THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 35
eight thousand civilians have been killed
or wounded. In much of Afghanistan,
life has never felt more precarious, and
the violence has never made less sense.
P
resident George W. Bush announced
the invasion of Afghanistan on Oc-
tober 7, 2001, from the White House
Treaty Room. Explaining the choice of
venue, he said, “The only way to pur-
sue peace is to pursue those who threaten
it.” The Taliban, who had sheltered Al
Qaeda while it plotted the 9/11 attacks,
were deposed within months. In 2003,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
declared, “We clearly have moved from
major combat activity to a period of sta-
bility.” Since then, more than a hundred
and fifty thousand people have been
killed in Afghanistan, and about seven
hundred and fifty thousand Americans
have served there. The U.S. has spent
about eight hundred billion dollars on
military operations and on a multitude
of economic, governance, education,
health, gender-equality, and counter-
narcotics initiatives. Today, most Af-
ghans live in poverty, corruption is en-
demic, literacy and life-expectancy rates
rank among the lowest in the world,
approximately a third of girls become
child brides, and no country exports
more illicit opium. The Taliban control
or contest more than half the country.
During the 2016 U.S. Presidential
campaign, the candidates barely men-
tioned the war. Trump, however, had
long criticized America’s presence in
Afghanistan. In 2012, on “Fox & Friends,”
he asked, “What are we doing there?
These people hate us.” Back then, nearly
a hundred thousand American troops
were deployed in the country. I spent
most of that summer in Helmand Prov-
ince, in the south, where U.S. marines
were embattled on multiple fronts. At
Camp Leatherneck—part of a massive
complex with fast-food restaurants, an
airfield, and state-of-the-art medical
facilities—General John Toolan, the
top American commander in the south,
foresaw a sustained presence. Gestur-
ing toward a construction site near his
office, he told me, “Look at this place—
it’s just being built. We’re not going any-
where.” The U.S. military withdrew from
Helmand Province two years later, and
by the end of Obama’s Presidency the
number of troops in Afghanistan had
dwindled to ten thousand. Camp Leath-
erneck now resembles a ghost town, vast
swaths of it engulfed, Ozymandias-like,
by the surrounding desert.
After Trump became President, he
chose General H. R. McMaster as his
national-security adviser. McMaster had
served in Afghanistan during the surge,
and is said to have resented Obama’s
unwillingness to give it more time. A
former official who was involved in de-
veloping Trump’s Afghan-
istan policy told me that
McMaster was resistant to
undertaking a peace process
and pushed for stepped-up
military action: “His view
was, we should not be ne-
gotiating with the Taliban
while they are ascendant.
We need to put them on
their heels first.” The offi-
cial added, “The idea that
any plausible amount of additional mil-
itary effort and resources would change
the trajectory of the conflict at that stage
was absurd.” For McMaster, however, “it
seemed emotional—as if he couldn’t ac-
cept the failure of American counter-in-
surgency strategy in Afghanistan.”
In 2017, Trump unveiled his “new
strategy” for the war. “My original in-
stinct was to pull out,” he admitted. But,
after studying Afghanistan “from every
conceivable angle,” Trump instead de-
ployed several thousand more troops
(including a contingent of marines, to
Helmand Province). He also relaxed
Obama-era rules intended to reduce ci-
vilian casualties, such as constraints on
air power. These changes, Trump ar-
gued, would finally enable the military
to apply “overwhelming force.” No time-
line was imposed. “Someday, after an
effective military effort, perhaps it will
be possible” to negotiate with the Tal-
iban, Trump said. “But nobody knows
if, or when, that will ever happen.”
A year later, little had changed mili-
tarily, McMaster had been fired, and
Trump had apparently lost patience. (Sec-
retary of State Mike Pompeo later ac-
knowledged that Trump wanted a troop
reduction before the 2020 Presidential
election.) Throughout the Obama Ad-
ministration, negotiations had been frus-
trated by the Taliban’s refusal to engage
with the Afghan government, which they
considered illegitimate, and by the U.S.’s
equally obstinate refusal to sideline the
government. In July, 2018, a few weeks
after the Eid ceasefire, Trump agreed to
exclude the Ghani administration and
negotiate directly with the Taliban.
The U.S. named Zalmay Khalilzad,
an Afghan-born former Ambassador to
Iraq and Afghanistan, as a special envoy.
Khalilzad contacted Taliban representa-
tives in Doha, Qatar, where the group
had been permitted to open an office in
2013, in part to facilitate the
exchange of five Guantá-
namo Bay detainees for Bowe
Bergdahl, an American sol-
dier who’d been captured
by the Taliban after going
awol. (As a Presidential
candidate, Trump had exco-
riated the Obama Admin-
istration for the exchange,
calling Bergdahl a “dirty rot-
ten traitor” and the detain-
ees “killers who want to destroy us.”) Over
the next ten months, Qatar hosted nine
rounds of intensive discussions. The U.S.
negotiating team included senior officials
from the State Department, the Penta-
gon, and the White House. The Taliban
negotiating team included the five for-
mer Guantánamo detainees.
Negotiations to end wars can have
the perverse effect of escalating them:
sometimes, combatants strive to gain
leverage at the table by showing strength
on the ground. As the Doha talks pro-
ceeded, the conflict in Afghanistan be-
came the deadliest in the world. Raids
and air strikes killed and wounded a
record number of civilians—more than
a hundred a month—while the Tali-
ban attacked Afghan Army bases and
mounted large offensives on provincial
capitals. ISIS, which wasn’t a party to
the talks, introduced a new dimension
of unpredictability and cruelty to the
violence, terrorizing Kabul and Jalala-
bad with suicide bombings. The result,
for many Afghans, was a painful disso-
nance: unprecedented hope that peace
might finally arrive, and unprecedented
anguish over the nightmare consuming
them until it did.
On September 2, 2019, Khalilzad an-
nounced that an agreement had been
reached. Some details had already leaked
out. The U.S. would remove fifty-four
hundred troops from Afghanistan within
a hundred and thirty-five days, and the
