The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of the Taliban

[0] From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow.

[1] This is the Daily.

[2] In his final days as president, Donald Trump is promising to withdraw as many American troops as possible from Afghanistan, all but guaranteeing a major place for the Taliban in the country's future.

[3] Today, as that new chapter begins in Afghanistan, my colleague, Mujib Mishal, on what he's, he's learned from living with and reporting on the Taliban for the past 25 years.

[4] It's Wednesday, November 18th.

[5] Mjib, tell me about some of your earliest memories of growing up in Afghanistan.

[6] I think some of my earliest memories is my grandpa visiting our home in Kabul often.

[7] He lived in a different part of the city, and he had a cane.

[8] He was a tall, man and he loved walking.

[9] Every time he would visit our home and he would knock on the door with his cane, it would be, you know, a moment of joy for us, would run to the door.

[10] But this was a period where the daily reality of the city was just the sound and the destruction of rockets.

[11] And in the house we lived in, we had a small garden where my dad would grow vegetables when he would come back from work.

[12] One of those rockets landed as he was watering the flowers and vegetables.

[13] And in the backyard.

[14] Wow.

[15] And we had this apple tree right in the middle of the backyard.

[16] And we're lucky because the rocket kind of cut through that apple tree.

[17] And it landed and it went through the soft dirt and it didn't explode.

[18] But I remember very clearly for years after that, my dad would pour water into that spot where the shell had gone in thinking it would rust up the shell and it won't explode.

[19] So it almost became part of his backyard garden.

[20] And what was going on in the country that explained these terrifying experiences that are happening in your backyard?

[21] Who was behind this?

[22] So this is the early 1990s.

[23] There's a power vacuum.

[24] The Soviet Union that had invaded Afghanistan has just pulled out.

[25] And all these guerrilla factions that were funded by the CIA as part of this larger Cold War rivalry to fight the Soviets are now fighting each other over the power vacuum.

[26] So Kabul, the capital city, is divided into little fiefdoms by these guerrilla factions, and they're firing rockets on each other.

[27] But as a kid, we didn't know of these bigger dynamics.

[28] What I was experiencing was largely just the sound and the horror of the rockets.

[29] And the little excitement that we had during the day was a couple hours and the evening would get electricity.

[30] Power would come up and then people would switch on their television.

[31] And when you switch on the television, there would be a recitation of the Quran and there would be the national anthem.

[32] And then they would go into a children's program.

[33] Most days than not, it was a show about, I think it was a rabbit.

[34] And the rabbit was chasing a carrot.

[35] And I don't really remember the plot of the story.

[36] But I just remember in the daily routine, And in all the chaos, this was a moment of sort of laughter and color and normalcy, right?

[37] Mm -hmm.

[38] But that didn't last long.

[39] I think I was seven or eight when it ended.

[40] And why was that?

[41] What had happened?

[42] It was 1996.

[43] And one of the guerrilla groups, the Taliban, moved into the capital.

[44] They were a force that did not believe in television and music.

[45] and in any visuals and quickly any idea of television and things like that was gone.

[46] They literally turned it off.

[47] They turned it off.

[48] And who were the Taliban to you?

[49] What did you understand about them in this moment?

[50] So we felt the changes immediately.

[51] One thing I remember was there was a constant fear of being raided if you had a television or if they were music heard from your music, your home.

[52] So you either destroyed the television that you had, burn the photo albums, or you found ways to bury them or to hide them.

[53] And my dad, I remember he had a collection of cassettes.

[54] He had favorite singers that he would listen to.

[55] And he took his cassettes.

[56] He took the television.

[57] He took the photo albums up the stairs to this little attic we had.

[58] And he kind of put it all there.

[59] And then at the end of the stairs, he sealed the attic with a wall.

[60] And it was so obvious.

[61] It wasn't a great disguise, really.

[62] But that is the best you could think of.

