54 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
in Karzai’s government, and a longtime
enemy of the Taliban. He spent some
three years as their prisoner, before es-
caping, and he later survived a suicide
bombing that killed several civilians.
Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsi-
bility for the attack.
When Herat fell, the Taliban cap-
tured Khan, but he managed to flee to
Iran. It is not clear that he poses less
risk from afar. Along with other polit-
ical figures—including two of Ghani’s
Vice-Presidents, Amrullah Saleh and
the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum—
Khan may attempt to raise an armed
insurrection if the new government ap-
pears weak.
In Herat, the Taliban announced
their presence by hanging the bodies of
four alleged kidnappers above the city
from construction cranes. Since then,
things have mostly been quiet, but
during the autumn the city began fill-
ing with displaced people, as thousands
of peasant farmers and their families
fled the drought-stricken provinces of
Badghis and Ghor. According to Mary
Ellen McGroarty, the W.F.P. director,
the refugees were in a desperate state;
on a recent visit, she had nearly been
taken hostage by a mob of them.
I found the refugees along a road
that leads through the desert from Herat
to Badghis. On a patch of treeless dirt,
a few dozen families had cobbled to-
gether shelters from rocks, plastic sheet-
ing, and discarded tin. Most of the men
had worked as day laborers, paid with
a portion of whatever crops they helped
plant. With the drought, though, there
had been no harvest, and no pay.
Two of the women had tuberculo-
sis, and two others were pregnant.
Zainab, one of those with TB, had four
children. She squatted in the dirt and
explained that she couldn’t sleep well;
she coughed constantly and had pain
in her hands and her head.
An elderly man named Ibrahim lived
nearby, with his sister Guljan. As Gul-
jan spoke, Ibrahim stood silently, lean-
ing on a stick. She explained that he
had been beaten by militiamen in their
village three years earlier. “He hasn’t
been the same since,” she said. “He talks
nonsense and swears and sometimes
breaks things.” The other refugees stood
and listened, nodding sympathetically.
They seemed distressed that their el-
ders had no one to help them. When I
asked their ages, Guljan looked uncer-
tain and said, “Ibrahim may be seventy
or eighty, and I am fifty or sixty.” (Most
Afghans do not know their precise age,because they don’t traditionally cele-
brate birthdays.)
Down the road, I stopped at a field
where a larger group had camped out.
Men and boys crowded around, jos-
tling and talking, until their elders man-
aged to calm them down. One elder,
Jan Muhammad, told me that he had
led about a hundred people to Herat,
because there had been no rain where
they lived: “We had nothing to eat, so
we left.” He had no plan, he said. “We
are hoping for some aid from the U.N.,
after some of its officials visited.” No
one from the Afghan government had
come to see them yet. A wealthy busi-
nessman had arrived a few days earlier
and distributed tents, but there had not
been enough for everyone.
A man carried a young boy over to
me, pulling aside his smock to show his
back and left arm, where the skin had
been burned to a livid, bubbled mass.
The Americans had bombed his village
the previous year, he explained. His
older son was killed, and this boy, who
was six, had sustained these burns. “It
itches him,” the man said. “He can’t
sleep at night.”
Everyone there had a story of pri-
vation and despair. A young man who
worked in a roadside eatery next to the
encampments told me that at night,
from his adjoining bedroom, he could
hear the children crying of cold and
hunger. With a despairing look, he said
that he hoped something could be done.
The most important local authority
was the governor of Herat, Noor Mo-
hammad Islamjar, a scholar of Islam
whom the Taliban had drafted into of-
fice. When I visited the governor’s pal-
ace, there was a kind of coat check, where
visitors could leave their Kalashnikovs,
and an armed guard posted by the door.
Inside, Islamjar had set up an office in
an elegant sitting room, a legacy of the
days of the Afghan monarchy.
Islamjar, wearing glasses and a white
shalwar kameez, spoke about the ref-
ugees with scholarly detachment. “The
security problems are over, but the eco-
nomic problems are not,” he said. “Part
of this is climate change. Other fac-
tors include the unfair sanctions.” He
gave me a scolding look. “The Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan will not suf-
fer much,” he added. “But the women
and old people will.”“Are you sure you want to present your ideas in the form of an airplane?”