9-1-WHAT?:

There's a sense among rank-and-file Taliban members that the group should govern "without making any concessions towards women's rights," the writer Anand Gopal says.Photograph by Alex Majoli / Magnum

Last week, The New Yorker published "The Other Afghan Women," a penetrating report on an unlikely source of support for the Taliban during their stunningly quick reconquest of Afghanistan: the country's rural women. While the Taliban's recapture of Kabul sparked panic among residents of that city, the response of women in Afghanistan's countryside--home to the majority of the population, and the site of much of the violence of the two-decade U.S. occupation--was more complicated. Reporting this spring and summer from the country's southern Helmand Province, the writer Anand Gopal encountered relief and outright support among some local women, despite the Taliban's harshly repressive treatment of women when the group last ruled the country, and in the areas it has controlled more recently. [...]

Anand, many of the young Taliban members who recently surged into Kabul and into cities and towns all over Afghanistan--they weren't even born when 9/11 happened. I wonder, when they talk about 9/11, when they think about 9/11--this is an event that fundamentally shaped their lives, and they have no memory of it--how do they talk about it?

Well, David, the remarkable thing is that most of them don't even know about 9/11, and many of them have no conception of it or the foggiest notion of it. You know, they'll say, Yeah, there was some attacks in the U.S.A., but they don't really link 9/11 to what's happened in their country for the last twenty years.

Why do they think the United States came to Afghanistan, invaded Afghanistan, in the first place?

You know, it's interesting. I often ask Taliban members and non-Taliban members, Why do you think the U.S. is here? And they give all sorts of reasons, from, you know, "Oh, we have minerals here and, you know, the Soviets wanted our precious metals, and now the U.S. does, too."

You know, "They just hate our way of life," which always struck me as interesting because that was the frame that we're using on 9/11 here in the U.S. And, of course, it's different when you get to the edge--you know, the sort of more élite Taliban who, who follow the news--but I'm, I'm talking about the rank-and-file Taliban. They really don't see their conflict, or their struggle, as having anything to do with September 11th. [...]

We hear talk about a potential civil war, yet again, in Afghanistan. What is the potential for that, and, if it happens, what would the lineup be? What would the sides be?

So, you know, the Taliban is very different today than it was in the nineties--where, in the nineties, it was really like this hardcore clique of mullahs or, or religious clerics, from Kandahar and Helmand, these southern provinces, and it's really broadened and diversified in the last twenty years, so it includes Uzbeks and even some Hazaras and other ethnic groups. It's really a coalition today of tribes and clans and villages, and what really held that coalition together over the last twenty years is that they all felt one way, that they were marginalized from the post-2001 order for various reasons. So that was the cohering factor. But now that factor is gone because now they're in government. So now they actually have to do a much harder thing, which is to actually govern, to distribute revenue fairly among these various groups, to distribute ministerial posts and patronage among these groups, and I think that is where the fault lines are probably going to emerge, where there's groups that said, O.K., we were opposed to the previous Afghan government, but now we're joining this government. We don't want to be dominated by people from Kandahar--Pashtuns from Kandahar--for example. So there are real fault lines. There are already some signs that some of the ethnic minority groups within the Taliban are disaffected, so this is one potential way in which the Taliban could break apart.

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