THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 45
Zero-Two killed fourteen people there,
in two compounds. An N.D.S. officer
provided a statement to the Afghani-
stan Independent Human Rights Com-
mission: “Zero-Two had a report that
four suicide attackers were inside Mo-
hammad Alam’s house. Zero-Two ar-
rived at the house and, using a mega-
phone, announced that they had come
to conduct a search. They were fired
upon and, in order to defend themselves,
returned fire.”
Alam’s son, Mohammad Azam, a
middle-aged laborer whose beard was
dyed orange with henna, met me at the
house. Inside the main gate sat the car-
cass of an incinerated vehicle. Azam
hadn’t been home at the time of the
raid. He pointed out where he’d later
found the corpses of his father, his three
brothers, and his brother-in-law Orfan
Allah—an Afghan Army soldier home
on leave. Azam’s mother, Mahbuba, had
sustained a bullet wound, deforming her
right foot. I later met Mahbuba, who
said, “The neighbors took me to the
hospital. The doctor said I needed to
stay, but I left the same day so I could
bury my husband and sons.” When I
described the N.D.S. account of the
raid, Mahbuba said, “I swear to God,
the only weapons in our house were
kitchen knives.”
Azam said that he and his family
had been targeted only because they
were originally from a part of Nangar-
har that was now controlled by ISIS.
One of his brothers still managed a
small grocery store there, Azam admit-
ted. “But we bought this house because
we dreamed of living in a place where
we could sleep peacefully,” he said.
Azam and Mahbuba now lived in a
nearby compound that had also been
raided that night. There, the oldest male
survivor, Haroon, was twelve. He told
me that he had been sleeping outside
with his fourteen-year-old brother, Sal-
man, and a cousin, Hedayat, who was
also twelve. Moments after the gate
blasted open, Salman and Hedayat were
shot dead. Haroon ran inside, to his
mother’s room. People entered the house
and started firing. A search was con-
ducted. When the intruders left, Haroon
discovered that all three of his uncles
had been killed, including Zahid, a doc-
tor, who had raised Haroon since his fa-
ther’s death, some years earlier. In a nearby
room, one of Haroon’s aunts, Laima, was
covered in blood. Bullets had pierced her
shoulder, the left side of her neck, and
her lower jaw. She was weeping while
clutching her nine-month-old daugh -
ter, Hafsa, to her chest. As Haroon ap-
proached them, he realized that Hafsa,
too, had been killed. Someone on the
raid had patched up Laima’s wounds and
left behind supplies, so that she could
change the dressings.
I had been escorted to the compound
by district security forces. “These peo-
ple came here to live in peace, and Zero-
Two killed them,” one of the officers
said. “There was no need for it.”
A few minutes later, when we were
alone, the officer indicated that he had
something else to add. “I was only say-
ing that stuff in order to assure them
I’m on their side,” he said.
Did this mean that he approved of
the raid?
The officer gave a thumbs-up. “One
hundred per cent.”
What about Orfan Allah? Wasn’t he
in the Afghan Army?
“If he was, it was only so he could
spy for isis.”
No one had specified what, exactly,
Mohammad Alam and his sons had
been guilty of. Were they would-be sui-
cide bombers? Had ISIS fighters shopped
at the brother’s store? Or had the fam-
ily’s crime been something murkier, such
as “sympathizing” with the group? The
security officers did not seem overly
concerned with these details.
ISIS has become such a singularly ab-
horrent spectre that any alleged associ-
ation with it—“They are ISIS”—can be
seen as sufficiently damning. Once ap-
plied, the label is also uniquely dehu-
manizing. It opens the door to extraor-
dinary violence, such as Zero-Two raids
or the Mother of All Bombs, distorting
our normal standards of restraint and
tolerance for collateral damage. In Iraq
and Syria, American bombers razed en-
tire cities in order to kill the ISIS fighters
living in them. Trump had referred to
those blitzes when laying out his Af-
ghanistan strategy: “As we lift restric-
tions and expand authorities in the field,
we are already seeing dramatic results
in the campaign to defeat ISIS.”
When I met with the governor
of Achin District, he told me that the
ninety-six people killed by the MOABhad included women and children. “But
they belonged to ISIS,” he added. “No
civilians were killed.”I
n 2009, when General Stanley Mc-
Chrystal assumed command of the
war in Afghanistan, he said that “we run
the risk of strategic defeat by pursuing
tactical wins that cause civilian casual-
ties.” He championed a counter-insur-
gency doctrine that promoted winning
the allegiance of the population by pro-
tecting it. This doctrine was always more
aspirational than operational, but today
even the pretense of protecting the pop-
ulation has been discarded. The increase
in night raids by Afghan Special Forces
and C.I.A.-sponsored units has coin-
cided with a spike in American air strikes,
which have become less discriminate.
Last month, a U.S. drone killed thirty
pine-nut farmers in Nangarhar Province;
a few days later, a U.S. bombardment
killed at least forty members of a wedding
party. A series of air strikes in May caused
seventy or more civilian casualties, many
of whom were women and children. Cur-
rently, children make up nearly a third of
the civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
isis might have provided a convenient
justification for “overwhelming force” in
2017, but more recently the U.S. military
has offered another rationale: bringing
the Taliban to the table and pressuring
them into compromising. Yet the Taliban
have always been willing to talk with the
U.S. It wasn’t the American escalation of
violence that enabled the Doha talks; it
was Trump’s decision to bypass the Af-
ghan government. Similarly, some ana-
lysts questioned the assumption that in-
creased strikes against the Taliban, which
continued throughout the negotiations,
would yield concessions from them. Ac-
cording to Borhan Osman, a senior re-
searcher at the International Crisis Group,
“For the Taliban, it is not a cost-benefit
calculation. They have a rigorous zeal to
not surrender. Their pride wouldn’t allow
them even to acknowledge they are being
pressured. They double down.” The
strategic utility of the relentless U.S.
bombardment since the Doha talks col-
lapsed—nearly a thousand “weapon
releases” in September—is still more du-
bious, considering that Trump, not the
Taliban, cut off discussions.
While U.S. air strikes and paramili-
tary raids have made the war even more