[63] And then in school, I remember the subjects all of a sudden changed.

[64] Certain subjects were completely dropped.

[65] Like geography was dropped.

[66] There was multiple religious subjects that was added.

[67] And some of the teachers for those religious subjects were clearly officials of the Taliban government because they would arrive in cars.

[68] Cars were very rare back then.

[69] And then around noon, everybody would be filed into this auditorium where the noon prayer would happen.

[70] And one youngish teacher, he would lead the prayers.

[71] And the prayer is supposed to be something focused where you're not looking at anyone, but as he would bend over, as you do in a Muslim prayer, I remember we would all be focused on his gun.

[72] You know, his gun would be strapped to his side.

[73] The other thing was my sister suddenly not being able to go to school.

[74] I have one sister, and she was older than me, and I think she was in sixth grade, and she was top of her class all those six years.

[75] So she continued studying at home initially thinking this was a temporary thing, right?

[76] What system, what government in their right mind would completely stop girls from going to school?

[77] but quickly the sense dawned on her that she may never get a chance to go back to school.

[78] And how do you remember people talking about these changes?

[79] People like your parents, your aunts, your uncles, the adults in your life?

[80] Immediately, if we go back to that context of a capital city in anarchy, the daily reality being rockets, being looting, where there are multiple forces inside the city.

[81] In that context, initially the Taliban was this force that brought an end to the anarchy and into the rockets that people didn't fear losing their lives any moment.

[82] That all of a sudden, at night you could leave your gates open and nobody dared come into your home to steal anything.

[83] That all of a sudden you felt like there was order in the city.

[84] But they brought all of that at a...

[85] enormous cost through terror and fear.

[86] On the streets, you would see the Taliban around prayer time, where they would forcibly lash people to the mosques.

[87] If somebody was caught stealing, their hand was chopped in front of a packed stadium at the halftime of a soccer game.

[88] You were at their mercy.

[89] They set the tone for how you lived your life.

[90] So how long does this period of profound trade -offs that you just walked us through, how long does that last?

[91] At the time, the feeling was this was permanent.

[92] They had 95 % of the country under their control.

[93] But the end of it came really unexpectedly.

[94] Osama bin Laden, who had orchestrated the attacks of September 11th, 2001, was living in Afghanistan.

[95] He was a guest of the Taliban.

[96] Right.

[97] And once bin Laden and Al -Qaeda carried out those attacks in New York, the U .S. invaded, and the bombing of the city started it again.

[98] And what was that time like for you, the time when the United States arrives in Afghanistan and begins this enormous invasion?

[99] I remember when the airstrike started, school still continued.

[100] And as a kid even, I knew very well that from the sky above, the planes will not be able to tell a gathering of a Taliban and a gathering of students wearing turbans.

[101] So I just distinctly remember the turban was part of the school uniform, but I would have it tucked under my arm until that last minute of entering the classroom where I really had to wear it.

[102] And then in the evenings, I remember in the darkness of the city, we could get on the roof to try to sort of estimate what part of the city was hit, because you could see the fire, to know whether we knew a relative or a family member that live close to that area, right?

[103] whether we should worry or not.

[104] In school, I remember there's nervousness in the same teachers and principals we're seeing.

[105] All of a sudden, those meetings at the auditorium, there would be chance of death to America.

[106] And then there was talk of how with faith and with Islam we're going to defeat this global military might.

[107] But the resistance didn't last long.

[108] It only took a couple weeks for the Taliban to realize that this air force in particular, was nothing like they had seen before.

[109] They started running pretty quickly.

[110] That one morning we woke up and they were gone.

[111] They just packed up and left the city.

[112] I remember for a couple of days my dad didn't really believe it, so he didn't tear down the wall to bring out his cassettes, to bring out the television.

[113] But then we finally convinced him.

[114] I just remember it was us kids begging him, it's gone, it's done.

[115] We should bring out that television.

