THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 49
problems besetting the Afghan Army so
late in the American era, his sponsors
shouldn’t give up hope. “It takes time to
build an army, brother,” he said. “We are
trying to train the right people. We started
from nothing. Please be patient.”
A
t the Sharq hotel in Doha, Faw-
zia Koofi was often the only
woman in a room full of male nego-
tiators. At first, she told me, some of
her Taliban counterparts refused to
speak to her. At a lunch meeting, two
Taliban seated across from her asked
her to move to another table. A third
Talib at the table stared at the floor,
unwilling to meet her gaze. Koofi
picked up a plate and offered him a
kebab; the Talib took it and smiled.
“Miss Koofi, you are a very dangerous
woman,” he told her. They have been
talking ever since.
By the time I arrived, in late De-
cember, the negotiators had begun to
relax. “They let their hair down,” the
senior American official told me. The
government delegates found that the
Taliban, though often hostile in groups,
were friendlier one on one. The harsher
rhetoric began to fade, and on some af-
ternoons I saw Taliban and government
delegates walking together through the
Sharq’s gardens.
Negotiators from both sides told me
that they felt a heavy responsibility to
end the conflict. Most believe that the
Taliban would accept a deal under the
right circumstances—that they are as
tired of war as everyone else is. But
many observers in Kabul suspect that
the Taliban are using the talks to buy
time until the Americans depart. One
of the skeptics was Sima Samar, who
for seventeen years presided over the
Afghan Independent Human Rights
Commission, which seeks to bring mod-
ern concepts of justice and equality to
the country. Samar believes that the
Taliban will ultimately decide it’s eas-
ier to take power by force. “The Tali-
ban?” she said. “They haven’t changed
a bit.” In December, during a break in
the talks, a video surfaced of Fazel
Akhund, one of the Taliban negotia-
tors, greeting a group of masked men
at what appears to be a military train-
ing camp. As Akhund embraced the
trainees, one of them cried out, “Long
live the holy warriors of Afghanistan!”
In Kabul, Vice-President Amrullah
Saleh suggested to me that pro-gov-
ernment Afghans would be no less re-
luctant than the Taliban to share con-
trol of the country. I met Saleh in 1999,
as the Taliban were surging to victory
in the country’s long, brutal civil war;
back then, Saleh and a few holdouts
were clinging to a tiny piece of terri-
tory in the northeast. In 2004, Saleh
became the head of the National Di-
rectorate of Security, and earned a rep-utation among the Taliban as a fierce
and efficient foe. In July, 2019, suicide
bombers breached Saleh’s security cor-
don and killed thirty-two people.
Saleh argued that, if the Afghan
government is forced to make a deal
with the Taliban before the group for-
sakes violence, the peace will fail, and
the group will try to reimpose its me-
dieval vision. “Society has changed,”
he said. Women have been educated,
young people are connected to the wider
world, English has become common
in the cities. “People will not accept
the Taliban,” he said. “They will not
lie down. We have forty thousand Spe-
cial Forces. Do you think they will let
the Taliban slaughter them one by one?”
He went on, “It will be another civil
war.” The first, in the nineties, killed
more than fifty thousand people. “But
it will be worse than the last one. Ab-
solutely worse.”
Yet the government negotiators will
have to make some concessions to the
Taliban, or the talks will break down,
and the Western countries will likely
leave the population to fend for itself.
“I will fight with my claws and my teeth
for the rights we have gained,” Fatima
Gailani, a government delegate and an
advocate for women, told me. “But there
is a risk that some of these rights are
going to be lost.”
One place to measure that risk is the
Afghan Women’s Skills Development
Center, in Kabul. The center offers train-ing in sewing and catering, and works
with a restaurant to supply jobs for train-
ees. It also provides a shelter for women
and children escaping the difficulties
of a society that, in many places, is still
bound by age-old rules. Almost every
day, a woman or a girl appears at the
doorstep: a child bride fleeing her hus-
band; a wife forced into an abusive mar-
riage; a recently divorced woman whose
family regards her as a disgrace and
sent her into the streets. One recent
morning, a young woman arrived so
badly pummelled that attendants mas-
saged her every day for two weeks.
“There wasn’t a spot on her body—not
one—that was not black-and-blue,” a
worker at the center told me. “I wanted
to scream.” The shelter, the first of its
kind in Kabul, has a maximum capac-
ity of seventy; it is often full.
One of the women who run the
shelter is Mahbouba Seraj, an ebullient
seventy-year-old. Born to royal lineage,
she fled Afghanistan with her family
in 1978, as the country disintegrated,
and settled for a time in Manhattan, at
Lexington Avenue and Forty-third
Street. After 2001, Seraj was drawn back
by the prospect of change in her home-
land. Ever since, she has been sustained
by a sense that outdated traditions were
falling away. “There’s a lot of change
here, and a lot of possibility—and a lot
of pain and a lot of happiness,” she told
me. “All these things used to get swept
under the rug, and there was nowhere
for a woman to go. Now there is.”
Would the shelter survive a Taliban
regime? Seraj isn’t sure. She believes
that the younger generations, which
constitute most of the country’s urban
population, will fight. “I have a belief
in the energy and the idea and the new-
ness and the commitment of the young
people of this country,” she said. “We
have doctors now, we have people with
master’s degrees and Ph.D.s now. So
many women and so many young peo-
ple, so full of energy. They’re not going
to give this up.”
Seraj is less sure about everyone else.
She told me that she’d been chatting
with friends recently, and they all agreed
that the situation was likely to get much
worse: “For the first time after all these
years, I said to my friends, ‘Let’s not be
heroes. At this point, we have to save
our lives.’” ^