Ashraf Ghani<\/a>, the Afghan President. I got out of my taxi at the edge of the security cordon, about half a mile from his office, and trekked past concrete barricades, armed guards, and machine-gun nests. At the center of the defenses is the Arg\u2014a nineteenth-century castle, replete with towers and parapets, which houses Ghani\u2019s administration. Inside, guards searched and X-rayed me, then confiscated my voice recorder and my phone. I was led to a waiting area, a chilly room with rock walls and marble floors, and finally to the office of the President. Ghani was at his desk, wearing a mask, alone. \u201cWelcome,\u201d he said.<\/div>\nGhani, who is seventy-one, was born to an educated family near Kabul and went abroad as a teen-ager to study. He taught anthropology at Johns Hopkins and then spent a decade at the World Bank, in Washington, D.C., helping developing nations strengthen their economies. After the U.S. invasion, he returned to Afghanistan and threw himself into the reconstruction. Ghani has the cool demeanor of a technocrat, but he spoke passionately about giving up a stable career to work for his country. \u201cI made my decision to come home, and I never looked back,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Ghani\u2019s Presidency has been a long struggle. He came to power in 2014, in an election marred by fraud. He promised to unite the country but instead watched it deteriorate around him, as more American troops departed. When he won re\u00eblection, in 2019, fewer than two million Afghans cast ballots. In the past year, he has seemed increasingly aware that his country\u2019s future is being decided far from Kabul\u2014first in the Trump Administration\u2019s negotiations with the Taliban over an American withdrawal, and then in the Afghan government\u2019s talks with the Taliban over the potential for peace.<\/p>\n
When Trump decided to reach out to the Taliban, in 2018, he chose as his envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned diplomat and a native Afghan. Khalilzad had known Ghani since high school, when they played basketball together. But the two found themselves at odds over the country\u2019s direction, and their relationship soured. In January, Khalilzad arrived for a visit, and Ghani declined to see him.<\/p>\n
Trump was clearly desperate to make a deal that would allow him to say that he had ended the war. When the Taliban refused to include the Afghan government in the talks, the U.S. did not insist. The senior American official told me, \u201cThe Trump people were saying, \u2018Fuck this\u2014the Afghans are never going to make peace anyway. Besides, who cares whether they agree or not?\u2019\u00a0\u201d As the talks progressed, Trump repeatedly announced troop withdrawals, depriving his negotiators of leverage. \u201cHe was steadily undermining us,\u201d a second senior American official told me. \u201cThe trouble with the Taliban was, they were getting it for free.\u201d In the end, the two sides agreed not to attack each other, and the Americans agreed to withdraw.<\/p>\n
The Taliban had to meet a list of conditions, including preventing terrorists from operating out of Afghanistan and refraining from major attacks on the country\u2019s government and military. But the prospect of insuring a total pullout was appealing enough that the Taliban began rooting for Trump to win re\u00eblection. In one of the odder moments of the U.S. campaign season, they issued an endorsement of his candidacy. \u201cWhen we heard about Trump being covid<\/em>-19-positive, we got worried,\u201d a senior Taliban leader told CBS News. (The group subsequently claimed that it had been misquoted.)<\/p>\nIn my meeting with Ghani, he seemed abandoned, like a pilot pulling levers that weren\u2019t connected to anything. He professed gratitude to the United States, but was clearly uneasy with the deal. Recently, he said, he had ordered the release of five thousand Taliban prisoners\u2014\u201cnot because I wanted to, because the U.S. pushed me.\u201d He feared a security disaster, as Taliban fighters returned to the streets and American soldiers left the country. \u201cThe U.S. can withdraw its troops anytime it wants, but they ought to negotiate with the elected President,\u201d he went on. \u201cThey should call me. I\u2019m the elected President.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many Afghans say that Ghani is to blame for his predicament, describing him as remote, vindictive, and surrounded by sycophants. A prominent businessman who meets often with senior government officials told me that, when Khalilzad reported that Trump had ordered a pullout, Ghani should have tried to win over his old friend. Instead, the businessman said, \u201cGhani went around town announcing his intention to destroy him.