THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 43
On a frigid evening in January, I paid
a visit to Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan
President. I got out of my taxi at the
edge of the security cordon, about half
a mile from his office, and trekked past
concrete barricades, armed guards, and
machine-gun nests. At the center of the
defenses is the Arg—a nineteenth-cen-
tury castle, replete with towers and par-
apets, which houses Ghani’s adminis-
tration. Inside, guards searched and
X-rayed me, then confiscated my voice
recorder and my phone. I was led to a
waiting area, a chilly room with rock
walls and marble floors, and finally to
the office of the President. Ghani was
at his desk, wearing a mask, alone. “Wel-
come,” he said.
Ghani, who is seventy-one, was born
to an educated family near Kabul and
went abroad as a teen-ager to study. He
taught anthropology at Johns Hopkins
and then spent a decade at the World
Bank, in Washington, D.C., helping de-
veloping nations strengthen their econ-
omies. After the U.S. invasion, he re-
turned to Afghanistan and threw himself
into the reconstruction. Ghani has the
cool demeanor of a technocrat, but he
spoke passionately about giving up a sta-
ble career to work for his country. “I made
my decision to come home, and I never
looked back,” he said.
Ghani’s Presidency has been a long
struggle. He came to power in 2014,
in an election marred by fraud. He
promised to unite the country but in-
stead watched it deteriorate around
him, as more American troops de-
parted. When he won reëlection, in
2019, fewer than two million Afghans
cast ballots. In the past year, he has
seemed increasingly aware that his
country’s future is being decided far
from Kabul—first in the Trump Ad-
ministration’s negotiations with the
Taliban over an American withdrawal,
and then in the Afghan government’s
talks with the Taliban over the poten-
tial for peace.
When Trump decided to reach out
to the Taliban, in 2018, he chose as his
envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned
diplomat and a native Afghan. Khalil-
zad had known Ghani since high school,
when they played basketball together.
But the two found themselves at odds
over the country’s direction, and their
relationship soured. In January, Khalil-
zad arrived for a visit, and Ghani de-
clined to see him.
Trump was clearly desperate to make
a deal that would allow him to say that
he had ended the war. When the Tal-
iban refused to include the Afghan gov-
ernment in the talks, the U.S. did not
insist. The senior American official told
me, “The Trump people were saying,
‘Fuck this—the Afghans are never going
to make peace anyway. Besides, who
cares whether they agree or not?’” A s
the talks progressed, Trump repeatedly
announced troop withdrawals, depriv-
ing his negotiators of leverage. “He was
steadily undermining us,” a second se-
nior American official told me. “The
trouble with the Taliban was, they were
getting it for free.” In the end, the two
sides agreed not to attack each other,
and the Americans agreed to withdraw.
The Taliban had to meet a list of
conditions, including preventing ter-
rorists from operating out of Afghan-
istan and refraining from major attacks
on the country’s government and mil-
itary. But the prospect of insuring a to-
tal pullout was appealing enough that
the Taliban began rooting for Trump
to win reëlection. In one of the odder
moments of the U.S. campaign season,
they issued an endorsement of his can-
didacy. “When we heard about Trump
being COVID-19-positive, we got wor-
ried,” a senior Taliban leader told CBS
News. (The group subsequently claimed
that it had been misquoted.)
In my meeting with Ghani, he
seemed abandoned, like a pilot pulling
levers that weren’t connected to any-
thing. He professed gratitude to the
United States, but was clearly uneasy
with the deal. Recently, he said, he had
ordered the release of five thousand
Taliban prisoners—“not because I
wanted to, because the U.S. pushed
me.” He feared a security disaster, as
Taliban fighters returned to the streets
and American soldiers left the coun-
try. “The U.S. can withdraw its troops
anytime it wants, but they ought to ne-
gotiate with the elected President,” he
went on. “They should call me. I’m the
elected President.”
Many Afghans say that Ghani is to
blame for his predicament, describing
him as remote, vindictive, and sur-
rounded by sycophants. A prominent
At peace talks, the delegate Fawzia Koofi was often the only woman in the room.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM FERGUSON FOR THE NEW YORKER
