42 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
O
n the night of August 14th,
Fawzia Koofi was on her way
home to Kabul from the fu-
neral of family friends. Koofi, forty-five,
is one of Afghanistan’s leading advo-
cates for women’s rights—a former par-
liament member who, in the twenty
years since the United States and its al-
lies toppled the Taliban, has carried on
a ferocious public fight to reverse a his-
tory of oppression. She and her twenty-
one-year-old daughter, Shuhra, were
riding in an armored car, as they often
do. A second car, filled with security
guards, trailed behind. The guards were
necessary; in 2010, Taliban gunmen had
attempted to kill her.
As they neared Kabul, her driver
pulled over to get gas, and Koofi de-
cided to switch cars. “Sometimes the
armored car feels like a prison,” she
explained, when I visited Afghanistan
in December. As they left the gas sta-
tion, she saw a car behind hers, seem-
ing to track its moves; she was being
followed. While she watched, a sec-
ond car veered into the road, block-
ing the lane. Koofi’s driver acceler-
ated and swerved onto the shoulder,
but, before he could get clear of the
blockade, men in the other car opened
fire. Bullets smashed through the win-
dows and tore through her upper arm.
The assailants sped away. Koofi was
rushed to the nearest safe hospital,
forty-five minutes away, where sur-
geons removed a bullet and set her
shattered bone.
A month later, Koofi was due to
represent the government in peace talks
with the Taliban—the latest in a de-
cade-long series of attempts to end the
Afghan conflict. As she prepared, the
mood in Kabul was unusually fraught.
A wave of assassinations had begun,
which has since claimed the lives of
hundreds of Afghans, including pros-
ecutors, journalists, and activists. Offi-
cials in Afghanistan and in the U.S.
suspect that the Taliban commit-
ted most of the killings—both to
strengthen their position in talks and
to weaken the civil society that has ten-
uously established itself since the Tal-
iban were deposed. “They are trying to
terrorize the post-2001 generation,”
Sima Samar, a former chairperson of
the Afghan Independent Human
Rights Commission, told me.
The peace talks began last Septem-
ber, in Doha, Qatar, a Persian Gulf mi-
crostate that sits atop the world’s larg-
est natural-gas field. For seven years,
Qatar’s leaders have hosted several of
the Taliban’s most senior members in
luxurious captivity, housing them and
their families with all expenses paid. At
the opening ceremony, delegates from
the Taliban and the Afghan govern-
ment gathered at the Doha Sheraton,
in a cavernous convention space staffed
by an army of guest workers. When
Koofi walked into the lobby, she saw a
group of Taliban negotiators. They were
staring at her arm, which was still in a
cast. Koofi smiled at them. “As you can
see, I’m fine,” she said.
Despite Koofi’s assurance, the Af-
ghan government was in a precarious
position. For decades, it had been but-
tressed by U.S. military power. But, as
Americans have lost patience with the
war, the U.S. has reduced its presence
in Afghanistan, from about a hundred
thousand troops to some twenty-five
hundred. Seven months before Koofi
went to Doha, officials in the Trump
Administration concluded their own
talks with the Taliban, in which they
agreed to withdraw the remaining forces
by May 1, 2021. The prevailing ethos, a
senior American official told me, was
“Just get out.”
Afghanistan presents Joe Biden with
one of the most immediate and vexing
problems of his Presidency. If he com-
pletes the military withdrawal, he will
end a seemingly interminable inter-
vention and bring home thousands of
troops. But, if he wants the war to be
considered anything short of an abject
failure, the Afghan state will have to
be able to stand on its own.
For Koofi and her fellow-negotia-
tors, a question hangs over the talks:
How much of the American-backed
project, which has cost thousands of
lives and more than two trillion dol-
lars, will survive? Before the U.S. and
its allies intervened, in 2001, the Tali-
ban imposed a draconian brand of Is-
lam, in which thieves’ hands were cut
off and women were put to death for
adultery. After the Taliban were de-
feated, a new constitution opened the
way for democratic elections, a free
press, and expanded rights for women.
Koofi worries that the Taliban leaders,
many of whom were imprisoned for
years at Guantánamo, do not grasp how
much the country has changed—or
that they view those changes as errors
to be corrected. “I want their eyes to
see me, to get used to what Afghan
women are today,” Koofi told me. “A
lot of them, for the past twenty years,
have been in a time capsule.” She hopes
that a deal can be made to keep the
Americans in the country until a com-
prehensive agreement brings peace. But
she fears that the talks won’t be enough
to save the Afghan state: “Even now,
there are some people among the Tal-
iban who believe they can shoot their
way into power.”
T
he United States has spent more
than a hundred and thirty billion
dollars to rebuild Afghanistan. The ef-
fort has been beset by graft and mis-
represented by Presidents and com-
manders, but in Kabul the effects were
evident. High-rise apartment build-
ings remade the skyline, and the streets
filled with cars; foreign aid helped cre-
ate new jobs, and women began going
to work and to school. After decades
of civil war and repressive government,
the capital became a rollicking inter-
national city. Diplomats, aid workers,
and journalists gathered at a French
restaurant called L’Atmosphère and a
Lebanese place known as Taverna; after
hours, they stumbled over to the bar
of the Gandamack Lodge, named for
a site where nineteenth-century Af-
ghan tribesmen massacred British in-
vaders. The Taliban were gaining
strength in the countryside, but the
cities flourished.
These days, assassinations and bomb-
ings have driven most of the foreign-
ers away. Taverna closed in 2014, after
a Taliban attack there killed twenty-one
civilians. As American and NATO troops
have departed, blast walls, barbed wire,
and armed checkpoints have risen to
provide a semblance of security. The
few Western visitors mostly stay at the
fortress-like Serena hotel, even though
American officials warn that the insur-
gent Haqqani network, an adjunct of
the Taliban, is scouting the place for
people to kidnap. At night, the streets
are quiet. Twenty years into the Amer-
ican-led war, Kabul feels again like the
capital of a poor and troubled country.