\u201d I noticed that Ghani did not have a television in his office; he prefers to read transcripts of shows afterward. \u201cHe is delusional,\u201d the businessman said. \u201cHe has no idea what the country thinks of him.\u201d<\/p>\n\nBefore talks, Ashraf Ghani warned negotiators, \u201cDon\u2019t bring home a bad deal.\u201d<\/span>Photograph by Adam Ferguson for the New Yorker<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nGhani was still hoping that Afghanistan would retain its place in the minds of American policymakers. \u201cAll I need from the U.S. is four or five videoconferences a year,\u201d he told me. But the Americans have given every sign that Afghanistan is no longer a major consideration. U.S. officials now see Ghani as an obstacle to a peace deal\u2014wedded to the status quo, which keeps troops in the country and him in power. \u201cEach step of the way, he\u2019s resisting,\u201d the senior American official said.<\/p>\n
In 2018, the U.S. asked Ghani to appoint a negotiating team; it took two years\u2014and the announcement of a billion-dollar cut in American aid\u2014for him to complete the process. Before the current talks began, he assembled his negotiators for a historical seminar on persistent conflicts. He walked them through Colombia\u2019s civil war, which lasted fifty-two years; Nepal\u2019s, which lasted ten; and Sri Lanka\u2019s, which dragged on for twenty-five. Ghani\u2019s message was that long wars take a long time to end. When talks were convened to end the Vietnam War, he noted, it took nearly three months just to agree on the shape of the negotiating table. Whatever pressure his negotiators felt\u2014from the Americans or from the Taliban\u2014ought to be resisted, he said, instructing them, \u201cDon\u2019t bring home a bad deal.\u201d<\/div>\n
According to U.S. officials, the most favorable outcome of the talks is a ceasefire and an agreement to form a transitional government, with power shared between the Taliban and the existing Afghan government. The transitional government would write a new constitution and lay the groundwork for nationwide elections.<\/p>\n
Ghani insists that compromise is dangerous. He was chosen by the Afghan people, in an election that was open, at least notionally, to every adult in the country. Why would an elected President hand over power to a group of unelected insurgents? \u201cMy power rests on my legitimacy,\u201d he said. \u201cThe moment that legitimacy is gone, the whole thing implodes.\u201d<\/p>\n
The negotiators gathered in Doha at the Sharq hotel\u2014a sprawling beach resort, owned by the Ritz-Carlton, with high-arched buildings set alongside ornately tiled pools. It struck some delegates as a peculiar place to end a war. \u201cYou walk around the hotel and people are swimming,\u201d Koofi said. \u201cWomen are walking around in bikinis. And then you go inside a meeting room to talk about the fate of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
At first, the loathing between the two sides was so intense that they bridled at standing together in the same room. \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t even look at each other,\u201d a Qatari official told me. After a couple of days, they sat down in a conference room, but even then some of the delegates found their anger difficult to contain. Three weeks earlier, Taliban gunmen had killed the nephew of Nader Nadery, one of the government negotiators. Nadery himself had been arrested and tortured by the Taliban in the nineties, when he was a student activist. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how badly I wanted to leave the talks,\u201d he told me. Another negotiator, Matin Bek, had lost his father to a Taliban attack ten years before; a third, Masoom Stanekzai, had survived three attacks in which bombs blew up his car.<\/p>\n
The Taliban had their own grievances. Among their negotiators was Khairullah Khairkhwa, who helped found the Taliban and served as an interior minister in its government. In the chaotic days after the U.S. began attacking, in 2001, Khairkhwa negotiated to become a C.I.A. informant. (He denies this.) As the talks broke down, Khairkhwa fled to the Pakistani border town of Chaman. He was captured, put on a plane, bound and blindfolded, and flown to the newly opened prison at Guant\u00e1namo Bay. \u201cThe flight was endless for me, a journey to Hell,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n
At Guant\u00e1namo, Khairkhwa said, he was denied sleep, handcuffed to chairs for hours, denied prompt medical treatment, and subjected to months of interrogation. There were occasional moments of tenderness, as when a female military-police officer slipped him earplugs, hidden in a roll of toilet paper, to help him sleep. Mostly it was boring.<\/p>\n
