have problems to work out among themselves.”
Kabul is now a bustling commercial city, with new apartment buildings rising above the skyline. Its endemic inequities remain: there are beggars in the streets, and the slums on the surrounding hills have expanded. But there are gaudy wedding palaces and dress shops for the middle class, along with pool halls, gyms, and hairdressers for young men. Billboards advertise a startling variety of imported energy drinks.
Gailani was among a handful of politically connected Afghans who had remained in the country after President Ghani fled, hoping to persuade both the Taliban and the international community that there was a viable way forward. He didn’t pretend that the conflict was over in Afghanistan. “I don’t think my life will be long enough to see the end of this drama,” he said, laughing. “It’s like one of those Turkish TV series that never end.” But he professed guarded optimism.
Mujahid didn’t answer when I asked about plans for women in government. Instead, he pointed out that there were still women working in various ministries, including health, education, and the interior, and also at the airports and in the courts. “Wherever they are needed, they come to work,” he insisted.
Despite the talk of inclusion, the highest ranks of the Taliban government initially contained no Hazaras, and no women. In late September, amid international criticism, the Talibs added an ethnic Hazara, as the deputy health minister, and an ethnic Tajik, as the deputy trade minister. The additions struck many Afghans as tokenism. As an adviser to the Taliban told me, “Calling their government inclusive is not a help—because it’sThe government is also said to be profoundly divided.
Mawlawi Mohammad Salim Saad, a former head of suicide bombers, is in charge of security at the Kabul airport. I met him one evening at his office, surrounded by a dozen of his men. They had just come from their prayers, and Saad, a tall, severe-looking man, told me that he was fasting. When I asked how he had felt sending men to their deaths, he said, “You should ask what it is that makes people become willing to give up their lives.
During my visit, I went to Wardak, a rural province west of Kabul. It was one of the last major battlefields in the country; many of its villages had been partly destroyed, and the crude stone graves of war dead were everywhere, marked with martyrs’ flags. As we drove through a roadside village, there was a commotion just ahead of us: gunmen were yelling and waving their weapons as frightened civilians hustled past them. An elderly man explained that the Taliban were having an armed standoff.
Without financial backing from the U.S. and from international lending institutions, Afghanistan’s economy has all but evaporated. Hundreds of thousands of government employees have not received a salary for months. In the cities, there is food for sale in the bazaars, but prices have risen so steeply that Afghans find it difficult to sustain their families. In the countryside, drought has caused widespread hunger, worsening during the cold winter months. The U.N.
Karzai would not have been President without U.S. support, but while in office he became increasingly frustrated by America’s counter-insurgency tactics. In 2013, he visited Washington and, in a tense meeting with Obama in the Oval Office, raised the issue of civilian casualties. Karzai told me that he had shown Obama a gruesome photograph: an American soldier stood with his boot on an elderly Afghan man’s severed hand, while a terrified woman and children looked on.
On a road east of Kabul is Camp Phoenix, a military base erected by the U.S. In 2014, the Americans handed it over to the Afghan military, and it was turned into a rehabilitation center for a burgeoning population of drug addicts. The Taliban, during their first tenure, virtually stamped out opium-poppy cultivation. But, after the Americans invaded, several prominent warlords allied with the U.S. reportedly became involved in the heroin trade.
In the yard, one man was carrying another on his back. They were Amanullah and Abdul Rahman, two friends in their early thirties. They had grown up in the farm country near Kunduz, and had joined the Afghan Army when they were in their late teens. Amanullah explained that he was being carried because he had lost a leg when he stepped on a mine in Helmand. Abdul Rahman’s arm had been wounded in the same explosion; he wore a metal vise, with pins going into his humerus.
In some ways, though, the Taliban’s rejection of the previous order has increased the chaos in Afghanistan. On the day that they took Kabul, they opened the gates of the city’s main prison, at Pul-e-Charkhi, and of Bagram prison, on a former U.S. airbase outside the capital. More than twelve thousand inmates rushed out. They included senior leaders of Al Qaeda and at least a thousand members of IS-K, the Afghan affiliate of.
In large swaths of the countryside, as the Taliban took territory in the past decade they became a kind of shadow government. The Talibs were popular among some locals; they were, after all, sons of the same soil. As the Americans withdrew, many people surrendered to the Taliban without a fight—some of them motivated by survival, others by genuine affinity.
In Bamiyan, though, he and his men felt at home. “We have no concerns,” he told me. “This is part of our nation, and we all belong to the same nation.” He had been there before the Americans came, he said, and it had been fine then, too. Sarhadi had been in Bamiyan when the Buddhas were destroyed, and I asked if he thought that it had been a mistake. His aides looked upset, but he waved a hand dismissively. “This was a decision by the leadership,” he said. “Whatever the leaders and the emirs of the Islamic Emirate decide, we follow.”
Later that day, I met some of the local people. Near the base of the cliff where the Buddhas once stood, some young men had dug a hole and set a fire to bake potatoes. There was no work, they explained, and so they were trying to stave off hunger. Herat’s defense was led in part by its former governor Ismail Khan, a tough-as-nails warlord in his late seventies. Khan is renowned in Afghanistan as a mujahideen leader, a minister in Karzai’s government, and a longtime enemy of the Taliban. He spent some three years as their prisoner, before escaping, and he later survived a suicide bombing that killed several civilians. Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack.
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