50 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
foreign occupiers. For Baradar, the war
was won at the negotiating table, where
Trump’s envoys agreed to lenient terms
for a withdrawal. I asked Shaheen, the
diplomat, “Are there two Talibans?”
Shaking his head, he said, “There is
one Taliban. They have different view-
points and different angles on how to
proceed, but there is one Islam.” Mu-
jahid went further, insisting, “There is
no Haqqani network.”
The government remains opaque to
many Afghans: its major figures, after
decades as secretive insurgents, avoid ap-
pearing in public. The Supreme Leader
has never been seen. The single known
image of Sirajuddin Haqqani is a sil-
houette. Officials like Yaqoob, the de-
fense minister, typically appear in care-
fully controlled videos. Among the top
leaders, the most familiar face belongs
to the acting Prime Minister, Mullah
Mohammad Hassan Akhund. He was
the Taliban’s foreign minister in the nine-
ties, and remains under sanction by the
U.N. Security Council.
The rumors of internal conflict per-
sist. In mid-September, Baradar van-
ished from view, as reports circulated
that he had been wounded in a brawl
with Haqqani men at the Presidential
palace. The fight was ostensibly set off
by a dispute over which faction had done
more to secure Kabul. Baradar, after an
absence of several days, released a video
denying the reports; his office explained
that he had travelled to Kandahar, be-
cause he needed “rest.”
During my visit, I went to Wardak, a
rural province west of Kabul. It was one
of the last major battlefields in the coun-
try; many of its villages had been partly
destroyed, and the crude stone graves of
war dead were everywhere, marked with
martyrs’ flags. As we drove through a
roadside village, there was a commotion
just ahead of us: gunmen were yelling
and waving their weapons as frightened
civilians hustled past them. An elderly
man explained that the Taliban were hav-
ing an armed standoff. No one seemed
to know what the men were fighting
over; it was just another fight.
I
n Kabul, street markets have sprung
up, where desperate people sell off
their possessions, everything from rugs
and heaters to pet birds. There are beg-
gars everywhere: young children, el-
derly women, men pulling carts from
straps around their foreheads. On the
city’s outskirts, women in burqas sit in
the middle of the road with their chil-
dren around them, hoping that people
in passing cars will toss them some
food or some money.
Without financial backing from
the U.S. and from international lend-
ing institutions, Afghanistan’s econ-
omy has all but evaporated. Hundreds
of thousands of government employ-
ees have not received a salary for months.
In the cities, there is food for sale in
the bazaars, but prices have risen so
steeply that Afghans find it difficult to
sustain their families. In the country-
side, drought has caused widespread
hunger, worsening during the cold win-
ter months. The U.N. World Food Pro-
gram country director, Mary Ellen Mc-
Groarty, told me that the situation was
dire. “22.8 million Afghans are already
severely food-insecure, and seven mil-
lion of them are one step away from
famine,” she said. “You have the drought
banging into the economic crisis, and
it’s been one of the worst droughts in
thirty years.” She concluded, “If this
trajectory continues, ninety-five per
cent of the Afghan population will fall
below the poverty line by mid-2022.
It’s just devastating to watch. If I were
an Afghan, I’d flee.”
As the economic crisis intensifies,
there is a threat of deepening anti-
Western resentment among citizens. In
a curious reversal, Taliban officials I met
with often made overtures of friend-
ship with the U.S., while former U.S.
allies expressed bitterness about Amer-
ica’s failure in their country. Gailani re-
called warmly how President George W.
Bush had invited him to the 2006 State
of the Union address and told him,
during a photo op, “Hamed, buddy,
we’re proud of you!” But he was shocked
at the money that the U.S. had ex-
pended in Afghanistan. “They say as
much as two and a half trillion dollars
was spent here since 2001,” he said. “No
doubt some great things were achieved
in Afghanistan in that time, but you
don’t see any big changes in the coun-
try’s infrastructure, do you?” Gailani
shook his head. “The fact is, most of
the money that supposedly came to
Afghanistan—probably eight and a
half dollars out of every ten—went
back to the U.S., and meanwhile the
corruption here was out of control. Af-
ghan society became corrupted, and it
was that corruption which brought
about this day, with the Taliban back
in power.” With a smile, Gailani said,
“The Americans spent two and a half
trillion dollars to clear this country
from the Taliban, only to give it back
to them again. I will go to my grave
trying to figure out this riddle.”
Hamid Karzai, who served as Pres-
ident from 2004 to 2014, was also deeply
critical of America’s occupation. He
received me in his private library, in a
residential compound in Kabul. It is
surrounded by high concrete blast walls
and situated in the Green Zone, a
highly fortified area around the for-
mer U.S. Embassy.
An elegant, ceremonious man, Kar-
zai urged green tea on me and spoke
about poetry. He especially loved Em-
erson. Kipling was fine, except for “White
Man’s Burden,” he said, shaking his head.
In a marvelling tone, Karzai mentioned
that he had been “greatly impressed” by
the poem Amanda Gorman had recited
at Biden’s Inauguration.
Karzai would not have been Presi-
dent without U.S. support, but while
in office he became increasingly frus-
trated by America’s counter-insurgency
tactics. In 2013, he visited Washington
and, in a tense meeting with Obama
in the Oval Office, raised the issue of
civilian casualties. Karzai told me that
he had shown Obama a gruesome pho-
tograph: an American soldier stood
with his boot on an elderly Afghan
man’s severed hand, while a terrified
woman and children looked on. “I asked
Obama, ‘How can you expect me to be
your ally and to go along with such ac-
tions when I am the Afghan President
and am supposed to protect my peo-
ple?’” Karzai waved his arms in a wide
arc: “And here we are.”
Karzai’s government, built on un-
