THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 45
ical and mental resilience has clearly
been affected by their time there,” the
second senior U.S. official told me.
Still, their team was audacious. Be-
fore the negotiators could work on
matters of substance, they had to de-
vise a code of conduct. The Taliban
proposed that disputes be decided
exclusively by Sunni jurisprudence.
Government delegates insisted that
Afghanistan’s Shiite populace be rep-
resented, too. “We made it clear to
them that we stood for the diversity
of our society,” Sadat Naderi, one of
the negotiators, told me. The Tali-
ban—whose members had massacred
Shiite civilians before 2001—stormed
out of the room.
Eventually, they returned to the
bargaining table, but things didn’t go
much better. “They told us we were
puppets of the infidels,” Naderi re-
called. “They told us the war was over.”
Khairkhwa suggested to me that the
2020 peace deal with the U.S. had es-
tablished the Taliban as the victors in
the conflict. “We defeated the Amer-
icans on the battlefield,” he said. Hafiz
Mansoor, a former minister in the Af-
ghan government, blamed the Amer-
icans for giving the Taliban the im-
pression that they had won the war:POEMTHATENDSAT THE OCEAN
1
I’ve always wanted to write a poem that ends
at the ocean. How the poem gets there
doesn’t much matter, just so at last
it arrives. The manatee will be there
we saw all those years ago,
almost motionless under the water
like a pendant swaying at an invisible throat,
the one my mother used to wear
on the most special of occasions. My God
is still there, the one I prayed to as a boy:
he never answered, but that didn’t keep me
from calling out to him.2
I turn off the notification app for good,
no longer needing to know exactly how many gone.
After all, clinging to life
is what we have always done best.
We are still trying to hide
from the truth of things and who
can blame us.
Lists don’t make sense anymore,
unless toilet paper and peanut butter head them.
Last-stage patients are not being told
how crowded the ferry will be
that will take them across the river.3
We are forbidden cafés, churches, even cemeteries.
Fishing by ourselves, however, is still permitted. As long
as we keep nothing at all. As long as we walk
back home, in darkness, empty-handed,
breathing deeply, having thrown back
what was never ours to keep.—Jim Moore“By making the deal, the U.S. legiti-
mized them.”
In meetings, the two sides shouted
at each other; Taliban leaders said the
Afghan officials represented an illegit-
imate government, propped up by in-
fidels and bankrolled by Western money.
“They were so arrogant,” Nadery said.
“They thought they were there just to
discuss the terms of surrender. They
said, ‘We don’t need to talk to you. We
can just take over.’”S
ince 2001, the main arena of con-
flict in Afghanistan has been the
countryside: the government held the
cities, while the Taliban fought to con-
trol the villages and towns, particularly
in the south, their heartland. But by
early this year the paradigm had begun
to fall apart. The Taliban were en-
trenched across the north; their shadow
government had begun to creep into
the cities.
In January, I visited the Qalai Abdul
Ali neighborhood, in western Kabul;
it straddles the national highway, which
runs south to Kandahar. Taliban fight-
ers, distinguished by black turbans that
trail down their backs, were stroll-
ing through the streets. A decade ago,
when there were nearly a hundred and
fifty thousand American and NATO
troops in the country, such a scene was
unimaginable.
In Qalai Abdul Ali, the government
was mostly in hiding. A squad of po-
lice hunkered down behind Hesco bar-
ricades. The real authority, the locals
said, was a Talib called Sheikh Ali, who
took me on a driving tour of the neigh-
borhood. “I am the mayor,” he said, as
he climbed into my car.
While we drove, an Afghan Army
truck passed through without stopping.
The police and other security agencies
were not technically banned from the
neighborhood, but those who entered
risked attack. As Ali and I drove by a
large, abandoned house on a hill, he
pointed out the window and said, “Last
year, we killed a judge who was living
there.” We passed a tangle of twisted
metal. “Here, you can see, we blew up
an N.D.S. vehicle”—a truck from the
National Directorate of Security, the
equivalent of the F.B.I.
Ali, soft-spoken but assured, told
me that the Taliban in Qalai Abdul