THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 47
ram were driving in Kapisa, two mo-
torcycles pulled alongside them, and a
man on the back shot them both dead.
When I arrived at the Kohistanis’ home,
the family was still greeting mourners.
Freshta’s father, Najibullah, said that
he wasn’t sure who killed her, but that
her death resembled many others in
recent months. “They are killing the
élites,” he said.
When the U.S. negotiated its with-
drawal with the Taliban, American of-
ficials made it clear that they expected
suicide bombings and other mass-ca-
sualty attacks to end. In their place, the
Taliban appear to have launched a cam-
paign aimed at terrorizing the educated
élite, just as the Afghan government
began its own talks. More than five
hundred Afghans have been killed in
targeted attacks in the past year, many
of them shot or struck by “sticky bombs,”
explosives placed underneath cars.
Among them are Malala Maiwand, a
female journalist in Jalalabad; Pamir
Faizan, a military prosecutor; and Zakia
Herawi, one of two female Supreme
Court justices who were killed. A deep
unease has permeated Afghanistan’s
cities. “I feel like I’m in a dark room
filled with people, and I don’t know
who’s hitting me,” an official named Ali
Howaida told me in Kabul.
The Taliban deny responsibility for
the attacks, but Afghan officials say
that many of them are orchestrated by
the Haqqani network. Amrullah Saleh,
one of the country’s two Vice-Presi-
dents, told me that Taliban command-
ers, meeting in Pakistan, mapped out
the campaign early last year. Saleh said
that he passed a warning to Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary
of Defense Mark Esper before the
United States made the deal with the
Taliban. (The State Department says
that it has no record of this.) “We told
them exactly what was going to hap-
pen,” Saleh said. Pompeo and Esper
were undeterred.
But not all the victims of assassina-
tion are enemies of the Taliban. In June,
2019, as Ustadh Abdul Salaam Abed
was being driven to his office, a bomb
blew off the back of his car and wounded
him in the neck. Every week, during
Friday prayers at the Osman Ghani
mosque, Abed had been telling his con-
gregation that Afghans had to recon-
cile. While he sometimes criticized the
Taliban, he advocated dialogue; it was
the government and its American sup-
porters who were driving the violence,
he maintained. At his house in Kabul,
he gestured to his wound and told me,
“I’m a hundred per cent certain the gov-
ernment did this.”
A growing number of Afghans be-
lieve that people inside the government
are directing some of the killings. In
August, a group of prominent former
officials, many of whom are close to
former President Hamid Karzai, wrote
to Ghani alleging that there were
“high-ranking officials who are credi-
bly suspected of being involved in tar-
geted assassinations.” The letter also
accused a Vice-President and a deputy
in the N.D.S. of “attempting to spread
an environment of fear and terror among
government critics and opposition fig-
ures.” A senior Afghan leader told me,
“I don’t have proof, but there are peo-
ple around Ghani who are determined
to destroy the peace process.”
Ghani denied that anyone in his
administration was behind the killings.
Saleh, the Vice-President, dismissed
the claims, saying, “They equated our
lack of capability to stop the targeted
assassinations with being complicit.”
The senior American official told me
that it seemed plausible that people in
the government were behind some of
the killings: “Why would the Taliban
kill someone who supports the peace
talks?” But, he added, with so few
troops left in the country, the U.S. was
struggling to gather reliable intelli-
gence. “We don’t exactly know what’s
going on.”I
n January, General Austin Miller, the
commander of NATO forces in the
country, flew to Doha to deliver a mes-
sage to the Taliban: The assassination
campaign was putting the deal with
the Americans at risk. If the Taliban
didn’t back off, the U.S. could resume
attacks. The Taliban maintained that
it had no obligation to reduce violence:
“the Islamic Emirate has not commit-
ted itself to any such undertaking.”
At fifty-nine, Miller is compact, no-
nonsense, and direct. When I arrived
at his base, he was leading his soldiers
in an hour of running and calisthenics,
which, at nearly six thousand feet abovesea level, were enough to tire a soldier
half his age. He is a kind of living sym-
bol of America’s post-9/11 wars. Since
2001, he has spent more than seven
years fighting alongside Special Oper-
ations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, he hunted members of
Al Qaeda and the Taliban; in Iraq, he
took part in the operation that killed
the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi. He noted wryly that many of
the Afghan leaders that he and his staff
encountered, friend and foe, were al-
ready present when he first came to the
region. “We’re dealing with their sons
now,” he said.
Since 2002, American soldiers and
officers have typically served tours of a
year or less. With each rotation, new
soldiers have to learn the country, and
senior officers devise fresh plans. The
result is that twenty years of effort in
Afghanistan has meant twenty differ-
ent campaigns. Miller returned to the
country in 2010 and took the top job in- “This is my fourth, fifth, or sixth
tour,” he told me. “I haven’t counted.”
Miller arrived at the peak of the
American effort, and has presided over
a rapidly shrinking force. Where the
U.S. once pursued ambitious goals, in-
stilling democracy and economic de-
velopment, he defined his mission nar-
rowly: Don’t let Afghanistan become a
terrorist haven. But, he said, there’s a
catch. “You need a government for that.”
Senior officials in the Biden Admin-
istration say that they intend to take
their time before they decide how to
handle Afghanistan. “They’re trying to
figure out the best of the bad options
they inherited,” the second senior Amer-
ican official told me. They are conscious
that, if Biden ignores Trump’s deal and
decides to keep the roughly twenty-five
hundred American troops in Afghan-
istan, the Taliban will almost certainly
resume attacking them.
In January, a senior U.S. military-in-
telligence officer told a group of Amer-
ican soldiers to get ready for attacks.
“We’ve been in this country for twenty
years, and we may be entering the last
four months. These could be the most
uncertain of all,” the officer said. “Come
May 1st, if we are still here, I think it’s
game on for the Taliban.”
Miller told me, “If the Taliban were
to attack U.S. or coalition forces, we