“In the past there were no Taliban taxes,” he says. They charge 35,000 afghanis ($455) for every lorry travelling from Herat, on the Iranian border, to Kabul. At the edge of Kabul, the boss of a company which imports cooking gas says the security of his tankers has actually improved over the past year, because the Taliban control more roads. They seem to be applying that method again. The Taliban first took power in the 1990s, when Kandahari merchants paid them to provide security on the roads, for which they charged less than the warlords of the day. The sense of siege comes from more than the violence. The Taliban have also increased attempts to assassinate government officials, many of them successful. Several hundred Afghan soldiers have died just in the past month (and probably a similar number of Taliban). The Afghan army retreated en masse, and the Taliban were eventually beaten back only by American air strikes-the first in months. On October 12th insurgents attacked Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, the first big assault on a city in over a year. In recent weeks the Taliban have launched attacks to try to take control of districts such as Panjwai, near the city of Kandahar. In some parts of the country violence has escalated. On October 26th the United Nations announced that civilian casualties have not fallen since the start of talks.
Yet instead of stepping back to foster dialogue, the Taliban have seized the opportunity to strengthen their position militarily. Air strikes, which in 2019 reached the highest level in the two decades of the American intervention, have since been limited. Now the Pentagon has announced plans to reduce the American force to 2,500 by the end of Mr Trump’s term, in mid-January, over the objections of NATO. In October he said he wanted all American troops “home by Christmas”. Although the agreement foresaw a complete withdrawal only by June of next year, and only if the Taliban kept its side of the bargain, President Donald Trump is in a hurry. Over the past year the number of American soldiers has duly fallen by more than half, from over 9,000 to around 4,500 now. Big questions, such as what form of government Afghanistan should have, have not yet been broached. The two sides are still arguing over the agenda and format of the talks. As well as jobs shooting at government outposts, by night they also operate checkpoints on the road to extort tolls from passing motorists.īut progress has been slow. “The government here provides no opportunities.” The Taliban do provide some. “There is so much unemployment,” he says. Mr Khanjar complains that the locals protect them, but he says he understands why. The local Taliban live in the villages nearby, which they run as fiefs, unmolested by the troops. On his phone, Mr Khanjar shows your correspondent a picture of the unexploded bomb and the phone the Taliban would have used to detonate it. They retreated and then ambushed the fighters. Recently they tried to blow up another outpost along the road, but the police got wind of the plan in advance. Not everything goes the insurgents’ way, says Mr Khanjar. Unlike the cops, they have night-vision goggles and laser sights. But at night the local Taliban shoot at the soldiers from a ridge a few hundred metres away. During the days, things are mostly quiet, he says. Seated by a small vegetable patch, the 25-year-old in charge, Omedullah Khanjar, who commands six outposts along the highway, explains the situation. Around a dozen men, dressed mostly not in fatigues but in shalwar kameez and trainers, stand around. The outpost is little more than a ring of concrete blast walls perched on a hill overlooking the road. At a police outpost in Wardak province, about 20km outside the city on the main highway leading south, the Taliban’s encroachment is evident.
TO REACH THE front line in Afghanistan’s civil war, you do not need to go far from the capital, Kabul.
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