44 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
(He denies this.) As the talks broke
down, Khairkhwa fled to the Pakistani
border town of Chaman. He was cap-
tured, put on a plane, bound and blind-
folded, and flown to the newly opened
prison at Guantánamo Bay. “The flight
was endless for me, a journey to Hell,”
he told me.
At Guantánamo, Khairkhwa said,
he was denied sleep, handcuffed to
chairs for hours, denied prompt med-
ical treatment, and subjected to months
of interrogation. There were occasional
moments of tenderness, as when a fe-
male military-police officer slipped
him earplugs, hidden in a roll of toi-
let paper, to help him sleep. Mostly it
was boring.
In prison, Khairkhwa insisted that
he was merely a bureaucrat in the Tal-
iban’s administration. American pros-
ecutors said that he was a military com-
mander, who had helped foment a
massacre of ethnic Hazara civilians—
but much of the evidence was classi-
fied. In 2009, President Barack Obama
gave a speech suggesting that cases
like Khairkhwa’s belonged in an un-
easy category: too innocent to charge,
too guilty to free.
Then, in 2014, an American soldier
appeared at his cell and told him that
he was being transferred to house ar-
rest in Qatar. He and four other Tali-
ban leaders were being swapped for
Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier
who had been captured five years be-
fore. Khairkhwa didn’t know much
about Qatar, but his guards assured him
it was a Muslim country. As it turned
out, life was easy there; his wife and
children joined him, and he had an
apartment, all expenses paid by the Qa-
tari government.
Just as Khairkhwa settled in, he
was summoned again: he had been
chosen to be a negotiator on behalf
of the Taliban for an Afghan peace
settlement. Soon afterward, he met
for the first time with his American
counterparts—diplomats instead of
soldiers. “All of a sudden, I was ne-
gotiating with the same people who
had imprisoned me,” he said. “It is a
very strange feeling.”
In the current talks, American ob-
servers noted that the Talibs who had
been held in Guantánamo seemed to
struggle to stay focussed. “Their phys-ghan people, in an election that was
open, at least notionally, to every adult
in the country. Why would an elected
President hand over power to a group
of unelected insurgents? “My power
rests on my legitimacy,” he said. “The
moment that legitimacy is gone, the
whole thing implodes.”T
he negotiators gathered in Doha
at the Sharq hotel—a sprawling
beach resort, owned by the Ritz-Carl-
ton, with high-arched buildings set
alongside ornately tiled pools. It struck
some delegates as a peculiar place to
end a war. “You walk around the hotel
and people are swimming,” Koofi said.
“Women are walking around in bikinis.
And then you go inside a meeting room
to talk about the fate of the country.”
At first, the loathing between the
two sides was so intense that they bri-
dled at standing together in the same
room. “They wouldn’t even look at each
other,” a Qatari official told me. After
a couple of days, they sat down in a
conference room, but even then some
of the delegates found their anger dif-
ficult to contain. Three weeks earlier,
Taliban gunmen had killed the nephew
of Nader Nadery, one of the govern-
ment negotiators. Nadery himself had
been arrested and tortured by the Tal-
iban in the nineties, when he was a
student activist. “I can’t tell you how
badly I wanted to leave the talks,” he
told me. Another negotiator, Matin
Bek, had lost his father to a Talibanattack ten years before; a third, Masoom
Stanekzai, had survived three attacks
in which bombs blew up his car.
The Taliban had their own griev-
ances. Among their negotiators was
Khairullah Khairkhwa, who helped
found the Taliban and served as an in-
terior minister in its government. In
the chaotic days after the U.S. began
attacking, in 2001, Khairkhwa negoti-
ated to become a C.I.A. informant.businessman who meets often with se-
nior government officials told me that,
when Khalilzad reported that Trump
had ordered a pullout, Ghani should
have tried to win over his old friend.
Instead, the businessman said, “Ghani
went around town announcing his in-
tention to destroy him.” I noticed that
Ghani did not have a television in his
office; he prefers to read transcripts of
shows afterward. “He is delusional,” the
businessman said. “He has no idea what
the country thinks of him.”
Ghani was still hoping that Afghan-
istan would retain its place in the minds
of American policymakers. “All I need
from the U.S. is four or five videocon-
ferences a year,” he told me. But the
Americans have given every sign that
Afghanistan is no longer a major con-
sideration. U.S. officials now see Ghani
as an obstacle to a peace deal—wed-
ded to the status quo, which keeps troops
in the country and him in power. “Each
step of the way, he’s resisting,” the se-
nior American official said.
In 2018, the U.S. asked Ghani to ap-
point a negotiating team; it took two
years—and the announcement of a bil-
lion-dollar cut in American aid—for
him to complete the process. Before
the current talks began, he assembled
his negotiators for a historical seminar
on persistent conflicts. He walked them
through Colombia’s civil war, which
lasted fifty-two years; Nepal’s, which
lasted ten; and Sri Lanka’s, which
dragged on for twenty-five. Ghani’s
message was that long wars take a long
time to end. When talks were con-
vened to end the Vietnam War, he
noted, it took nearly three months just
to agree on the shape of the negotiat-
ing table. Whatever pressure his ne-
gotiators felt—from the Americans or
from the Taliban—ought to be resisted,
he said, instructing them, “Don’t bring
home a bad deal.”
According to U.S. officials, the most
favorable outcome of the talks is a cease-
fire and an agreement to form a tran-
sitional government, with power shared
between the Taliban and the existing
Afghan government. The transitional
government would write a new consti-
tution and lay the groundwork for na-
tionwide elections.
Ghani insists that compromise is
dangerous. He was chosen by the Af-