THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 53
me that, in 2002, a U.S. bombing raid
had killed his father, in Jalalabad. Salam
joined the Taliban when he was twelve,
along with his older brother, Kashmir.
“I wanted revenge,” Salam said. In 2009,
a U.S. air strike riddled his legs with
shrapnel and killed Kashmir.
One of the counterterrorism police
officers guarding the house, Moham-
mad Aziz, was from Salam’s village, in
Kunar. As I spoke with Salam, Aziz
came over and sat next to him on his
cot. They were about the same age. Put-
ting his hand on Salam’s knee, Aziz said,
“My cousin was killed by the Taliban.
I’m not going to let you live.”
Everybody laughed.
“We’ve been sharing war stories,”
Aziz explained.
“We’re friends,” Salam added.
At one point, I asked Qayum how
he would summarize the crucial differ-
ence between ISIS and the Taliban. He
said, “ISIS never compromises. The Tal-
iban compromises.” Although Taliban
leaders shun the Afghan government,
their field commanders sometimes find
common cause with it. The governor of
Kunar, Abdul Mirzakwal, told me that
he is in regular contact with the Tali-
ban’s shadow governor, who, among
other things, helps monitor the safety
of government-salaried teachers and
health workers in Taliban-held areas.
Mirzakwal said that a medical clinic in
Kunar had recently been looted by Tal-
iban fighters. “I called the Taliban gov-
ernor at ten in the morning and asked
him why they did this,” he said. “By four,
the clinic manager informed me that all
the equipment had been returned.”
I asked Mirzakwal if ISIS had brought
the Taliban and the government closer.
“The Taliban is an Afghan phenome-
non,” Mirzakwal said. “We have com-
mon values. ISIS is not Afghan.” While
reporting in eastern Afghanistan, I saw
several cemeteries with both Afghan
and Taliban flags adorning the graves
of soldiers and insurgents. ISIS fighters
are buried without markers, and only
in land belonging to the caliphate.
E
ven peace will not solve many of
the problems that plague Afghan-
istan, and it could create new ones. The
economy depends on foreign aid; donor
countries directly financed about half
of this year’s national budget, and much
of Afghanistan’s G.D.P. is generated by
Western militaries, companies, and or-
ganizations. As the number of U.S.
troops in the country has gone down,
poverty, unemployment, and crime have
gone up. While I was in Jalalabad, doc-
tors threatened to strike, because so many
of them are being kidnapped and ex-
torted. “It’s not only doctors,” the head
of their association told me. “It’s all busi-
nessmen, anyone with money.” At Nan-
garhar’s provincial hospital, I saw a pa-
tient—a dentist—who’d been shot in
the head for having failed to pay a ran-
som. At Emergency Surgical Center, a
hospital in Kabul dedicated to battlefield
injuries, surgeons are increasingly treat-
ing stab wounds instead of bullet and
blast wounds. According to Fabrizio
Foschini, a researcher who has been
studying criminality in Kabul, a “mafia
culture” has taken hold, and “all major
enterprise is threatened by violence, in-
timidation, and extortion.”
In the event of peace, a lot of pro-
fessional fighters might find them-
selves out of work. Nearly three hun-
dred thousand Afghans serve in the
security forces, which cost the U.S. ap-
proximately five billion dollars a year.
If American troops leave Afghanistan,
and if the government and the Taliban
are no longer at war, how much longer
will Congress and the President con-
tinue to approve these funds? Tens of
thousands of Taliban militants would
also need to be reintegrated into Afghan
society, as would at least thirty thou-
sand irregular-militia members armed
and funded by U.S. Special Forces. An
end to the conflict might cause Paki-
stan and Iran to forcibly repatriate mil-
lions of refugees.
There are already two and a half
million internally displaced people in
Afghanistan, many of them living in
destitute conditions on the fringes of
provincial capitals. (Kabul’s population
has more than tripled since 2001, and
now exceeds five million.) Outside Jalal-
abad, I visited a neighborhood called
Behsud, where thousands of families
were squatting in abandoned compounds
after fleeing violence and poverty in
their home districts. In a part of Beh-
sud known as Burned Tank—where a
destroyed Soviet tank sat on the road-
side, its cannon supporting the canopy
of a makeshift watermelon stand—
people had recently arrived from Kunar
Province, after a Zero-Two raid there.
Several local officials told me that ISIS
has been recruiting in Behsud. Ahmed
Ali, the provincial-council chief, believes
that the Afghans living in Behsud, and
in similar settlements, are primed for
radicalization. “They’ve lost everything,”
he said. “And they have no support. The
government is not helping them.”
Children were everywhere in Beh-
sud, roaming the streets, swimming in
irrigation ditches, and playing cricket
in dirt lots with wickets made from cin-
der blocks. Rabbani, the seventeen-year-
old from Shirzad District, whose father,
two younger brothers, and three cous-
ins had been killed by Zero-Tw o, n o w
lives in Behsud. The compound where
he was staying was at the end of a rut-
ted lane bordered by wheat fields and
rice paddies. He shared the house, an
unfurnished concrete shell without win-
dows or doors, with more than a dozen
relatives: siblings, cousins, nieces, neph-
ews. All had been orphaned by the raid.
“I’m the breadwinner now,” Rabbani
told me. He had been loading stones
onto trucks for construction projects,
earning just under three dollars a day.
In Afghanistan, the future is as un-
certain as it has ever been. Jamila Af-
ghani, the delegate who went to Doha,
told me, “We don’t know what is com-
ing.” After she made several Taliban ne-
gotiators weep, they agreed to include,
in the joint public statement, a commit-
ment to reducing civilian casualties to
zero. The gesture was understood to be
symbolic—and the Taliban’s recent at-
tacks have proved its hollowness—but
when Afghani returned to Kabul she
noticed that she felt different. Normally,
when she left the house, she was ac-
companied by an almost physical ten-
sion, an awareness that at any moment
something terrible might happen: gun-
fire, an explosion. As she walked down
the street, shopped in the market, or
commuted to work, this awareness might
briefly subside, but it never went away.
The morning after she came back from
Doha, it was gone. For the first time in
a while, Afghani moved through her
day as if she lived in a world where sud-
den, devastating violence was not a con-
stant menace.
Then the day ended and the next
one began.
