THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022 53
in war, so there may be small incidents.
But they cannot pose a threat to our na-
tion and system of government.” As we
talked, a bodyguard stood at his side,
staring at me with a finger on the trig-
ger of his weapon. At the end of the in-
terview, Mokhbit, evidently in an abun-
dance of caution, ordered a group of his
gunmen to escort me down the moun-
tainside. About halfway, they handed me
off to another armed convoy, who ac-
companied me to the edge of the city.
I
n large swaths of the countryside, as
the Taliban took territory in the past
decade they became a kind of shadow
government. The Talibs were popular
among some locals; they were, after all,
sons of the same soil. As the Ameri-
cans withdrew, many people surren-
dered to the Taliban without a fight—
some of them motivated by survival,
others by genuine affinity. In the town
of Bamiyan, eighty miles west of Kabul,
the new governor, Mullah Abdullah
Sarhadi, told me that he had taken the
territory peacefully. “There was no
fighting, praise be to God,” he said.
In Bamiyan, the Taliban occupy a
fortified complex on a high hilltop.
Governor Sarhadi, a spare-looking man
with a gray beard, wore a black turban
and a short umber shawl, called a patou.
He told me that he had joined the jihad
during the Soviet invasion, and had
been a fighter ever since. “I have many
scars on my body,” he said. He had lost
an eye in a firefight outside Kabul, he
explained: a bullet had entered his head
and come out through his eye socket.
In 2001, during the Taliban’s last
stand, at Kunduz, Sarhadi had been
taken prisoner, and militiamen had
locked him in an airless shipping con-
tainer, along with hundreds of other
fighters. Many asphyxiated, but Sar-
hadi was saved by a fluke: his captors
fired into the container, and he survived
by breathing through the bullet holes.
Afterward, he was handed over to the
Americans and held for four years in
Guantánamo. Following his release, he
returned to the battlefield and was cap-
tured again; he spent eight more years
in prison, this time in Pakistan.
In Bamiyan, though, he and his men
felt at home. “We have no concerns,”
he told me. “This is part of our nation,
and we all belong to the same nation.”
He had been there before the Ameri-
cans came, he said, and it had been fine
then, too.
This was a strikingly revisionist view.
If there is a single place that embodies
the Taliban’s abuses, it is Bamiyan. The
small town, set in a beautiful mountain
valley, is inhabited mostly by Hazaras.
Distinguished by their Mongol features,
the Hazaras are said to be descendants
of Genghis Khan’s army, which invaded
in the thirteenth century.
Many Hazaras live in caves hewed
into the valley’s vast wall of sandstone
cliffs. The caves were first excavated by
Buddhist hermits—monks who had
made their way along the ancient Silk
Road, which connected China with the
Middle East and Europe. About fif-
teen hundred years ago, the monks
carved two statues of the Buddha, each
as big as a jetliner, into the porous stone.
The Bamiyan Buddhas became Af-
ghanistan’s greatest tourist attraction.
But, in 2001, Mullah Omar decreed that
they were un-Islamic idols and had to
be destroyed. As archeologists and world
leaders pleaded for restraint, militants
demolished the statues with explosives
and artillery. Around the same time,
Taliban entered the Kabul Museum
and took sledgehammers and axes to
thousands of years’ worth of artifacts.
On my recent visit, when I brought this
up with officials in Kabul, they gener-
ally tried to change the subject.
Sarhadi had been in Bamiyan when
the Buddhas were destroyed, and I asked
if he thought that it had been a mis-
take. His aides looked upset, but he
waved a hand dismissively. “This was a
decision by the leadership,” he said.
“Whatever the leaders and the emirs of
the Islamic Emirate decide, we follow.”
According to reports, Sarhadi was
also linked to killings of Hazaras, in-
cluding a massacre in 2001 that Am-
nesty International said took the lives
of “over three hundred unarmed men
and a number of civilian women and
children.” Sarhadi denied any involve-
ment. His aides protested that I had no
right to question him. “Have you ever
asked officials in the West about the
atrocities they have committed in the
Islamic world?” one asked. Sarhadi added
that the West had nothing to teach Mus-
lim countries about human rights. “We
challenge the whole world!” he said. “In
Islam, even when you slaughter a sheep,
the first condition is that you should
not sharpen your knife in front of it,
and the second condition is that the
knife should be very sharp, so that the
sheep does not suffer.”
Sarhadi told me that he had brought
peace to the area. “By the grace of God,
there are no problems now, and there
will be none in the future,” he said. If
I wanted to know how the local peo-
ple felt about his leadership, he said, I
should go ask them: “We serve the peo-
ple day and night.”
Later that day, I met some of the
local people. Near the base of the cliff
where the Buddhas once stood, some
young men had dug a hole and set a
fire to bake potatoes. There was no
work, they explained, and so they were
trying to stave off hunger.
At the great gash where the smaller
Buddha had been, I found Hazara men
and boys staring into the dark recess.
They explained that they had come from
a neighboring province, after hearing
that the new authorities were handing
out food coupons. At the governor’s
compound, they had joined a crowd that
gathered to plead for help. The Taliban
guards had said that they had nothing
to give, and ordered them to leave.
The Hazaras decided that, before
returning home, they would visit the
site of the Buddhas. They had never
seen them, and now they had come too
late. I asked what they thought about
their destruction. The oldest man said,
cautiously, that he thought it was a pity,
since the statues had been “a part of
history.” When I asked what he thought
about the Taliban, he looked away, pre-
tending not to hear me.
S
prawled on an arid plain four hun-
dred miles west of Kabul is Herat, an
elegant oasis city distinguished by an im-
mense mosque with exquisite blue-and-
yellow tile work. It has been fought over
many times in its long history. The lat-
est battle ended on August 13th, when,
after weeks of fighting, government forces
surrendered to the Taliban. Kabul’s col-
lapse came just forty-eight hours later.
Herat’s defense was led in part by
its former governor Ismail Khan, a
tough-as-nails warlord in his late sev-
enties. Khan is renowned in Afghani-
stan as a mujahideen leader, a minister
