THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022 47
the U.S. should reopen its embassy and
lead international efforts to rebuild Af-
ghanistan. But had the Taliban really
changed, or were they just saying what
they needed to say in order to stabilize
the economy and keep themselves in
power? Until August, some eighty per
cent of the Afghan government’s bud-
get had come from the United States,
its partners, and international lenders.
That support had disappeared. The
Biden Administration also froze all Af-
ghan government funds in U.S. banks—
some seven billion dollars. The Afghan
banking system, without access to over-
seas assets, risks collapse. “Our message
to the world, especially to the Ameri-
can public and the American politi-
cians, is that they should choose a dif-
ferent path, different from the path of
war,” Mujahid told me. “Sanctions, pres-
sures, and threats have not resulted in
anything positive in the past twenty
years. We can go forward through pos-
itive interactions.”
The Taliban seemed assured that
their victory allowed them to reshape
the story of the country’s future, and
of its past. I asked Mujahid if he felt
any regrets over the killing of his
predecessor. “You mean Dawa Khan
Menapal?” he said, and laughed, for
the first time in our talk. He waved his
hands dismissively. “It was war,” he
said. The Americans had tried to kill
him “more than ten times,” he claimed.
“I was just a spokesman, too. Was I a
justifiable target?”
A
t a traffic circle in Kabul, I came
upon a man selling white satin Tal-
iban flags, bearing the invocation “There
is no God but Allah, and Muhammad
is his messenger.” Until August, he had
been a soldier in the Afghan Army, he
told me. Since the government had dis-
solved, and the Army with it, he had
turned to selling the flags. He smiled
and cupped his hands in the air, as if to
say, “It’s a living.”
To most of the Taliban, Kabul is
terra incognita—a cosmopolitan en-
clave in an otherwise rural, and deeply
traditional, country. To the city’s resi-
dents, the Taliban are interlopers, as
out of place as Texas militiamen on the
Upper West Side. Three months after
the takeover, the residents of Kabul
were uneasily adapting to the new re-
ality. Just about all the foreigners had
left the country, but the Taliban were
ubiquitous, manning roadblocks and
access points, riding in Humvees and
pickup trucks with guns at the ready.
Some kept their hair long and wore
the traditional shalwar kameez—
occasionally in incongruously bright
blues, oranges, or yellows—with their
eyes lined with black kohl. Others bor-
rowed the style of U.S. Spe-
cial Forces, wearing cam-
ouf lage uniforms, boots,
and wraparound sunglasses,
and carrying weapons left
behind by American troops.
For the most part, the ci-
vilians pretended the Tal-
ibs weren’t there.
In 2001, when the
American-led invasion
forced out the Taliban, the
Afghan capital was a forlorn place, much
of it in ruins after more than two de-
cades of Soviet occupation and civil war.
By the following spring, it had begun
to revive, as more than a million refu-
gees returned from abroad. Since then,
Kabul’s estimated population has nearly
doubled, to almost five million; the coun-
try has grown from some twenty-one
million citizens to forty million. The
median age is just eighteen.
Kabul is now a bustling commercial
city, with new apartment buildings ris-
ing above the skyline. Its endemic in-
equities remain: there are beggars in the
streets, and the slums on the surround-
ing hills have expanded. But there are
gaudy wedding palaces and dress shops
for the middle class, along with pool
halls, gyms, and hairdressers for young
men. Billboards advertise a startling va-
riety of imported energy drinks.
In the nineties, the Taliban forced
Afghans to conform to their stringent
interpretation of Islam. Violators could
have limbs amputated, or be publicly
stoned to death. Women were made to
wear all-concealing burqas and pre-
vented from holding jobs or attending
school. Morality commissars hunted
down graven images; in shops, men
with markers blacked out illustra-
tions on packages of baby soap. Even
road-crossing signs for livestock were
painted over.
The current residents of Kabul clearly
feared that the terror of those days wouldreturn. But, aside from a few incidents,
the Taliban had subjected them to little
visible repression. Signs on dress shops
still showed Bollywood-style images of
glamorous women, which in the nine-
ties would have brought their proprietors
a beating, or worse. The battle over graven
images was effectively lost: just about ev-
eryone has a smartphone, with access to
Instagram. Although women and girls
had been provisionally ban-
ished from workplaces and
high schools, they were still
out on the streets. All wore
head scarves, but few had
on burqas. Some even wore
makeup, without evident ha-
rassment from soldiers.
One afternoon, I spoke
about the new regime with
Sayed Hamed Gailani, a
prominent former politician
and an astute observer of his country. We
met at his home, in a wealthy section of
Kabul, where a servant brought fresh
pomegranate juice and pastries on deli-
cate porcelain plates. Gailani, a onetime
mujahideen fighter against the Soviets,
is now a rotund, urbane man in his six-
ties. His father was Pir Sayed Gailani, a
Sufi spiritual leader who also controlled
a mujahideen faction—known, in tribute
to its leader’s elegant taste, as the Gucci
Muj. When I mentioned it to Gailani,
he laughed good-naturedly and said, “I
must point out that my father much pre-
ferred Hermès.”
Gailani was among a handful of po-
litically connected Afghans who had re-
mained in the country after President
Ghani fled, hoping to persuade both the
Taliban and the international commu-
nity that there was a viable way forward.
He didn’t pretend that the conflict was
over in Afghanistan. “I don’t think my
life will be long enough to see the end
of this drama,” he said, laughing. “It’s
like one of those Turkish TV series that
never end.” But he professed guarded
optimism. Unlike most revolutionaries,
he argued, the Talibs had not killed a
lot of people in their return to power;
they had behaved themselves this time.
When the Taliban seized power twenty-
five years ago, he said, “you couldn’t go
out without a beard, and the women
couldn’t leave the house.” But, he sug-
gested, the reason the Taliban hadn’t
moved faster to reshape the country was