on July 15, I went to the palace to see Mohib. Above the gate tower, a gigantic tricolor of the republic fluttered against a clear blue sky. After going through security, I walked across the long, deserted lawn to the building where the National Security Council office was located. I waited in the empty reception room of the congregation until one of Mohib’s staff, a young woman who had studied in America, took me upstairs to his office, where he sat at his desk. Our conversation was largely off the record. He seemed exhausted when we talked about the desperate fighting in Kandahar City, which was surrounded by the Taliban.
Just a few days earlier, there had been a farewell ceremony for General Austin S. Miller, the long-serving US commander. The military had completed 90 percent of its withdrawal, well before Biden’s deadline. This fast pace was intended to reduce the risk of attack during the retreat, but had a devastating impact on Afghan security forces. The US military had spent billions training and equipping a fighting force in its own image, relying heavily on foreign contractors and air support. But the notoriously corrupt generals of the Afghan army stole their men’s ammunition, food and wages; while the security forces should total 300,000, the actual number was probably less than a third of that. In the districts, the army and police crumbled and turned over their weapons to the Taliban, who now controlled a quarter of the country.
Ghani had repeatedly insisted that he stand up and fight. “This is my house and my grave,” he thundered in a speech earlier in the spring. His vice president, Amrullah Saleh, and the security council were working on a post-American strategy called kafo, a Dari word meaning “base” or “floor,” which represented garrison towns connected by corridors held by the military and supported by militias, similar to how President Mohammad Najibullah clung to power for three years after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union. “It was very much the Russian model,” said Bek, who returned to the government that month as the president’s chief of staff. “They had a good plan on paper, but to make this work, you had to be a military genius.”
Earlier in July, Ghani was warned that only two of the army’s seven corps were still functional, according to a senior Afghan official. Desperate for troops to protect Kandahar City, the president begged the CIA to make use of the paramilitary army formerly known as counter-terrorism pursuit teams, according to Afghan officials. The units had been trained for night raids and clandestine missions in the border area and had grown into capable light infantry of thousands of men. They were now officially part of Afghan intelligence and were known as Zero Units, after codes corresponding to provinces: 01 was Kabul, 03 was Kandahar, and so on. But according to the officials, the CIA was still paying the salaries of these strike troops and had to agree to Ghani’s request to defend Kandahar City that month. (A US official stated that the units were under Afghan control; the CIA declined to comment on details of their deployment.) “They are highly effective units, motivated, cheap,” Mohib told me in his office, saying Kandahar would be fallen without them. “They don’t need all kinds of heavy equipment. I wish we had more like them.”
But the Zero Units had a reputation for ruthlessness in battle; both journalists and Human Rights Watch have referred to them as “death squads” — charges the CIA denied, saying they were the result of Taliban propaganda. I’d been trying to track these shadowy units for years and was surprised to see that, in their signature tiger stripes, they got glowing attention on government social media accounts.
In Kabul I met Mohammad, an officer of one of the NDS units operating around the capital, whom I have known for several years. Mohammad had worked as an interpreter for the unit’s US advisers and an instructor for undercover teams making arrests in the cities. He said morale among his men had plummeted as the Americans left. Afghan officials say the station in Ariana Square was empty at the end of July. But Mohammad’s team still got advice from the Americans. He showed me messages that he said were from the CIA, and he urged his unit to patrol areas around Kabul that had been infiltrated by the insurgents. “The airport is still in danger,” said a message.