In prison, Khairkhwa insisted that he was merely a bureaucrat in the Taliban\u2019s administration. American prosecutors said that he was a military commander, who had helped foment a massacre of ethnic Hazara civilians\u2014but much of the evidence was classified. In 2009, President Barack Obama gave a speech suggesting that cases like Khairkhwa\u2019s belonged in an uneasy category: too innocent to charge, too guilty to free.<\/p>\n
Then, in 2014, an American soldier appeared at his cell and told him that he was being transferred to house arrest in Qatar. He and four other Taliban leaders were being swapped for Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier who had been captured five years before. Khairkhwa didn\u2019t know much about Qatar, but his guards assured him it was a Muslim country. As it turned out, life was easy there; his wife and children joined him, and he had an apartment, all expenses paid by the Qatari government.<\/p>\n
Just as Khairkhwa settled in, he was summoned again: he had been chosen to be a negotiator on behalf of the Taliban for an Afghan peace settlement. Soon afterward, he met for the first time with his American counterparts\u2014diplomats instead of soldiers. \u201cAll of a sudden, I was negotiating\u00a0with the same people who had imprisoned me,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is a very strange feeling.\u201d<\/div>\n
\nAmerican soldiers assemble for an operation at Forward Operating Base Kalagush, in Nuristan, in 2008. In the coming years, the American force in Afghanistan grew to about a hundred thousand troops. Some twenty-five hundred remain.<\/span>Photograph by Adam Ferguson<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn the current talks, American observers noted that the Talibs who had been held in Guant\u00e1namo seemed to struggle to stay focussed. \u201cTheir physical and mental resilience has clearly been affected by their time there,\u201d the second senior U.S. official told me. Still, their team was audacious. Before the negotiators could work on matters of substance, they had to devise a code of conduct. The Taliban proposed that disputes be decided exclusively by Sunni jurisprudence. Government delegates insisted that Afghanistan\u2019s Shiite populace be represented, too. \u201cWe made it clear to them that we stood for the diversity of our society,\u201d Sadat Naderi, one of the negotiators, told me. The Taliban\u2014whose members had massacred Shiite civilians before 2001\u2014stormed out of the room.<\/p>\n
Eventually, they returned to the bargaining table, but things didn\u2019t go much better. \u201cThey told us we were puppets of the infidels,\u201d Naderi recalled. \u201cThey told us the war was over.\u201d Khairkhwa suggested to me that the 2020 peace deal with the U.S. had established the Taliban as the victors in the conflict. \u201cWe defeated the Americans on the battlefield,\u201d he said. Hafiz Mansoor, a former minister in the Afghan government, blamed the Americans for giving the Taliban the impression that they had won the war: \u201cBy making the deal, the U.S. legitimized them.\u201d<\/p>\n
In meetings, the two sides shouted at each other; Taliban leaders said the Afghan officials represented an illegitimate government, propped up by infidels and bankrolled by Western money. \u201cThey were so arrogant,\u201d Nadery said. \u201cThey thought they were there just to discuss the terms of surrender. They said, \u2018We don\u2019t need to talk to you. We can just take over.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n
Since 2001, the main arena of conflict in Afghanistan has been the countryside: the government held the cities, while the Taliban fought to control the villages and towns, particularly in the south, their heartland. But by early this year the paradigm had begun to fall apart. The Taliban were entrenched across the north; their shadow government had begun to creep into the cities.<\/p>\n
In January, I visited the Qalai Abdul Ali neighborhood, in western Kabul; it straddles the national highway, which runs south to Kandahar. Taliban fighters, distinguished by black turbans that trail down their backs, were strolling\u00a0through the streets. A decade ago, when there were nearly a hundred and fifty thousand American and nato<\/em> troops in the country, such a scene was unimaginable.<\/p>\nIn Qalai Abdul Ali, the government was mostly in hiding. A squad of police hunkered down behind Hesco barricades. The real authority, the locals said, was a Talib called Sheikh Ali, who took me on a driving tour of the neighborhood. \u201cI am the mayor,\u201d he said, as he climbed into my car.<\/p>\n
