42 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
intelligence agency, the National Di-
rectorate for Security, or N.D.S., pro-
posed organizing his tribe into a mili-
tia that would join the assault on the
valley. Maizullah and five hundred oth-
ers volunteered. Forty of them were
killed. “isis didn’t retreat,” Maizullah
recalled. “They didn’t care about dying.”
That April, the U.S. deployed the larg-
est non-nuclear weapon in its arsenal, a
twenty-thousand-pound Massive Ord-
nance Air Blast, or moab—colloquially
known as the Mother of All Bombs—
against an isis redoubt in the Mamand.
Afghan officials say that the moab killed
ninety-six militants, and credit it with
precipitating isis’s decline in Achin.
To reach Maizullah’s checkpoint, I’d
accompanied the district governor in a
convoy up a rutted dirt road that par-
alleled a river flowing swiftly with snow-
melt. Trucks loaded with talc bounced
by, carrying local workers, who looked
as if they’d been coated in flour. We
passed the ravine where the MOAB had
been dropped and a collection of clay
houses that had been badly damaged
by the blast. Nearby, two Black Hawk
helicopters were lifting off from a U.S.
Special Forces base. As Maizullah and
I spoke, the Americans lobbed mortars
into distant hills.
The 2017 offensive had pushed ISIS
out of the villages, but militants persisted
in the mountains, and they had spread
to other areas of Nangarhar Province,
including Shirzad District, adding local
and foreign fighters to their ranks along
the way. Ahmed Ali, the chief of the pro-
vincial council, told me, “In Nangarhar,
ISIS is now more dangerous and more
numerous than the Taliban.” Although
ISIS has been confined to the regions
along the eastern border, it continues to
carry out catastrophic attacks in popu-
lation centers. In August, an ISIS suicide
bomber killed sixty-three wedding guests
in Kabul. This past Friday, in Nangarhar
Province, near Achin, explosives brought
down the roof of a mosque full of wor-
shippers. No one immediately claimed
responsibility. More than a hundred peo-
ple were killed or injured.
If the U.S. were to return to the Doha
accord, and the Taliban and the Afghan
government began negotiations in Oslo,
ISIS could attract hard-line insurgents
averse to a brokered peace. According
to Ahmed Ali, many criminal networks
currently affiliated with the Taliban in
Nangarhar might also “change their
white flag to the black flag—ISIS could
replace the Taliban.”
Before I left Maizullah’s outpost, I
asked about his son, the soldier, whose
name was Shamsuddin. Maizullah said
that Shamsuddin had been stationed in
Helmand Province, not far from Camp
Leatherneck. When Maizullah fled
Achin, Shamsuddin’s five-year commit-
ment to the Army was almost over. “I
asked him to please come home,” Mai-
zullah said. “He told me, ‘It would be
shameful.’” Ten days before Shamsud-
din’s contract expired, a Taliban sniper
shot him in the head.
The Americans formally turned over
control of the war to Afghan security
forces at the end of 2014, having lost
twenty-one hundred service members.
Since then, fewer than a hundred have
been killed. Shamsuddin, however, is
one of at least forty-five thousand Af-
ghan soldiers and police officers who
have been killed in the past five years—a
fatality rate comparable to America’s at
the height of the Vietnam War.T
he alarming losses for Afghan troops,
and the steep reduction in Ameri-
can troops, have caused both countries
to rely increasingly on their élite branches.
A significant portion of the fourteen
thousand U.S. personnel currently de-
ployed in Afghanistan are Special Forces.
Many of them partner with the Afghan
Army’s Commando Corps, which con-
ducts a disproportionate share of the
combat against ISIS and the Taliban. This
summer, I met Hamdullah Mohib, Af-
ghanistan’s national-security adviser, at
his office in the Arg—a sprawling cita-
del in the heart of Kabul containing ex-
pansive gardens and the castle-like Pres-
idential palace. “We are using our Special
Forces to the maximum effect we can,”
Mohib said. This also applies to what he
called “hybrid units,” which are jointly
supervised by the N.D.S. and the C.I.A.
Despite the significant role that such
units play in Afghanistan, little is known
about them. We don’t know how many
Afghans and Americans belong to them,
how members are recruited, what their
budget is, how their hierarchy functions,
or if they are subject to oversight. We
do know that they are organized region-
ally: Zero-One in central Afghanistan,Zero-Two in the east, Zero-Three in the
south, and Zero-Four in the north. When
I asked an American defense official
about the Zero units, he suggested that
I contact the N.D.S. for more informa-
tion. I told him that I had recently met
with General Nazar Ali Wahedi, the
N.D.S. chief for Nangarhar Province,
who had said of Zero-Two, “They coör-
dinate closely with the Americans. They
do operations together.” The American
official responded, “Whether or not there
are Americans outside of the U.S. mil-
itary that are potentially with them, I
just can’t tell you.”
It appears that the Zero units are
composed primarily of Afghans but an-
swer to the C.I.A. Ahmed Ali, the chief
of the Nangarhar provincial council, told
me, “They’re N.D.S. in name only.” My
interview with General Wahedi took
place in his office, at the N.D.S. head-
quarters in Jalalabad. I asked if it was
possible for me to meet a member of
Zero-Two. Wahedi made a phone call
and told the man who answered that a
journalist wished to talk to him. “O.K.,”
Wahedi said, and hung up. “They’re not
allowed to see you,” he told me.
Every Afghan official I spoke with,
including the governor of Nangarhar,
said that Zero-Two had been instru-
mental in fighting ISIS and the Taliban.
Wahedi claimed that two thousand in-
surgents had been killed in the prov-
ince in the past year, the majority by
Zero-Two. “They’re good at their jobs,”
Ahmed Ali said. “They’re very well
trained. They have the best weapons
and equipment. The problem is, some-
times they go into people’s homes and
just shoot everybody.”
Many Nangarharis have accused Zero-
Two of atrocities, especially in areas where
ISIS has made inroads. Last winter, a sev-
enteen-year-old Afghan named Rabbani
was inside his house, in Shirzad District,
when he and his father, Khan Wali, heard
helicopters in the sky. According to Rab-
bani, Khan Wali was a mason who raised
goats and cows to feed his family. An
explosion blew open the front gate of
their compound. An Afghan using a
megaphone ordered everyone to come
outside. As Khan Wali and Rabbani
emerged, Khan Wali was shot in the face.
Uniformed men, wearing helmets
with night-vision devices, stormed
the compound. Rabbani’s hands were