Tenacity and carnage: How the Taliban outlasted a superpower
Under the shade of a mulberry tree, near grave sites dotted with Taliban flags, a top insurgent military leader in eastern Afghanistan acknowledged that the group had suffered devastating losses from U.S. strikes and government operations over the past de
But those losses have changed little on the ground: The Taliban keep replacing their dead and wounded and delivering brutal violence.
“We see this fight as worship,” said Mawlawi Mohammed Qais, the head of the Taliban’s military commission in Laghman province, as dozens of his fighters waited nearby on a hillside. “So if a brother is killed, the second brother won’t disappoint God’s wish — he’ll step into the brother’s shoes.”
It was March, and the Taliban had just signed a peace deal with the United States that now puts the movement on the brink of realizing its most fervent desire — the complete exit of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
The Taliban have outlasted a superpower through nearly 19 years of grinding war. And dozens of interviews with Taliban officials and fighters in three countries, as well as with Afghan and Western officials, illuminated the melding of old and new approaches and generations that helped them doit.
After 2001, the Taliban reorganized as a decentralized network of fighters and lowlevel commanders empowered to recruit and find resources locally while the senior leadership remained sheltered in neighboring Pakistan.
The insurgency came to embrace a system of terrorism planning and attacks that kept the Afghan government under withering pressure, and to expand an illicit funding engine built on crime and drugs despite its roots in austere Islamic ideology.
At the same time, the Taliban have officially changed little of their harsh founding ideology as they prepare to start direct talks about power-sharing with the Afghan government.
“We prefer the agreement to be fully implemented so we can have an all-encompassing peace,” Amir Khan Mutaqi, the chief of staff to the Taliban’s supreme leader, said in a rare interview in Doha, Qatar, with The New York Times. “But we also can’t just sit here when the prisons are filled with our people, when the system of government is the same Western system, and the Taliban should just go sit at home.”
“No logic accepts that — that everything stays the same after all this sacrifice,” he said, adding, “The current government
stands on foreign money, foreign weapons, on foreign funding.”
A grim history looms. The last time an occupying power left Afghanistan — when the U.S.-backed mujahedeen insurgency helped push the Soviets to withdraw in 1989 — guerrillas toppled the remaining government and then fought each other over its remains, with the Taliban coming out on top.
Now, even as U.S. forces and the insurgents have stopped attacking each other, the Taliban intensified their assaults against the Afghan forces before a rare three-day truce this week for the Eid holiday. Their tactics appear aimed at striking fear.
Taliban field commanders made clear that they were holding fire only on U.S. troops to give them safe passage — “so they dust off their buttocks and depart,” as one senior Taliban commander in the south said. But there was no reserve about continuing to attack the Afghan Security Forces.
“Our fight started before America — against corruption. The corrupt begged America to come because they couldn’t fight,” a young commander of the Taliban elite “Red Unit” in Alingar said. He was a toddler when the U.S. invasion began, and met up with a Times reporting team in the area where government control gives way to the Taliban.
“Until an Islamic system is established,” said the commander, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “our jihad will continue until doomsday.”
The Taliban now have somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 active fighters and tens of thousands of part-time armed men and facilitators, according to Afghan and U.S. estimates.
It is not, however, a monolithic organization. The insurgency’s leadership built a war machine out of disparate and farflung parts, and pushed each cell to try to be locally self-sufficient. In areas they control, or at least influence, the Taliban also try to administer some services and resolve disputes, continuously positioning themselves as a shadow government.
Even at the peak of the long U.S. military presence and the coordinating effort to help the Afghan government win hearts and minds in the countryside, the Taliban were able to keep recruiting enough young men to keep fighting. Families keep answering the Taliban’s call, and booming profits help hold it all together.
In the second decade of the insurgency, the Taliban have been defined by the ruthlessness of their violence — and by their ability to strike at will even in the most guarded parts of the Afghan capital, Kabul.
They have packed sewage trucks, vans and even an ambulance with explosives, striking at the heart of the city with hundreds of casualties. They have penetrated the ranks of Afghan forces with infiltrators who have opened fire at Afghan commanders, and once even at the top American general in Afghanistan.
When the United States began negotiating in 2018 with a delegation of the Taliban in Doha, across the table were architects of the insurgency — and the survivors of it. Nearly half of the Taliban negotiating delegation had spent a decade each in Guantánamo.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the lead Taliban negotiator, had just been released after 10 years in Pakistani prison, detained because he had made contacts for peace talks with the Afghan government without the blessing of the Pakistani military establishment that had nurtured the insurgency.
One main concern among American and Afghan officials was whether the Taliban’s political wing had true influence among the insurgency’s military commanders.
Taliban officials say what sets them apart from the factions that fought against the Soviet Union and then broke into anarchy over power is that their allegiance was divided to more than a dozen leaders. The Taliban began their insurgency under the authority of a single emir, Mullah Mohammad Omar. But the insurgency reached its greatest heights more recently, with a leadership structure that depends on consensus and then strikes with a heavy fist against any who disobey from within.
Even as new commanders emerged in recent years, much of the leadership council is made up of the older crew that established the insurgency in the years after the U.S. invasion. The old political leaders acknowledge the balancing act they face is like no challenge the insurgency has faced before. They have made sure to tightly control the rationale for their violence — it is a holy war for as long as their supreme leader and clerics decree it to be.
Timor Sharan, an Afghan researcher and former senior government official, said that unity has been easier to maintain with a common enemy, the U.S. military, to fight. But if the Taliban eventually win their dream of an Afghanistan without the Americans, he said, they will face many of the challenges that once dragged the country into anarchy.