THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 39
accord. “The sooner, the better,” Sha-
heen said. “We stand by what we have
agreed to.” The same impulsiveness that
led Trump to cancel the talks might
cause him to resume them. To date, how-
ever, his stated position is: “They’re dead.”
When Trump laid out his Afghani-
stan strategy, in 2017, he barely mentioned
the Taliban, whose ranks have grown to
more than sixty thousand full-time
fighters. He instead framed the war as a
campaign against international terrorist
organizations, particularly isis, that
threaten the American homeland. Al-
though isis has never had more than a
few thousand militants in Afghanistan,
counterterrorism tactics—identifying
targets and eliminating them—have
eclipsed traditional U.S. priorities such
as expanding the reach of the Afghan
government and helping it win popular
support. This year, the U.S. stopped cal-
culating how many Afghan civilians live
under government versus Taliban rule.
According to the Defense Department,
the statistic now has “limited deci-
sion-making value.” Trump has been
more straightforward. “We are not na-
tion-building again,” he has said. “We
are killing terrorists.”
In this iteration of the war, collateral
damage is incidental: according to the
U.N., during the first half of 2019, U.S.
and Afghan forces killed more civilians
than the Taliban and ISIS did. The shift
has been accompanied by curtailed trans-
parency. U.S. air strikes pummel isolated
areas where casualties are impossible to
confirm, and night raids are conducted
by C.I.A.-sponsored groups that oper-
ate independently of both the U.S. and
the Afghan militaries. Journalists are
often denied access to combat units.
America’s longest war has never gone
well, and American leaders have always
lied about it. Obama’s surge was a fail-
ure, which he misrepresented as a suc-
cess. Under Trump, however, the conflict
has entered perhaps its most troubling
phase, one that is being prosecuted
largely in secret.
I
SIS established its first stronghold in
Afghanistan in Nangarhar’s Achin
District, on the country’s eastern fron-
tier. Achin abuts the Federally Admin-
istered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, or FATA,
a mostly ungoverned region that is home
to various Islamist groups. The border
is demarcated by the Spin Ghar range,
sheer, jagged peaks that mellow into
foothills with lush river valleys. As early
as 2010, militants from the FATA flee-
ing Pakistan Army offensives started en-
tering one of the valleys in Achin, called
the Mamand. “They came with their
wives and children, on foot,” Asil Mai-
zullah, a tribal elder there, told me. “They
said that they were enemies of Pakistan.
We said, ‘Then, you are welcome.’”
Maizullah estimated that, over sev-
eral years, two thousand militants from
Pakistan settled in the Mamand. His
older brother, Mohammad Younis, hosted
eight families in his house. Eventually,
the militants took over, imposing a con-
servative form of Islam on local villag-
ers—closing schools, opening fundamen-
talist madrassas, and forbidding poppy
cultivation. “They started creating prob-
lems, calling us spies for the infidels,”
Maizullah said. In 2014, several militant
leaders in the FATA aligned themselves
with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi
founder of ISIS, and the next year ISIS
formally announced its expansion into
Afghanistan, where the militants in Achin
declared their allegiance to the group.
The ISIS fighters in the Mamand Val-
ley began clashing with the Taliban and
demanding that locals side with them.
People suspected of disloyalty were ex-
ecuted. Maizullah, who had a son in the
Afghan National Army, decided to flee.
He urged Younis, his brother, to join him,
but Younis refused. That
summer, ISIS ordered nearly
a hundred local elders to as-
semble at a mosque. One of
them, Fateh Gul, told me,
“They accused us of sup-
porting the Taliban and put
us in an abandoned house.
They beat us on every part
of our body.” After twenty
days, Gul was released. Ten
elders, including Younis and
eight of Maizullah’s cousins, were less
fortunate. ISIS later published a highly
produced video, complete with sound
effects and slow motion, showing the
men kneeling on a row of explosives, sur-
rounded by their former guests. Younis
is the first in line, and dies with the oth-
ers when the explosives are ignited.
“They tricked us,” Maizullah told me.
We were sitting behind a wall of sand-
bags in a fortified checkpoint on the
southern slope of the valley. Below us
stretched terraced cornfields, rocky
creeks, and rampant wild marijuana. To
the east, the bald faces of the Spin Ghar
peaks were patched with oblong white
shapes, which, Maizullah said, were talc
mines. Most Afghan talc is exported to
Pakistan, where much of it then con-
tinues to Europe and America, ending
up in household products ranging from
makeup to baby powder. According to
a report by Global Witness, an N.G.O.
that monitors natural resources in con-
flict zones, the Taliban have long taxed
Afghan talc producers in Nangarhar,
generating millions of dollars a year in
revenue. Ironically, the marines in Hel-
mand Province used to carry baby pow-
der on patrol, to mark routes free of Tal-
iban explosives.
Access to talc and other minerals ap-
pears to have been a factor in early skir-
mishes between the Taliban and ISIS.
In 2015, an ISIS commander told Global
Witness, “At any price, we will take the
mines.” But the rift between the groups
was also more fundamental. The Tali-
ban publicly repudiated al-Baghdadi’s
authority, calling his apocalyptic ideol-
ogy a “scourge,” while isis denounced
the Taliban’s relationship with Pakistan,
which supports the insurgency and har-
bors its leaders.
The theatrical killing of Younis and
the other elders, though unremarkable
compared with countless ISIS executions
in Iraq and Syria, appalled
many Afghans, including
members of the Taliban.
The fact that the perpetra-
tors were foreigners ren-
dered the offense even more
egregious. The Taliban, who
have killed thousands of Af-
ghan civilians, sometimes
savagely, released a state-
ment condemning the “hor-
rific video.”
As long as ISIS and the Taliban were
fighting each other, the U.S. and Af-
ghan militaries were slow to intervene.
But, in 2017, the year that President
Trump defined one of his main prior-
ities in Afghanistan as “obliterating ISIS,”
the coalition launched a concerted offen-
sive to reclaim the Mamand Valley.
At the time, Maizullah was living
in a settlement of internally displaced
people, outside Jalalabad. Afghanistan’s