While we drove, an Afghan Army truck passed through without stopping. The police and other security agencies were not technically banned from the neighborhood, but those who entered risked attack. As Ali and I drove by a large, abandoned house on a hill, he pointed out the window and said, \u201cLast year, we killed a judge who was living there.\u201d We passed a tangle of twisted metal. \u201cHere, you can see, we blew up an N.D.S. vehicle\u201d\u2014a truck from the National Directorate of Security, the equivalent of the F.B.I.<\/p>\n
Ali, soft-spoken but assured, told me that the Taliban in Qalai Abdul Ali were collecting taxes, providing security, patrolling the streets. Every truck that passed through\u2014hundreds a day, on the highway\u2014had paid a toll to the Taliban. He produced a receipt for a payment from a driver who had recently carried a truckful of laundry detergent from Faryab Province. The receipt, marked \u201cThe Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,\u201d was complete with a contact phone number and an e-mail address. \u201cThe government is full of thieves,\u201d Ali said. \u201cWe\u2019re the real authority.\u201d<\/p>\n
The neighborhood\u2019s residents weren\u2019t necessarily happy to see the Taliban take control, but they didn\u2019t trust the government, either. A former police officer named Sultan told me that, in the years after 2001, he had thrown himself into his job, inspired by the local police chief, whom he regarded as competent and honest. But his colleagues extorted bribes from the locals; to get hired, he said, he was forced to hand over several months\u2019 salary. Meanwhile, tales spread of corruption and illicit activities among the country\u2019s leaders. They included bacha bazi<\/em>\u2014a tradition, practiced by warlords in the nineties, of keeping boys as sex slaves. Sultan showed me a video, which was making the rounds on social media, of a former Afghan official ogling a dancing boy. \u201cIt turns my heart black,\u201d he said. Sultan gave up his job a year and a half ago, after the Taliban assassinated the local police chief. Now he was working as a minibus driver. The Taliban patrolled the highway at night, all the way to Kandahar, he said: \u201cThe road is safe now.\u201d<\/p>\nOn the second floor of a house on Qalai Abdul Ali\u2019s main street, I sat with three Talibs\u2014middle-aged men who said they\u2019d been fighting since the Americans first arrived. The group\u2019s leader called himself Hedyat; he had a scraggly gray beard and slouched against a pillow, regarding me with narrowed eyes. Hedyat said tersely that Taliban fighters had moved into the neighborhood two years ago from Wardak, an adjacent province. \u201cThe Taliban control all of Wardak now,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can bring people from all over the country.\u201d<\/div>\n
These days, he said, Qalai Abdul Ali was so secure that the Taliban were using it to stage attacks in other parts of the capital. \u201cOh, yes,\u201d one of the other Talibs crowed. Hedyat told me that his local group was observing the ceasefire with the Americans. But, when I asked about making a deal with the Afghan government, he smiled scornfully. \u201cWe\u2019re not sharing power with anyone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Freshta Kohistani was fifteen when the Taliban government fell, and she thrived on the new freedoms. In the next two decades, she became an advocate for the poor in her ancestral province of Kapisa, north of Kabul, where she helped families find food and medicine. She carried herself in a defiantly modern way, driving her own car, walking around in jeans, flashing a bright smile, and asking direct questions of powerful men. She used Facebook to publicly demand better conditions; she separated from her husband when he discouraged her activism. \u201cYou can\u2019t imagine someone as brave as Freshta,\u201d her brother Roheen told me. \u201cShe was confronting our stupid traditional society.\u201d<\/p>\n
For years, Kohistani received threatening text messages, but she ignored them. Then, about a year ago, a group of men with knives surrounded her, and one of them slashed her side as she escaped. In December, Kohistani pleaded for the government to protect her. \u201cI am not a frightened little girl,\u201d she wrote in a Facebook post. But she was worried about what her family and her co-workers would \u201cdo in this ruined country after I\u2019m gone.\u201d Twelve days later, as she and her brother Shahram were driving in Kapisa, two motorcycles pulled alongside them, and a man on the back shot them both dead. When I arrived at the Kohistanis\u2019 home, the family was still greeting mourners. Freshta\u2019s father, Najibullah, said that he wasn\u2019t sure who killed her, but that her death resembled many others in recent months. \u201cThey are killing the \u00e9lites,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
