What America Leaves When It Leaves Afghanistan

This month, the outgoing commander of America’s military effort in Afghanistan told Congress that the country the United States invaded more than 14 years ago was at “an inflection point.” The Taliban reportedly holds more territory than at any time since 2001, and civilian casualties are at record levels. Ethnic minorities are especially vulnerable; some fear that peace talks with the Taliban could open a place in the government for an organization that waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing against them.

For all of these reasons, even as U.S. forces continue to depart the country, the war in Afghanistan isn’t over yet, and by many measures it’s not going well.

But there are stories of hope, if you know where to look. One of the brightest is so small it’s invisible to many; to find it, you have to drive for the better part of an hour along rutted roads from the center of Kabul, to a Hazara slum in a desert on the city’s outskirts. It’s just a school. But it is, in many ways, exactly what the Americans and their Afghan allies have been fighting for more than a decade to protect. And it’s exactly what Afghanistan stands to lose now.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, with a parade of foreign armies behind it, a group of refugees was waiting to take advantage. They were Afghans, though at the time of the invasion they were not in Afghanistan, not yet. They were Hazaras, and they were next door in Pakistan, where thousands of members of their ethnic group had fled during more than a century of persecution in their home country, committed most recently by the Taliban regime that America was about to overthrow.

Because they were minorities in a country dominated by other ethnic groups, because of their Shia beliefs in a country dominated by Sunnis, and because of the pervasive origin myth that has them descending from Mongol invaders of the 13th century, the Hazaras occupied the bottom rungs of society even before the Taliban swept to power. In the late 19th century, the country’s ruler Abdur Rahman—known as “the Iron Amir” for his ruthlessness—launched a war against Hazaras and oversaw their enslavement. A militia the Americans later supported took part in one of the worst crimes of Afghanistan’s civil war of the 1990s, massacring as many as 2,500 Hazaras and injuring and raping thousands more in 1993. Then the civil war ended with the Taliban’s takeover in 1996, and things only got worse for Hazaras. One governor reportedly issued a fatwa saying, “Hazaras are not Muslim. Killing them is not a sin,” and Taliban fighters evidently took those guidelines to heart. More massacres followed. The Hazaras have been denied access to power, property, or even education in their own country.