THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022 51
easy alliances, accommodated a range
of aggressive warlords and corrupt of-
ficials. Hoping to end the war, he made
strenuous efforts to start a dialogue
with the Taliban. These had served
mostly to compound his image as a
hapless leader, trapped in a toxic rela-
tionship with his American patrons,
but he hadn’t given up. “I’ve been say-
ing for years that the Taliban are our
brothers,” he told me. “Let’s work to-
gether for a common future.”
Karzai’s status in the new Afghan-
istan is tenuous; he is not in power, but
neither is he entirely out. A well-con-
nected Afghan suggested that Karzai
was a “sort of hostage” of the Taliban,
who had prevented him from leaving
because they needed him as an inter-
locutor with the West. (Karzai and Mu-
jahid both deny this.) Karzai had rea-
son to be wary of the new government.
Sirajuddin Haqqani had once tried to
assassinate him. But Karzai told me
that he had been meeting regularly with
Taliban ministers, and insisted that they
had “an absolute conviction that the
government needs to be inclusive.” He
emphasized that Afghan society had
changed in the previous two decades.
“There were downsides to the Ameri-
can experience, but there were positives,
too,” he said. He mentioned increased
education, especially among women,
and the improved roads.
The question of how Afghanistan
would be governed remained open, he
conceded. A provisional constitution
had to be enacted; a commission would
then draft a permanent constitution
and submit it to a national loya jirga,
or grand council. “The future state
should present the will of the people,”
Karzai said. “I will be pushing for a de-
mocracy, of course.” He laughed. “But
there will be those who oppose it, who
will say, ‘Look at the sham of a democ-
racy that was here before.’”
O
n a road east of Kabul is Camp
Phoenix, a military base erected
by the U.S. In 2014, the Americans
handed it over to the Afghan military,
and it was turned into a rehabilitation
center for a burgeoning population of
drug addicts. The Taliban, during their
first tenure, virtually stamped out opium-
poppy cultivation. But, after the Amer-
icans invaded, several prominent war-
lords allied with the U.S. reportedly
became involved in the heroin trade.
Opium farming expanded hugely, and
Afghanistan reëmerged as the world’s
primary supplier. There are now be-
lieved to be more than three million
addicts in the country.
When the Taliban returned in Au-
gust, about a thousand addicts were
housed on the former base, where a six-
week rehabilitation program had been
instituted under the auspices of the
Ministry of Public Health. By Decem-
ber, the Talibs had picked up some two
thousand more on the street and brought
them to the center. But the program’s
staff, like other civil servants in Afghan-
istan, had not been paid for months.
There was no budget for food, and the
patients were starving.
I toured the center with a young so-
cial worker named Mohammad Sabir.
The patients, most of them wearing
dirty hospital smocks, were shuffling
around the grounds, or sprawled in an
unkempt yard. All were painfully thin.
Many pantomimed hunger, rubbing
their bellies or gesturing as if eating an
imaginary meal.
Sabir acknowledged that the only
food the camp had was what remained
in its stores from before the govern-
ment fell. The patients were given a
cup of watered-down milk and a piece
of naan for breakfast, rice for lunch,
and beans and a half-piece of naan for
dinner. As we approached a garbage
bin, Sabir chased away a man who was
scrounging for food. “Two nights ago,
they ate the camp cat,” he said. “They
tore it apart and ate it raw.”
In the yard, one man was carrying
another on his back. They were Aman-
ullah and Abdul Rahman, two friends
in their early thirties. They had grown
up in the farm country near Kunduz,
and had joined the Afghan Army when
they were in their late teens. Amanul-
lah explained that he was being car-
ried because he had lost a leg when he
stepped on a mine in Helmand. Abdul
Rahman’s arm had been wounded in
the same explosion; he wore a metal
vise, with pins going into his humerus.
They had both started using heroin to
ease their pain.
Abdul Rahman sat by silently,
wearing a vacant look. Amanullah
told me that the explosion had af-
fected his friend: “He was different
before.” Amanullah said that his great-
est wish was to return to his wife and
three children. He believed that his
addiction was cured, and he was de-
termined never to use heroin again.
In his hand, he carried what remained
“Bad news—the rats are subletting to cockroaches.”
• •