When the U.S. negotiated its withdrawal with the Taliban, American officials made it clear that they expected suicide bombings and other mass-casualty attacks to end. In their place, the Taliban appear to have launched a campaign aimed at terrorizing the educated \u00e9lite, just as the Afghan government began its own talks. More than five hundred Afghans have been killed in targeted attacks in the past year, many of them shot or struck by \u201csticky bombs,\u201d explosives placed underneath cars. Among them are Malala Maiwand, a female journalist in Jalalabad; Pamir Faizan, a military prosecutor; and Zakia Herawi, one of two female Supreme Court justices who were killed. A deep unease has permeated Afghanistan\u2019s cities. \u201cI feel like I\u2019m in a dark room filled with people, and I don\u2019t know who\u2019s hitting me,\u201d an official named Ali Farhad Howaida told me in Kabul.<\/p>\n
The Taliban deny responsibility for the attacks, but Afghan officials say that many of them are orchestrated by the Haqqani network. Amrullah Saleh, one of the country\u2019s two Vice-Presidents, told me that Taliban commanders, meeting in Pakistan, mapped out the campaign early last year. Saleh said that he passed a warning to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper before the United States made the deal with the Taliban. (The State Department says that it has no record of this.) \u201cWe told them exactly what was going to happen,\u201d Saleh said. Pompeo and Esper were undeterred.<\/p>\n
But not all the victims of assassination are enemies of the Taliban. In June, 2019, as Ustadh Abdul Salaam Abed was being driven to his office, a bomb blew off the back of his car and wounded him in the neck. Every week, during Friday prayers at the Osman Ghani mosque, Abed had been telling his congregation that Afghans had to reconcile. While he sometimes criticized the Taliban, he advocated dialogue; it was the government and its American supporters who were driving the violence, he maintained. At his house in Kabul, he gestured to his wound and told me, \u201cI\u2019m a hundred per cent certain the government did this.\u201d<\/p>\n
A growing number of Afghans believe that people inside the government are directing some of the killings. In August, a group of prominent former officials, many of whom are close to former President Hamid Karzai, wrote to Ghani alleging that there were \u201chigh-ranking officials who are credibly suspected of being involved in targeted assassinations.\u201d The letter also accused a Vice-President and a deputy in the N.D.S. of \u201cattempting to spread an environment of fear and terror among government critics and opposition figures.\u201d A senior Afghan leader told me, \u201cI don\u2019t have proof, but there are people around Ghani who are determined to destroy the peace process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ghani denied that anyone in his administration was behind the killings. Saleh, the Vice-President, dismissed the claims, saying, \u201cThey equated our lack of capability to stop the targeted assassinations with being complicit.\u201d The senior American official told me that it seemed plausible that people in the government were behind some of the killings: \u201cWhy would the Taliban kill someone who supports the peace talks?\u201d But, he added, with so few troops left in the country, the U.S. was struggling to gather reliable intelligence. \u201cWe don\u2019t exactly know what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
In January, General Austin Miller, the commander of nato<\/em>forces in the country, flew to Doha to deliver a message to the Taliban: The assassination campaign was putting the deal with the Americans at risk. If the Taliban didn\u2019t back off, the U.S. could resume attacks. The Taliban maintained that it had no obligation to reduce violence: \u201cthe Islamic Emirate has not committed itself to any such undertaking.\u201d<\/p>\nAt fifty-nine, Miller is compact, no-nonsense, and direct. When I arrived at his base, he was leading his soldiers in an hour of running and calisthenics, which, at nearly six thousand feet above sea level, were enough to tire a soldier half his age. He is a kind of living symbol of America\u2019s post-9\/11 wars. Since 2001, he has spent more than seven years fighting alongside Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, he hunted members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban; in Iraq, he took part in the operation that killed the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He noted wryly that many of the Afghan leaders that he and his staff encountered, friend and foe, were already present when he first came to the region. \u201cWe\u2019re dealing with their sons now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Since 2002, American soldiers and officers have typically served tours of a year or less. With each rotation, new soldiers have to learn the country, and senior officers devise fresh plans. The result is that twenty years of effort in Afghanistan has meant twenty different campaigns. Miller returned to the country in 2010 and took the top job in 2018. \u201cThis is my fourth, fifth, or sixth tour,\u201d he told me. \u201cI haven\u2019t counted.\u201d<\/div>\n
