The New Yorker Radio Hour - Remembering September 11th, and the Future of the Taliban

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Twenty years after the events of September 11th, the writer Edwidge Danticat reads from her essay “Flight,” about the way that tragedies are memorialized by those who survive them. And the New Yorker contributor Anand Gopal reports from Afghanistan, where, he says, the younger rank and file of the Taliban are hardly aware of the way that the 9/11 attacks have shaped the last two decades. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio. My family in Haiti has been removing rubble from a school that was shattered during the earthquake of January 12, 2010. They have found bones, human bones. Because they're not scientists or DNA experts, it's impossible for them to trace the bones back to the bodies. to which they once belonged. Active, lively people who spoke and laughed

and danced and loved. In 2011, Edwidge Dantikot wrote an essay for the New Yorker called Flight. It was the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Dantikot was also writing in the wake of a devastating earthquake

that had hit her home country of Haiti the year before. Whose bones are these, they wonder? Do they belong to the bright student who was always first in her class, to a parent with whom a teacher had an appointment? Are there the teacher's bones? It is the burden of the survivors and the curious to decipher final moments, whether there occurred a year, 10 years, or a thousand years ago. After two years, after 10 years, there's still enough people around to look back and to remember. After 100, a thousand, or 10,000 years, the bones and images will have to speak for themselves.

The image that lingers most in my mind from September 11, 2001 is that of human beings attempting to fly. men and women catapulted from or fleeing a volcano-like inferno of fuel, fire, heat, and smoke, then cutting across a clear blue sky down toward the ground. Some were alone. Some were in pairs. Some tried to make parachutes of ordinary things, curtains, clothes. One woman held on to her purse. perhaps thinking that she might need it on the very slight chance that she landed safely on the ground.

We are often told that we must not compare tragedies, but how can we not when we experience them in the same body and with the same mind? Past horrors give us a language with which to define new ones. Worldwide terrors become personalized. My father, for example, who woke me from a deep sleep in another part of New York to tell me that the World Trade Center had been destroyed, died four years later of pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that also struck many 9-11 first responders. He had spent part of that day in downtown Brooklyn picking up people fleeing Manhattan and chauffering them home.

That eerie coincidence is one more thing that links September 11th to all the other horrors that my father endured in his life, including a brutal dictatorship in Haiti. As we look back up at the World Trade Center, and I know you can see it better with helicopters, but you can see it from the ground here as well. The picture that we are looking at, that most of Lower Manhattan is looking at, flames inside the World Trade Center, and the huge hole. My father was extremely critical of the television stations that showed the so-called jumpers. Yes, the images were shocking and deeply unsettling, but they rendered undeniable the true horror of that day. Even though, like bones, they mostly tell one story, the final one. The job of reconstructing lives belongs to the living, the memory keepers,

which is what all of us became that day, willing or unwilling witnesses, unable to look away. Where were you, sir? Right underneath it. Right underneath the Trade Center. Went ahead. The second one, both of them hit. We ran like how all we up here. Did you happen to look up?

Yeah, we seen the second one run right into. We're unloading a truck. A few days after September 11th, when I ventured near the still smoky ashes of the World Trade Center, I kept thinking about a clear blue sky. that had rained lives. I got on a bus filled with other ordinary New Yorkers whose eyes were still teary and red and whose mouths and noses were covered with dust masks.

Besides the shared sensation of having been shattered, though, there is also a feeling of community. Those of us who were from countries that have always been in their own ways terrorized, could now be counselors to our previously sheltered friends, but only barely. For no matter how much we immerse ourselves in communal grieving, we all carry within ourselves our own private memorials of loss

and an increasing fear of future ones. Watching any disaster from near or far makes us aware that memorials are not only places, but also experiences. experiences. Acts of remembrance can surface out of daily rituals, even interrupted ones. A place setting left unused at a dinner table, an oversized shoe into which we slip a foot, a prayer whispered over unclaimable bones. Though I occasionally suffer from a fear of flying, doing the past 10 years getting on an airplane has become an act of remembrance.

each necessary surrender to every new, sometimes frustrating security measure is an acknowledgement that I too am attempting to glide on wind currents, on borrowed wings, while also hoping, praying to land safely on the ground. Edwidge Dantica, her essay, Flight, was published in the New Yorker on the 10th anniversary of 9-11. Now, it's impossible to calculate all the many consequences of September 11th, to our lives, to foreign and domestic policy, and to the shape of the country. But certainly the most immediate policy consequence was the United States' invasion of Afghanistan. It began just weeks after the attacks, and that long and bloody episode has now just ended.

The Taliban, which had sheltered al-Qaeda's leaders, are fully in charge of that country once again. So what now? Anan, hi. Hi. How are you? Good, David. Thanks. You're in Qatar now? I'm in Qatar, yeah.

Contributor Anand Gopal was en route to Afghanistan when I spoke with him. Kapal has reported extensively on the Taliban, and very few Western journalists has spent so much time with its members. And on 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. And 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 USA, but they don't really link 9-11 to what's happened in their country for the last 20 years. Well, 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-Talban members, why do you think the U.S. is here? And they give all sorts of reasons from, you know, we have minerals here and, you know, the Soviets wanted our precious metals and now the U.S. does to, you know, they just hate our way of life, which always struck me as interesting because that was the frame that we were using on 9-11 here in the U.S. Of course, it's different when you get to the edge, you know, the sort of more elite Taliban who follow the news.

