F
or fifteen years, Zabihullah Mu-
jahid was the Tokyo Rose of the
Taliban: a clandestine operative
who called reporters to claim responsi-
bility for his fighters’ attacks and to exult
in their victories. Sometimes the vic-
tims were American soldiers or their
coalition allies. Sometimes they were
Afghan government troops. Often, ci-
vilians were killed. For reporters, Mu-
jahid was a kind of phantom, a disem-
bodied voice on the phone. No one ever
saw his face, and, when one journalist
claimed to have encountered him, Mu-
jahid fiercely denied it. But he seemed
to talk to everyone, all the time, and a
rumor spread to explain his output:
Zabihullah Mujahid was a composite
identity, assumed by a rotating group
of Talibs, who perhaps weren’t even liv-
ing in Afghanistan. He denied this, too.
Last summer, Mujahid appeared in
public for the first time. After years of
steady gains in the countryside, the
Taliban had swarmed into Kabul, as
President Ashraf Ghani fled to Abu
Dhabi. While the Taliban asserted their
authority, Mujahid held a press con-
ference to announce that he was the
new government’s acting Deputy Min-
ister of Information and Culture. With
the fall of Kabul, he had been trans-
formed from the covert spokesman of
a long-running insurgency to the face
of a national administration. He was,
it turned out, a lean, sharp-featured
man in middle age.
In September, after the U.S. mili-
tary’s last humanitarian-evacuation
flight left the Kabul airport, Mujahid
introduced the interim government of
the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
This was the same name that the Tal-
iban had adopted during their previ-
ous stint in power, a brutal period that
extended from 1996 to 2001. But Mu-
jahid offered a vision of a more ecu-
menical Afghanistan, with an “inclu-
sive” government that protected the
rights of women and ethnic minorities.
He maintained that the Taliban weren’t
after revenge, and would offer amnesty
to their former enemies. This was hard
to believe. A few weeks earlier, Muja-
hid had issued a press release rejoicing
in the assassination of the previous gov-
ernment’s spokesman, a man named
Dawa Khan Menapal. He didn’t say
what his predecessor’s offense was, only
that he had been “punished for his mis-
deeds, killed in a special operation car-
ried out by the mujahideen.”
One December evening, I met with
Mujahid in an unheated corner office
at the Afghan Media and Information
Center, the mostly empty ministry that
he now ran. Wearing a black turban
with white stripes, he sat very still, his
eyes watchful.
I asked how his new position com-
pared with his old one. “In the past, it
was a military situation, and it wasn’t
very pleasant,” he said. “We had to an-
nounce how many people were killed.
That in itself was painful. The second
really painful aspect was the civilian ca-
sualties. We had to gather information
and publish it. It was heartbreaking. It
is three months now that we do not
have such heartbreaking news.”
The Taliban had achieved an aston-
ishing victory: after years of guerrilla
warfare, they had seized power from
an established government backed by
some of the world’s best-equipped mil-
itaries. Afghanistan is now in the hands
of an insurgent force, fervently com-
mitted to bringing about a truly Is-
lamic state. The country seems to be
at the beginning of a revolution just as
sweeping as the Communist victory
that remade China in the nineteen-for-
ties, or the Islamist takeover of Iran in
- But, when I asked Mujahid if the
Taliban were imposing a revolution, he
seemed taken aback. “This is a soft rev-
olution,” he said. “Revolutions are sharp
and problematic, causing bloodshed,
destruction of foundations. That is not
what has happened.” He added, “This
was a change that was needed. We
fought for twenty years to free Afghan-
istan from the foreigners, so that the
Afghans would have a government of
their choice.” Now that the Americans
were gone, Mujahid suggested, Af-
ghanistan could begin anew. “The for-
eign forces were the cause of the casu-
alties, and when they left the war
ended,” he said. “There were also some
authorities who were pocketing the
public wealth. They were corrupt. The
country is free of them, and now we
will try to lead the country toward a
positive change.”
During several weeks I spent talking
with Taliban officials, they all expressed
a desire for good relations with the
United States. Some even argued that
“I would work from home, but I don’t want my
kids to see all the screen time I get.”