Miller arrived at the peak of the American effort, and has presided over a rapidly shrinking force. Where the U.S. once pursued ambitious goals, instilling democracy and economic development, he defined his mission narrowly: Don\u2019t let Afghanistan become a terrorist haven. But, he said, there\u2019s a catch. \u201cYou need a government for that.\u201d<\/p>\n\nStudents await exam results at Kabul\u2019s Marefat High School. The American intervention has been costly and often overhyped, but it has led to notable gains in women\u2019s rights.<\/span>Photograph by Adam Ferguson<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSenior officials in the Biden Administration say that they intend to take their time before they decide how to handle Afghanistan. \u201cThey\u2019re trying to figure out the best of the bad options they inherited,\u201d the second senior American official told me. They are conscious that, if Biden ignores Trump\u2019s deal and decides to keep the roughly twenty-five hundred American troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban will almost certainly resume attacking them.<\/p>\n
In January, a senior U.S. military-intelligence officer told a group of American soldiers to get ready for attacks. \u201cWe\u2019ve been in this country for twenty years, and we may be entering the last four months. These could be the most uncertain of all,\u201d the officer said. \u201cCome May 1st, if we are still here, I think it\u2019s game on for the Taliban.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miller told me, \u201cIf the Taliban were to attack U.S. or coalition forces, we are prepared to respond proportionally,\u00a0with precision, and with capacity to spare.\u201d But he also said that he was prepared to pull out the last of his soldiers if ordered to do so. The unanswered question\u2014which has hung over the country since 2001\u2014is whether the Afghan state can survive without Western troops. When I asked if he thought that the Afghan Army could secure the country alone, his answer was not reassuring. \u201cThey have to,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In early January, I flew with Miller to Afghan Army bases in Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north, and near the Helmand River, in the south. Looking down on the Hindu Kush from our C-130 transport plane, I was reminded of the country\u2019s natural beauty but also of the geographic realities that have hampered every attempt to help it stand on its own: it\u2019s landlocked and covered by mountains and desert, with only twelve per cent of its land suitable for farming. For much of its modern history, Afghanistan has been a ward of the international community: foreigners pay seventy-five per cent of its federal budget, and American taxpayers largely underwrite its Army and its security forces, at a cost of four billion dollars a year. But, if there is any hope that the Afghan state can become self-sufficient, it resides with the soldiers who train here.<\/p>\n\n\n
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In Mazar-i-Sharif, we met General Sami Alizai, the commander of the 209th Corps. (He has since been promoted to lead the Afghan Army\u2019s special-operations corps.) An ethnic Pashtun from the south, Alizai signed up in 2004 and went on to graduate from the Joint Services Command and Staff College, one of the United Kingdom\u2019s \u00e9lite military academies. A typical U.S. officer of Alizai\u2019s rank is in his fifties; Alizai is thirty-five and exudes restless confidence. \u201cIt was a tough fighting season,\u201d he told Miller. \u201cThere are a lot of Taliban dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
At a lunch meeting with Miller, the limitations of nato<\/em>\u2019s campaign became clear. When the season began, five of the fifty districts that Alizai\u2019s troops oversaw were under Taliban control, and twenty-nine were \u201con the edge,\u201d he said. His men had secured a dozen of them, he told Miller. But the Taliban had captured several villages along Highway 1, effectively cutting off the northern and western parts of the country. In Maimana, the capital of Faryab Province, the local government\u2019s control extends barely past the city center. \u201cYou can only go to the end of the bazaar,\u201d he said. Several local leaders had been assassinated.<\/p>\n
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