48 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
the rest of society. But that forgiveness
must have meaning. You must join us.”
During the speeches, Afghani
checked her phone. There had been an
attack in the capital of Ghazni Prov-
ince, in central Afghanistan, where her
family lives. The Taliban had detonated
a car bomb that had damaged an ele-
mentary school attended by two of her
cousin’s children. Both boys had been
wounded by shrapnel. “Psychologically,
I was under pressure,” Afghani said.
When it was her turn to speak, she set
aside the speech she had prepared and
talked about the boys.
Seven-year-old Ahmad and eight-
year-old Shah Agha were born in a rural
part of Ghazni Province. Their father,
Noor Agha, was a farmer. After night
raids intensified in their village, Noor
Agha decided to move his family to the
city. This required abandoning his land
and his livelihood, which plunged them
into poverty. Noor Agha arranged for
his fifteen-year-old sister to be married,
to obtain a bride price. Ahmad and Shah
Agha made the wedding invitations and
accompanied Noor Agha when he de-
livered their work to the groom’s family,
who lived in another neighborhood. Ac-
cording to Afghani, police officers in the
area, identifying a strange vehicle, opened
fire without warning. Noor Agha was
killed and Ahmad sustained a glancing
wound on his face. When Noor Agha’s
father heard the news, he
had a heart attack and died.
“The money from the mar-
riage was spent on funerals
and medical bills,” Afghani
said. Ahmad and Shah
Agha moved in with their
grandmother, and Afghani
paid to send them to a pri-
vate school—the one just
bombed by the Taliban.
Afghani was in tears
when she finished telling the story.
“Why are you killing us?” she demanded.
To her surprise, several of the Taliban ne-
gotiators were also crying. Stanikzai, the
chief negotiator, wiped his eyes with the
tail of his turban. “I couldn’t stay there
any longer,” Afghani said. “I went to the
bathroom and I emptied my heart.”
Only two Talibs spoke that day, but
the next morning the group provided
detailed responses to the grievances the
government delegates had shared. Sev-
eral delegates told me that they were
impressed by how organized the Tali-
ban were. “They have become evolved
political operators,” one delegate said.
Throughout their negotiations with the
U.S., the Taliban have presented them-
selves as a different organization from
the one that ruled Afghanistan between
1996 and 2001, when they enforced a
Draconian form of Sharia law that in-
corporated flogging and public execu-
tions. Many observers believe that the
Taliban’s evolution is more than merely
cosmetic. Borhan Osman, the Crisis
Group researcher and a native of Ghazni
Province, said that the emergence of
ISIS in Afghanistan obliged the Taliban
to moderate some of their positions.
“They wanted to strike a clear contrast
with them,” Osman said.
Some of these changes predate ISIS.
In 2006, the Taliban code of conduct
banned all N.G.O.s and sanctioned the
burning of government schools. By 2013,
an address attributed to Mullah Omar,
the founder of the Taliban, declared that
“modern education is a fundamental
need of every society” and welcomed
the “selfless activities” of international
humanitarian organizations. Today, the
Taliban coördinate with N.G.O.s to
improve health care and medical facil-
ities in areas that they control. Many
Taliban-administered districts have
functioning government schools. Qual-
ity and accessibility vary,
especially for girls, but a
report by the Overseas De-
velopment Institute found
that, from a sample of
twenty districts, “the ma-
jority of interviewees felt
that the Taliban had im-
proved the running of the
government education sys-
tem,” and noted, “Teach-
ers turned up to work, chil-
dren attended class, books and supplies
did not go missing, and there was more
order in the classroom.”
Ashley Jackson, the author of the re-
port, said, “There was a shift, around 2014,
when the Taliban began to take and hold
territory, and they realized that they
needed to out-govern the government.”
Both Jackson and Osman describe the
Taliban’s overarching objective as “win-
ning hearts and minds.” That phrase re-
calls the counter-insurgency doctrineonce promoted by Stanley McChrystal.
An urgent question looming over any
potential political settlement with the
Taliban is their attitude toward women,
and to what extent it has changed. When
the Taliban were in power, women were
largely forbidden to work, to study, or
to speak in public. They could leave the
house only when wearing a burqa, es-
corted by a male relative. In a statement
in February, however, the Taliban
affirmed that the rights vouchsafed to
women by Islam included business own-
ership, inheritance, education, work,
choosing one’s husband, security, health,
and “a good life.”
One of the delegates in Doha was
Fawzia Koofi, a former parliamentar-
ian who, in 2009, drafted legislation that
criminalized violence against women.
Koofi is from Badakhshan Province, in
the north, where her husband was ar-
rested during the Taliban regime. When
Koofi visited the jail to petition for her
husband’s release, a Taliban commander
spotted polish on her nails and threat-
ened to stone her. (Her husband later
died, from tuberculosis contracted in
jail.) In Doha, Koofi sat on a commit-
tee that produced a joint public state-
ment with the Taliban negotiators. The
discussions lasted fourteen hours. When
Koofi proposed a sentence recognizing
women’s “social, political, economic, and
education rights, in accordance with Is-
lamic values and international human
rights principles and treaties,” the Tal-
iban successfully demanded the removal
of everything after “Islamic values.”
Koofi told me, “We exchanged some
words that were not very nice. Honestly,
my mind was about to explode. I wanted
to walk out.” She recalled that she told
the Taliban, “You have not changed,
don’t pretend,” and that another woman
said, “We remember how you were whip-
ping women on the streets.”
Koofi suspects the Taliban of disin-
genuously placating American anxieties
about betraying Afghan women, and
worries that the appeasement act will
come to an unceremonious end if the
U.S. disengages from Afghanistan. She
said that any weakening of women’s
rights, no matter how minor, would be
unacceptable, because the situation for
Afghan women is already so dire: “Even
under this government, women have no
opportunity and are subject to system-