Interview Living with the Ta l iba n Fatima Gailani, a senior negotiator at the - Afghan peace talks in Qatar, tells Trisha de Borchgrave who today’s Taliban are and what they mean for their country’s future Fatima Gailani is the daughter of the late Ahmed Gailani, leader of one of the mujahideen resistance groups that fought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She was their international spokesperson throughout the s and s. As a women’s rights campaigner, she helped draft the Afghan constitution for the interim government in following the American-led invasion. Gailani was also head of the Afghanistan Red Crescent Society between - . I M AG E S I A G E T T Y N U R P H OTO V In Doha, you spent 12 months negotiating with the Taliban. Were you surprised by the speed with which they took over the country in August last year? I was surprised by the speed but not the result. After President Biden declared that the United States’ troop withdrawal would be unconditional, I knew it was the end of the republic. The Taliban still controlled half the country, even after years of war and a trillion dollars of foreign aid and investment. But the Afghan government never really believed that the country would fall so convincingly. During the talks, those of us representing the Afghan Republic, would say to the Taliban: ‘Yes, you are winning, we are not blind. But you are winning the war, you are not winning the peace.’ The fact is that we played it very badly. We sat on our high horses saying no to the Taliban on everything, while at the same time we were being undermined by the Americans’ agenda to get out quickly and safely, and we came out with nothing. Should we worry about an apparent disconnect between the Taliban leadership and fighters on the ground? There is a vacuum of management and organization. The upbringing of a Talib is unimaginably backward. These fighters come from poor families of and children and, at the age of six or seven, are taken to a brutal madrassa. As soon as they have the beginnings of a moustache they are trained to kill. Do you really expect them to have a relationship with a woman, a sister or a mother? They never saw them. Today, these fighters should be trained to be professional soldiers and security forces. There are not too many of them, they can be easily absorbed into society. But the Taliban do have a problem with Isis-K (Islamic State – Khorasan Province) in the north and east of the country which could spread, because they are currently the only ones who can feed Afghans in these regions. Be scared of the day that Daesh recruit some 22