[116] And our idea was that once you bring out the television, you plug it into electricity and you turn it on, you'll go back to the same shows.

[117] So just as quickly as the Taliban arrives and is a total fact of life, it is suddenly just gone.

[118] Yes.

[119] It was established pretty quickly on the streets when the music came back.

[120] And when the barbershops were flooded, just people getting shaves and the beards being gone.

[121] All of a sudden, the world's attention focuses on this deprived, war -torn country.

[122] Dozens of nations come in.

[123] They open up their embassies.

[124] They open up their purses.

[125] Government is inclusive.

[126] Minorities come into the government.

[127] Women are ministers.

[128] Schools open up.

[129] It was a period of opportunities.

[130] And for me personally, in 2003, I got a scholarship to go step.

[131] in Massachusetts in a high school.

[132] And when I was leaving, the energy on the ground at that time was, this is the new beginning for Afghanistan.

[133] This is a country on the road for democratic, fair, just governance and prosperity.

[134] And the Taliban, they don't have a place in that future.

[135] We'll be right back.

[136] Mujib, we know that, of course, the Taliban does not go away.

[137] It starts to reemer.

[138] And I wonder how you experience that during your time in the United States.

[139] The years I was a student in the United States, I would go back home to my family over the summers.

[140] And in the first few years, the Taliban occasionally would come up in the news.

[141] You know, they would launch a small attack somewhere in a far away district.

[142] It wasn't really part of a central conversation.

[143] But as the years passed, it felt that the group was growing stronger.

[144] They went to safe havens across the border in Pakistan.

[145] They regrouped and they came back.

[146] So by 2012, when I returned as a reporter to Kabul, it was very, very clear that they were challenging the existence of this new democratic system that the Americans were bankrolling.

[147] As a reporter on the ground, we felt them in the frequency of the suicide attacks we covered.

[148] A couple times a week, more than that, they would be bombings across the city really brutal bombings and they would just grow in size and in carnage one time they packed a sewage truck with explosives and they detonated pretty close to our office I was driving to work that morning and when I arrived the desk where I work at had been flung and the windows were smashed and it just kept going closer and closer to home where the feeling as a resident of the city as a reporter, was that if I would be stuck in a traffic knot and there would be a truck in front of me, the fear of my heartbeat would go up because anything, any moment could explode in front of your eyes.

[149] And there is nothing you could do about it.

[150] If you came out of your home, you were on the front line.

[151] So at this point, how are you adult reporter thinking about the Taliban?

[152] Are they enemies of Afghanistan?

[153] Are they, in some sense, rulers thrown from power trying to claw their way back as all powers do try to do?

[154] Are they terrorists to you?

[155] Like, how are you categorizing them in your head?

[156] I'm seeing them as all those things because as a reporter, I know there is a backstory to the carnage.

[157] There is an ideology to it.

[158] There's a story to it, right?

[159] The trouble is that their leaders are hiding in safe havens in Pakistan.

[160] They're avoiding interviews.

[161] and their fighters, the only time we see them usually is their dead bodies.

[162] So we don't have as much access to their thinking.

[163] But that started changing in 2018.

[164] And why is that?

[165] Remind us what happens in 2018.

[166] So by 2018, the Taliban have grown into a force to be reckoned with.

[167] They have presence in large parts of the country and the loss of daily life is creating the sense of hopelessness and despair.

[168] And the war is a bloody stalemate.

[169] And the U .S. comes to a realization that despite growing an Afghan security force, despite supporting them with air strikes, it can't really defeat the Taliban militarily.

[170] The Taliban are just stubborn.

[171] So the U .S. decides to open direct talks with the Taliban in Doha.

[172] And that's an opening for me to travel to Doha and to start meeting some of these shadowy figures that had been impossible for us to access for so long to get a sense of how they feel about this conflict.

[173] Hmm.

[174] Mujib, as you covered these negotiations, I wonder what was going through your head because these are people who took a lot from you and everyone around you.

