In 2008, when Zubair was seventeen years old, he left the refugee camp in Pakistan where he’d grown up, crossed into Afghanistan, and joined the war against the Americans. Although he and his family had fled the country during the Taliban regime, everyone Zubair knew seemed to agree that it was his religious duty to resist the foreign occupation of his homeland. One of his teachers arranged his enlistment in the Taliban. Zubair underwent a brief training program in Kunar Province, in northeastern Afghanistan, where his father had died during the war against the Soviet Union. He was deployed to his native village, in the Korengal, a narrow, cedar-forested valley that harbored one of the U.S. Army’s remotest outposts. For more than a year, Zubair conducted ambushes, engaged in firefights, and hid from jets and drones. He lost eight friends. Forty-two Americans were killed and hundreds were wounded in the Korengal, which became known as the Valley of Death. In 2010, the Americans surrendered it to the Taliban. Some of Zubair’s comrades remained to launch attacks on Afghan government forces; Zubair asked to be sent to neighboring Nangarhar Province, where there were still foreigners to fight.

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

In June of 2018, the Taliban and the President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, announced a three-day ceasefire—the first of the war—for the Eid al-Fitr celebrations at the end of Ramadan. Zubair was in Shirzad, one of Nangarhar’s most restive districts. In the provincial capital, Jalalabad, he had aunts, uncles, and cousins he hadn’t seen for almost a decade. The government promised the Taliban freedom of movement during the festivities, but Zubair’s commander forbade him to leave. On the second day, Zubair hopped on a motorcycle and went anyway. Unsure what to expect, he wore a pistol under his vest. He’d passed through Jalalabad only once, at night, and he’d never visited any other city. He had spent most of his life on the front lines of the insurgency, where it was a given that urban Afghans were infidels. He knew that many of them despised the Taliban. Confronted with them in the flesh, what would they do?

“I was amazed,” Zubair told me this summer. “They welcomed us.”

It wasn’t only in Jalalabad—the glimpse of peace offered by the ceasefire inspired a national outpouring of optimism and unity. On social media, people uploaded photographs and videos of citizens, soldiers, and police jubilantly embracing Taliban fighters. The day that Zubair left Shirzad for Jalalabad, Muhammad Ajmal Omar, a member of Nangarhar’s provincial council, left Jalalabad for Shirzad. Although Omar represented the district, he hadn’t been there in fifteen years, because it was so firmly in the grip of insurgents. When I met him, in June, he showed me a cell-phone video of his arrival. Walking side by side, Omar and a Taliban commander raise their arms in mutual submission, as a crowd surrounding them chants, “We want peace! Afghanistan is great!”

“These are all Taliban,” Omar said, looking at the screen as if, a year later, he still couldn’t believe it. “We were crying the whole way.”

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Zubair heard that Omar was returning to Jalalabad with a large caravan of Taliban fighters. The governor of Nangarhar Province had invited the militants to spend the night at his guesthouse. Zubair decided not to join them. While wandering around the city—which teemed with mango-colored rickshaws, raucous bazaars, and pink bougainvillea spilling over compound walls—he had been surprised to discover that it was full of mosques. Everywhere, Muslims were praying. At some point, Zubair asked himself, “What if I stayed here? What would my life be like?”

On the final day of the ceasefire, as some of the Taliban from Shirzad were leaving the governor’s house, a suicide bomber attacked them, killing eighteen. No one claimed responsibility, but the culprit was widely thought to be a member of ISIS. A branch of the organization had appeared in Nangarhar four years earlier, and had since become the Taliban’s staunch enemy. The Taliban subscribe to a nationalist agenda: they wish to overthrow the government and impose Sharia law, but their ambitions do not extend beyond Afghanistan. ISIS, which seeks to create a global Islamic caliphate, does not recognize the existence of Afghanistan as a sovereign country, and accuses the Taliban of practicing a lax interpretation of Islam that accommodates heretical Pashtun customs.

Zubair felt caught in the middle of this fight. The teacher who had recruited him to the Taliban had subsequently joined ISIS, and had sent him text messages urging him to do the same. In recent months, Zubair had been fighting against ISIS more than against American or Afghan forces. What had begun for him as a resistance against a foreign occupation increasingly felt like Muslims killing Muslims. Zubair was at his uncle’s house when he learned of the suicide attack. By then, he’d made up his mind. His war was over.

During our interviews, which took place in my hotel room in Jalalabad, I never had the impression that Zubair had renounced the Taliban or what it stood for. He was simply tired. “I want a normal life,” he told me. “I want a piece of land and a house, that’s all.” Zubair asked that I not use his real name, and he kept his face wrapped tightly in a scarf, though it was oppressively hot. “The Taliban want to kill those of us who quit,” he said. Muhammad Ajmal Omar told me that the Taliban had been unnerved by how many of their fighters had defected during the ceasefire, and Zubair confirmed that many of his comrades who went to Jalalabad that weekend were now pursuing lives as civilians.

If the ceasefire revealed a profound desire for peace among Afghans, the ensuing year has shown how grievously difficult that will be to achieve. An effort at diplomacy collapsed spectacularly: the U.S. spent months in historic negotiations with the Taliban, but, in September, President Donald Trump abruptly scuttled a nearly completed accord that would have provided for a phased withdrawal of American troops from the country and direct talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. An underlying premise of the accord was the recognition that neither side could decisively vanquish the other—that there is no military solution. Now it appears that they will go on fighting anyway.

Last month, Taliban suicide attackers killed twenty-eight people in Zabul Province, thirty in Parwan Province, and twenty-two in downtown Kabul; U.S. warplanes dropped more bombs than at any point since 2010, when a multiyear “surge” ordered by President Barack Obama was approaching its peak. Between July and October, the United Nations documented more civilian casualties than it had during any other three-month period since it started keeping count, in 2009. So far this year, more than eight thousand civilians have been killed or wounded. In much of Afghanistan, life has never felt more precarious, and the violence has never made less sense.

President George W. Bush announced the invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, from the White House Treaty Room. Explaining the choice of venue, he said, “The only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it.” The Taliban, who had sheltered Al Qaeda while it plotted the 9/11 attacks, were deposed within months. In 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared, “We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability.” Since then, more than a hundred and fifty thousand people have been killed in Afghanistan, and about seven hundred and fifty thousand Americans have served there. The U.S. has spent about eight hundred billion dollars on military operations and on a multitude of economic, governance, education, health, gender-equality, and counter-narcotics initiatives. Today, most Afghans live in poverty, corruption is endemic, literacy and life-expectancy rates rank among the lowest in the world, approximately a third of girls become child brides, and no country exports more illicit opium. The Taliban control or contest more than half the country.