52 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
of a broken prosthesis. Holding it up,
he declared, “I am still ready to sac-
rifice for my country.”
M
any Taliban I spoke to suggested
that the viciousness of the war
was an inevitable response to the pres-
ence of foreigners. One senior leader
complained, “When there were forty-
five countries present in Afghanistan,
and hundreds of people were being
killed a day, that was called security.”
Now that the Taliban were in charge,
he argued, there was no need for fur-
ther unrest. “Not one person a day is
killed,” he said, without apparent irony.
“Is this not called security?”
In some ways, though, the Taliban’s
rejection of the previous order has in-
creased the chaos in Afghanistan. On
the day that they took Kabul, they opened
the gates of the city’s main prison, at
Pul-e-Charkhi, and of Bagram prison,
on a former U.S. airbase outside the cap-
ital. More than twelve thousand inmates
rushed out. They included senior lead-
ers of Al Qaeda and at least a thousand
members of IS-K, the Afghan affiliate
of ISIS. On August 26th, one of the IS-K
fighters blew himself up outside the gates
of the Kabul airport, killing thirteen
American soldiers and nearly two hun-
dred Afghans seeking evacuation.
During my visit, there were “sticky
bomb” explosions every few days in
Kabul: bombs attached to a magnet
were slapped onto the exterior of a car
and set off with a signal from a cell
phone. I came upon the site of an at-
tack just a few blocks from the police
headquarters. The bombed vehicle had
been removed, and Taliban were di-
recting traffic around strewn debris and
a large scorch mark in the road. Down
the street, gunmen moved in pairs, scan-
ning rooftops and searching in alley-
ways. The civilians passing by kept their
eyes averted, determined not to reveal
any interest.
The sticky-bomb attacks were re-
ported on social media, but with no in-
formation about who had carried them
out or why. Last summer, IS-K claimed
responsibility for two such attacks on
vans carrying Shiite “disbelievers.” The
group has slaughtered hundreds of Shi-
ites, in schools, hospitals, and mosques.
It has also targeted the Taliban, whose
members it regards as apostates. Not
long after the fall of Kabul, Zabihullah
Mujahid, the spokesman, held a wake
for his mother, who had died of an ill-
ness. While he and other officials were
at the mosque, an IS-K suicide bomber
struck. Mujahid survived, but several
people were killed and many others were
wounded—victims of the kind of at-
tack that he had once applauded.
Taliban officials mostly brushed aside
the dangers of IS-K. At a military base
in Logar, a strategic hill town outside
Kabul, a senior Haqqani commander
named Mawlawi Deen Shah Mokhbit
assured me that IS-K had “already been
defeated, by God.” In the manner of
someone unused to being interrupted,
he intoned, “When we were fighting the
Americans and their Afghan mercenar-
ies and slaves, doing jihad against them,
we were also fighting the Daesh, the
Khawarij”—those who fight other Mus-
lims in the name of Islam. “But God
defeated them, God obliterated and fin-
ished them.” Noting that the country
had endured forty years of war, Mokh-
bit added a caveat: “Afghanistan is full
of weapons and of people who grew up
Kabul ’s Kart-e-Sakhi cemetery surrounds a shrine favored by Hazaras, a Shiite group that has been persecuted by the Taliban.
