pink bougainvillea spilling over com-
pound walls—he had been surprised
to discover that it was full of mosques.
Everywhere, Muslims were praying.
At some point, Zubair asked himself,
“What if I stayed here? What would
my life be like?”
On the final day of the ceasefire, as
some of the Taliban from Shirzad were
leaving the governor’s house, a suicide
bomber attacked them, killing eighteen.
No one claimed responsibility, but the
culprit was widely thought to be a mem-
ber of ISIS. A branch of the organization
had appeared in Nangarhar four years
earlier, and had since become the Tali-
ban’s staunch enemy. The Taliban sub-
scribe to a nationalist agenda: they wish
to overthrow the government and impose
Sharia law, but their ambitions do not
extend beyond Afghanistan. ISIS, which
seeks to create a global Islamic caliph-
ate, does not recognize the existence of
Afghanistan as a sovereign country, and
accuses the Taliban of practicing a lax
interpretation of Islam that accommo-
dates heretical Pashtun customs.
Zubair felt caught in the middle of
this fight. The teacher who had recruited
him to the Taliban had subsequently
joined ISIS, and had sent him text mes-sages urging him to do the same. In re-
cent months, Zubair had been fighting
against ISIS more than against Ameri-
can or Afghan forces. What had begun
for him as a resistance against a foreign
occupation increasingly felt like Mus-
lims killing Muslims. Zubair was at his
uncle’s house when he learned of the
suicide attack. By then, he’d made up
his mind. His war was over.
During our interviews, which took
place in my hotel room in Jalalabad, I
never had the impression that Zubair
had renounced the Taliban or what it
stood for. He was simply tired. “I want
a normal life,” he told me. “I want a
piece of land and a house, that’s all.”
Zubair asked that I not use his real name,
and he kept his face wrapped tightly in
a scarf, though it was oppressively hot.
“The Taliban want to kill those of us
who quit,” he said. Muhammad Ajmal
Omar told me that the Taliban had been
unnerved by how many of their fighters
had defected during the ceasefire, and
Zubair confirmed that many of his com-
rades who went to Jalalabad that week-
end were now pursuing lives as civilians.
If the ceasefire revealed a profound
desire for peace among Afghans, the en-
suing year has shown how grievously
difficult that will be to achieve. An effort
at diplomacy collapsed spectacularly: the
U.S. spent months in historic negotia-
tions with the Taliban, but, in Septem-
ber, President Donald Trump abruptly
scuttled a nearly completed accord that
would have provided for a phased with-
drawal of American troops from the
country and direct talks between the Tal-
iban and the Afghan government. An
underlying premise of the accord was
the recognition that neither side could
decisively vanquish the other—that there
is no military solution. Now it appears
that they will go on fighting anyway.
Last month, Taliban suicide attack-
ers killed twenty-eight people in Zabul
Province, thirty in Parwan Province,
and twenty-two in downtown Kabul;
U.S. warplanes dropped more bombs
than at any point since 2010, when a
multiyear “surge” ordered by President
Barack Obama was approaching its peak.
Between July and October, the United
Nations documented more civilian cas-
ualties than it had during any other three-
month period since it started keeping
count, in 2009. So far this year, more thaninspired a national outpouring of opti-
mism and unity. On social media, peo-
ple uploaded photographs and videos of
citizens, soldiers, and police jubilantly
embracing Taliban fighters. The day
that Zubair left Shirzad for Jalalabad,
Muhammad Ajmal Omar, a member
of Nangarhar’s provincial council, left
Jalalabad for Shirzad. Although Omar
represented the district, he hadn’t been
there in fifteen years, because it was so
firmly in the grip of insurgents. When I
met him, in June, he showed me a cell-
phone video of his arrival. Walking side
by side, Omar and a Taliban commander
raise their arms in mutual submission,
as a crowd surrounding them chants,
“We want peace! Afghanistan is great!”
“These are all Taliban,” Omar said,
looking at the screen as if, a year later,
he still couldn’t believe it. “We were cry-
ing the whole way.”
Zubair heard that Omar was re-
turning to Jalalabad with a large car-
avan of Taliban fighters. The gover-
nor of Nangarhar Province had invited
the militants to spend the night at his
guesthouse. Zubair decided not to join
them. While wandering around the
city—which teemed with mango-col-
ored rickshaws, raucous bazaars, and
“Trust me, son, if there was a monster under your bed I would
have claimed it as a dependent by now.”