But I'm talking about the rank and file Taliban. Really don't see. their conflict or their struggle as having anything to do with September 11th. Now, here we are in late summer 2021. And a Taliban spokesman recently told the New York Times, we want to build the future and forget what happened in the past. Now, having spent so much time in areas that are controlled by the Taliban, what would you say is the likelihood of all that happening? Earlier this week, we saw the Taliban use force to break up a women's rights,

demonstration in Kabul and while they speak of a kind of new policy, whether it's about women or education or any number of other things, how much has the Taliban changed? Yeah, I think we should be very skeptical of these sorts of claims from the Taliban leadership. I mean, if you look at the point of view of your typical rank-and-file Taliban member, these are people who've really never left their village or their district. they've mostly seen war and violence. And if anybody's the end of the age of 21 who's in the Taliban, that's all they've known is fighting in war.

Now you can imagine from their perspective, there's a number of family members who've been killed, there's friends and comrades who've been killed, and what they're thirsting for is revenge, first of all. Secondly, from their perspective, they say, we won this war. We've marched into Kabul, we took this outright. We don't need to concede anything to anybody.

And so from that milieu, there's really a sense that the Taliban should be trying to return to the 1990s and reinstate that government that was there in the 1990s without sharing power, without making any concessions towards women's rights. And I'm afraid that probably that element is the majority of the movement. There's a minority of the movement who say all the right things,

who are a little bit more polished, who spend time outside the country, but they don't really have the power on the ground. In other words, these were the people that spent time in, you know, the Ritz Carlton's of the world making agreements and having diplomatic meetings with all kinds of Western countries. But the people on the ground who are going to make the policy are not much different. Well, I'm literally right now in a Ritz Carlton waiting to interview top officials. So yes, in Doha. So exactly.

These are people, I mean, I was thinking as I was walking through the corridors of this hotel, today, if any Taliban members on the ground in Helmand could see the complete splendor that these, their officials are living under, you know, you'd wonder if the movement would even hold together. The Taliban just named a number of people to top government posts. And among them, the head of the Haqani network was named Acting Minister of Interior. What do you read into these kinds of appointments? Well, I think, you know, I was looking at the list of cabinet members.

And what's striking about them is that almost every single one has. had held a position in the 1990s government. Many of them have had experience dealing with the international community. So there's a lot of the Taliban sort of network that was in Doha, that was negotiating with the U.S. A lot of them have ended up in ministerial positions. The same with the Hakani's. And the Hakani network, they're very close to the Pakistanis and to the ISI. This is Pakistani intelligence.

Pakistani intelligence, exactly. Of all the Taliban factions, they're the closest to Pakistani intelligence. But what's interesting about this ministerial list is that the most powerful members of the Taliban, the ones who are really running the insurgency for the last 20 years, aren't on it. Which leads me to think that there's kind of a shadow government that's going to be behind this government. That's going to be the real power behind the throne, as it were. And this is kind of a government on paper. What kind of leverage does the United States have any longer in Afghanistan among the Taliban? Afghanistan is what political scientists call a Rentee state.

It's a state that gets almost all of its revenue from abroad. So that's where the leverage exists. The problem, of course, is that that current within the Taliban is only one current. There's also the other current that says, well, we won this war. In the 90s, nobody recognized us. We had no support of the international community, and we're going to do the same thing again. What is the future of the relations between the two countries,

the United States and Afghanistan with Taliban in charge? Will the U.S. send an ambassador? Will we recognize the Taliban? Should we recognize them? Can we negotiate with the Taliban in any effective way? You know, I think given that there are different currents within the Taliban, the extent to which the international community tries to engage with the pragmatic current, it could empower that pragmatic current against the hardliners. The real danger is that if Afghanistan is isolated, that is going to feed into the discourse of the hardliners. And then we're going to see, I think, a much worse turn than what we've already seen. And I think the U.S. recognizes this. I mean, the problem right now is, of course, this has been a pretty catastrophic defeat for the U.S. And to rush to recognize the Taliban now, I think politically would not make sense.

but there are back channel, continuing back channel contacts between the State Department and the White House and the Taliban leadership. And there is in a few days a conference being called by the United Nations to look at how to deal with continuing aid to the country because there's a recognition that if aid is cut off, we'll see a complete economic collapse

and massive refugee crisis beyond which we've already seen and, you know, spiral downwards. We hear talk of 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 90s, where in the 90s, it was really like this hardcore clique of mullahs or religious clerics

from Kandahar and Helm in these southern provinces. And it's really broadened and diversified in the last 20 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 20 years is that they all felt in one way or another that they were marginalized from the post-2001 order for various reasons. So that was kind of 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, 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, okay, 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. 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. And on one point that your article makes crystal clear is that members of the Afghan army and Afghan militias that we supported for a long time and armed, were responsible for arbitrary killings and all kinds of horrendous human rights abuses. And the United States itself is responsible for the deaths of many, many Afghan civilians. Is there likely to be

any form of accountability for this, where should it come from? You know, one of the kind of tragedies of what happened with the evacuation, for example, is that there's thousands of Afghans who are just translators or who even were American citizens, dual American citizens and Afghans, who were not able to get on to the evacuation flights, but then those who had the most blood on their hands, who worked directly with militias that were under the control of the CIA. have been able to get out of the country.

Many of them are now already in the United States. And so I think unfortunately it's unlikely that there's going to be accountability for any of this. Is there any way to predict what Afghanistan is going to look like 10, 15 years from now? I'm not very good of predictions. It's hard to say. I would be very surprised if there was a Taliban government in power

10, 15 years from now. I just don't think that we're not. movement has a broad enough social base or enough experience in administering a modern bureaucratic state to be able to survive. Anon Gopal, thank you so much. Thank you. You can find Anon Gopal's reporting at New Yorker.com. He's the author of the book, No Good Men, Among the Living.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putuguele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help from Harrison Keithline.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.