are prepared to respond proportion-
ally, with precision, and with capacity
to spare.” But he also said that he was
prepared to pull out the last of his sol-
diers if ordered to do so. The unan-
swered question—which has hung over
the country since 2001—is whether the
Afghan state can survive without West-
ern troops. When I asked if he thought
that the Afghan Army could secure
the country alone, his answer was not
reassuring. “They have to,” he said.
In early January, I flew with Miller
to Afghan Army bases in Mazar-i-
Sharif, in the north, and near the Hel-
mand River, in the south. Looking
down on the Hindu Kush from our
C-130 transport plane, I was reminded
of the country’s natural beauty but also
of the geographic realities that have
hampered every attempt to help it stand
on its own: it’s landlocked and cov-
ered by mountains and desert, with
only twelve per cent of its land suit-
able for farming. For much of its mod-
ern history, Afghanistan has been a
ward of the international community:
foreigners pay seventy-five per cent of
its federal budget, and American tax-
payers largely underwrite its Army and
its security forces, at a cost of four bil-
lion dollars a year. But, if there is any
hope that the Afghan state can be-
come self-sufficient, it resides with the
soldiers who train here.
In Mazar-i-Sharif, we met General
Sami Alizai, the commander of the
209th Corps. (He has since been pro-
moted to lead the Afghan Army’s spe-
cial-operations corps.) An ethnic Pash-
tun from the south, Alizai signed up
in 2004 and went on to graduate from
the Joint Services Command and Staff
College, one of the United Kingdom’s
élite military academies. A typical U.S.
officer of Alizai’s rank is in his fifties;
Alizai is thirty-five and exudes restless
confidence. “It was a tough fighting
season,” he told Miller. “There are a lot
of Taliban dead.”
At a lunch meeting with Miller, the
limitations of NATO’s campaign be-
came clear. When the season began,
five of the fifty districts that Alizai’s
troops oversaw were under Taliban
control, and twenty-nine were “on the
edge,” he said. His men had secured
a dozen of them, he told Miller. But
the Taliban had captured several vil-
lages along Highway 1, effectively cut-
ting off the northern and western parts
of the country. In Maimana, the cap-
ital of Faryab Province, the local gov-
ernment’s control extends barely past
the city center. “You can only go to
the end of the bazaar,” he said. Sev-eral local leaders had been assassinated.
“What do you think is happening?”
Miller asked.
“The Taliban are trying to set up a
network here,” Alizai said. “We don’t
know who they are.” It was a conver-
sation that might have taken place fif-
teen years ago.
The 209th Corps is assisted by six-
teen hundred NATO troops, who help
with training, and by an American Spe-
cial Forces team, which provides both
training and protection in combat; if an
Afghan unit comes under attack, the
Americans can call in a plane or a drone.
(In one of the more unusual aspects of
the U.S.-Taliban peace deal, the United
States is allowed to protect Afghan
forces from attacks. In practice, that
means almost daily American air strikes
and drone attacks; when I visited Hel-
mand Province, the U.S. had carried out
two drone strikes that morning.) The
U.S. team was highly competent; all of
its twenty members were seasoned, with
some having served a dozen combat
tours, and many spoke Dari and Pashto.
But Alizai worried that the West’s com-
mitment might be coming to an end—
or that it might become too small to
matter. Over lunch, Miller told him
bluntly that he didn’t know what the
future would bring. “You know where
we’re at,” Miller said. “It’s just not clear.”
The 209th, budgeted for fifteen thou-
sand troops, was fielding barely ten
thousand. Even though the Army guar-
antees employment, in a country where
jobs are scarce, Afghan officers strug-
gle to find recruits; young people are
often reluctant to leave their families
for long tours. Alizai was undeterred.
“I think we can get it up to ninety per
cent soon,” he told Miller.
Alizai said that he was trying to con-
tain the militias of two local warlords:
Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former Vice-
President, and Atta Mohamed Noor.
Both men befriended the Americans
in 2001, and both fight the Taliban. But
they operate more like local fiefs than
like agents of the government. Dostum
has been accused of murder, rape, tor-
ture, and mass executions. “I will try to
bring them in,” Alizai told Miller. “Once
we pay them, we can influence them.”
But there was little sign that this time
would be different.
Alizai told me that, despite all the“How long do we need to stand here so you
can avoid talking to your neighbor?”