Recently, I had an interesting talk with an Afghan friend in Austria who left Afghanistan with his family almost two decades ago. Most of his childhood friends, it seems, have joined the Taliban to fight a war that they were literally born into. My friend wasn’t from Kabul or any other cities where the fall of the Taliban was cheered 19 years ago when the U.S. invasion began. He was born in Maidan Wardak, a province 40 minutes south of the capital that is largely controlled by militants even now.
A war begun to oust the Taliban is ending with a whimper almost two decades later, with those same Taliban poised for some sort of power-sharing agreement with Kabul. After decades of war and heartbreak and broken promises and shattered lives, so little seems to have changed in Afghanistan. I’ve spent my life trying to figure out why.