[175] And so I know as a journalist, you're there to cover them in their official capacity, but I wonder what was going through your heart as you're sitting across from them, talking to them, is there a temptation to kind of confront them?

[176] Of course.

[177] There's two things.

[178] One is, yes, here I am for the first time sitting across from people in whose names a lot of carnage happened, that these big bombings happened, that I've actually killed friends, colleagues that I know.

[179] So yes, the anger is there.

[180] But as a reporter covering a war with, multiple brutal sides i've learned to try to keep some of those emotions in check and what also helped was that these were characters whose names i knew and i remember one afternoon in doha i was walking around the hotel where the negotiations were happening and this one middle -aged talib wearing his turban was just standing at the edge of the shoreline looking at the water in doha and i walked up to him and struck a conversation.

[181] And as he was telling me about how the negotiations were going, he paused.

[182] And then he said, well, I won't be in trouble because you probably don't know who I am anyways.

[183] I was like, actually, sir, I think I know your name.

[184] And he said, who am I?

[185] And when I mentioned what ministry he had led, he just started laughing and he just smacked my knee.

[186] And he said, oh, you're a clever one.

[187] And then he said, how do you know?

[188] Like, well, when I was a kid, I lived under your government.

[189] And on the National Independence Day, we would march in the stadium and you would be in the VIP area watching our parade.

[190] But this was 20 years later now.

[191] And as curious as I was about how they're fighting this war, he starts asking me questions.

[192] He's just bombarding me a lot of questions about how Afghanistan has changed.

[193] And then he started asking me some questions about Taliban fighters around coffee.

[194] and some of the ways he was asking me the questions made me wonder how well he knew those fighters who were fighting in his name.

[195] And I realized really quickly that he's disconnected from a reality that has developed over the 20 years when he was hiding in safe havens in Pakistan.

[196] And to me, that was very, very telling because the Taliban leaders were sitting in Doha, who were negotiating a peace deal were actually elderly graybeards who had been out of the battlefield for 20 years or so.

[197] They were people who had experienced the chaos after the Soviet withdrawal.

[198] And they came with a bit of pragmatism, realizing that there was a huge burden of responsibility on their shoulders to avoid Afghanistan falling into another power vacuum again.

[199] But the main leverage they have is the fighting force on the ground.

[200] So this doubt that I had of how well he knows, how well he's aware of the evolution of that force made it clearly important to me that I need to meet face to face with this younger generation of Taliban fighters and understand the fighters and the views and the expectations of the fighter who are the real muscle.

[201] At the end of the day, it is the fighters on the ground that matter in terms of whether this war ends peacefully or whether this country breaks into another civil war.

[202] So how do you actually go about meeting these fighters?

[203] So in February, the U .S. and the Taliban finally signed their deal.

[204] And that began the American troop withdrawal and it mostly stopped the American airstrikes.

[205] and the Taliban reduced its attacks to open direct negotiations with the Afghan government over a power sharing, over a future government.

[206] And that was an opportunity for me to convince one of the Taliban commanders in the East to take us in and let us spend some time with his fighters.

[207] So we're driving towards Alingar where we're supposed to meet these Taliban fighters.

[208] The process has been a little difficult.

[209] for several weeks, actually months, to get access.

[210] So, this photographer, Jim Hollibrook and I...

[211] If there ever was a window to do the gym, now is it?

[212] I know.

[213] Because the airstrikes.

[214] And our reporter in the East, Zabiala, we get in a car and we drive to Lakhman province, where we're meeting these fighters.

[215] There's the last checkpost right before, a bridge where he crossed.

[216] into a Taliban area.

[217] And as the government control ends...

[218] How beautiful are those mountains in the back road, man?

[219] Yeah.

[220] Wow.

[221] As we drive deeper into the Taliban territory...

[222] And their turbines, their weapons out in the open...