46 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
Ali were collecting taxes, providing
security, patrolling the streets. Every
truck that passed through—hundreds
a day, on the highway—had paid a
toll to the Taliban. He produced a re-
ceipt for a payment from a driver who
had recently carried a truckful of laun-
dry detergent from Faryab Province.
The receipt, marked “The Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan,” was com-
plete with a contact phone number
and an e-mail address. “The govern-
ment is full of thieves,” Ali said. “We’re
the real authority.”
The neighborhood’s residents
weren’t necessarily happy to see the
Taliban take control, but they didn’t
trust the government, either. A former
police officer named Sultan told me
that, in the years after 2001, he had
thrown himself into his job, inspired
by the local police chief, whom he re-
garded as competent and honest. But
his colleagues extorted bribes from the
locals; to get hired, he said, he was
forced to hand over several months’
salary. Meanwhile, tales spread of cor-
ruption and illicit activities among the
country’s leaders. They included bacha
bazi—a tradition, practiced by war-
lords in the nineties, of keeping boys
as sex slaves. Sultan showed me a video,
which was making the rounds on so-
cial media, of a former Afghan official
ogling a dancing boy. “It turns my heart
black,” he said. Sultan gave up his job
a year and a half ago, after the Taliban
assassinated the local police chief. Now
he was working as a minibus driver.
The Taliban patrolled the highway at
night, all the way to Kandahar, he said:
“The road is safe now.”On the second floor of a house on
Qalai Abdul Ali’s main street, I sat
with three Talibs—middle-aged men
who said they’d been fighting since the
Americans first arrived. The group’s
leader called himself Hedyat; he had
a scraggly gray beard and slouched
against a pillow, regarding me with
narrowed eyes. Hedyat said tersely
that Taliban fighters had moved into
the neighborhood two years ago from
Wardak, an adjacent province. “The
Taliban control all of Wardak now,”
he said. “We can bring people from all
over the country.”
These days, he said, Qalai Abdul Ali
was so secure that the Taliban were
using it to stage attacks in other parts
of the capital. “Oh, yes,” one of the other
Talibs crowed. Hedyat told me that
his local group was observing the cease-
fire with the Americans. But, when I
asked about making a deal with the Af-
ghan government, he smiled scornfully.
“We’re not sharing power with any-
one,” he said.F
reshta Kohistani was fifteen when
the Taliban government fell, and
she thrived on the new freedoms. In
the next two decades, she became an
advocate for the poor in her ancestral
province of Kapisa, north of Kabul,
where she helped families find food
and medicine. She carried herself in a
defiantly modern way, driving her own
car, walking around in jeans, flashing a
bright smile, and asking direct ques-
tions of powerful men. She used Face-
book to publicly demand better condi-
tions; she separated from her husband
when he discouraged her activism. “You
can’t imagine someone as brave as
Freshta,” her brother Roheen told me.
“She was confronting our stupid tradi-
tional society.”
For years, Kohistani received threat-
ening text messages, but she ignored
them. Then, about a year ago, a group
of men with knives surrounded her,
and one of them slashed her side as
she escaped. In December, Kohistani
pleaded for the government to protect
her. “I am not a frightened little girl,”
she wrote in a Facebook post. But she
was worried about what her family and
her co-workers would “do in this ru-
ined country after I’m gone.” Twelve
days later, as she and her brother Shah-Before talks, Ashraf Ghani warned negotiators, “Don’t bring home a bad deal.”