The one thing a Taliban fighter said to me that changed my perspective of the war

Everything I needed to know about the Taliban's motivations summed up

Akif gazes with an air of menace, his fingers tightly clasping his long, grey-tinged beard, speaking only through an unsettling silence. The high-ranking Taliban official, bathed in the smears of spring sunlight that contour his cheeks like scars, reveals a haunting confession: “I was part of an operation shooting down Americans,” he declares as the Taliban’s white-and-black flag hangs eerily still behind him.

It’s just a few weeks after the U.S.-backed government fled in the late summer of 2021, allowing the Taliban to swoop in and seize the capital without firing a single shot. We’re all still trying to make sense of something that seemed to make no sense.

Observing Akif’s body language, I note a straight back, a pride tinged with a haunting journey through his boneyard of memories. In a moment of profound reflection, Akif poses a poignant question, a question that would repeat itself like a broken record in my mind for days and weeks to come – a comment that ultimately made me understand the twenty-year war in an entirely new light.