48 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
that Ghani’s flight and the quick fall of
Kabul had taken them by surprise. “They
weren’t really ready for it,” Gailani said.
“They still have problems to work out
among themselves.”
N
ear Kabul’s Bird Market, an an-
cient bazaar where poultry, fight-
ing birds, and songbirds are sold, is a
twenty-foot obelisk, topped with a red
clenched fist. It was erected in honor of
Farkhunda Malikzada, a young woman
who was beaten and burned to death
by a jeering mob of men in 2015, after
being falsely accused of burning a Quran.
The question of women’s rights is
perhaps the greatest unresolved issue in
the new Afghanistan. After taking
power, the Taliban leadership announced
that girls up to the sixth grade could
resume schooling, but for the most part
older girls had to wait until “conditions”
were right. When I talked with Muja-
hid, the spokesman, he was vague about
what those conditions were, and about
whether women would be allowed to
work. The impediment was funding, he
said. “For education and work, women
need to have separate spaces,” he ex-
plained primly. “They would also re-
quire special separate means of trans-
portation.” But, he added, “the banks
are closed, the money is frozen.”
Mujahid didn’t answer when I asked
about plans for women in government.
Instead, he pointed out that there were
still women working in various minis-
tries, including health, education, and
the interior, and also at the airports and
in the courts. “Wherever they are needed,
they come to work,” he insisted.
But some of these women were being
forced to sign in at their jobs and then
go home, to create the illusion of eq-
uity. The Taliban had also closed the
Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which was
created soon after the U.S. invasion; the
building was repurposed as the new
headquarters of the religious police, the
Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue
and Prevention of Vice. In September,
on the day that Mujahid announced the
new government, a group of women
gathered on the street to protest. Tali-
ban fighters pushed their way into the
crowd, striking some of the demonstra-
tors and firing weapons into the air.
Senior Taliban officials tended to de-
flect concerns about the future of women
in Afghanistan. When I asked Suhail
Shaheen, the Taliban nominee for Am-
bassador to the U.N., whether his gov-
ernment would allow women in schools
and in the workplace, he shot back, “If
the West really cares about girls, they
should attend to their poverty. Sanc-
tions are punishing the fifteen million
girls in this country.”
Shaheen was in Kabul, rather than
at the U.N. headquarters, in New York,
because the Taliban regime has not been
granted diplomatic recognition. I met
him in the garden of the Serena Hotel,
an old haunt of journalists and politi-
cians. Shaheen was happy to talk about
America’s failings but grew testy when
pressed on sensitive matters. I asked
about the Hazaras, a predominantly
Shiite minority that has historically
been persecuted by the Taliban, who
are mostly Sunnis from the Pashtun
ethnic majority. Shaheen replied that
the new government had no intention
of harming them. I noted that, in the
nineties, his comrades had slaughtered
thousands of Hazaras, whom they re-
garded as apostates. He stared stonily
at me. Finally, he said, “The Hazara
Shia for us are also Muslim. We be-
lieve we are one, like flowers in a gar-
den. The more flowers, the more beau-
tiful.” He went on, “We have started a
new page. We do not want to be en-
tangled with the past.”
D
espite the talk of inclusion, the
highest ranks of the Taliban gov-
ernment initially contained no Hazaras,
and no women. In late September, amid
international criticism, the Talibs added
an ethnic Hazara, as the deputy health
minister, and an ethnic Tajik, as the
deputy trade minister. The additions
struck many Afghans as tokenism. As
an adviser to the Taliban told me, “Call-
ing their government inclusive is not a
help—because it’s not. ”
The government is also said to
be profoundly divided. On one side is
the Kandahar faction, named for the
southern city where the late Mullah Mo-
hammed Omar founded the Taliban. It
includes the country’s Supreme Leader,
an enigmatic scholar of Islam named
Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, and
the acting defense minister, Mullah Mo-
hammad Yaqoob, who is Mullah Omar’s
son. Its public face is Abdul Ghani Bara-
dar, the acting Deputy Prime Minister,
who played a crucial role in negotiations
with the Americans.
On the other side is the Haqqani net-
work, a clan of militants closely linked
to Pakistan’s secret services. Where the
Kandahar faction began as an insular,
rural force, primarily concerned with
ruling its home turf, the Haqqanis were
interested in global jihad. It was the clan’s
founder, the late Jalaluddin Haqqani,
who connected the Taliban with Osama
bin Laden. For some members of the
Kandahar faction, this is a kind of orig-
inal sin in modern Afghan history—a
crucial miscalculation that led to the at-
tacks of September 11th and to the for-
eign intervention that forced the Tali-
ban from power.
The Haqqanis led the military take-
over of Kabul this summer, and their
leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is the act-
ing interior minister. The U.S. govern-
ment has offered a ten-million-dollar
bounty for Haqqani’s arrest, in connec-
tion with a series of terror attacks. One
occurred in 2008 at the Serena Hotel,
where I’d met Shaheen; a U.S. citizen
and five other people were killed.
Haqqani is thought to be responsible
for at least two other hotel attacks, and
for two attacks on the Indian Embassy,
in which dozens of people died. He
and his clan now control a prepon-
derance of security positions in Af-
ghanistan. As interior minister, he has
authority over the police and the in-
telligence services. His uncle Khalil
Haqqani, who is also wanted for ter-
rorism, leads the Ministry of Refugees.
Élite Haqqani commandos run mili-
tary bases in and around Kabul.
Mawlawi Mohammad Salim Saad,
a former head of suicide bombers, is in
charge of security at the Kabul airport.
I met him one evening at his office,
surrounded by a dozen of his men. They
had just come from their prayers, and
Saad, a tall, severe-looking man, told
me that he was fasting. When I asked
how he had felt sending men to their
deaths, he said, “You should ask what
it is that makes people become willing
to give up their lives. These were op-
pressed people, willing to sacrifice them-
selves against a much larger army.”
For the Haqqani faction, it was the
suicide missions and other “complex
attacks” that secured victory over the
