Original subtitles

(sombre music)

- I'm heartbroken about the way things went

in Afghanistan.

Powerful armies invaded this country

with slogans about peace, democracy, women's rights.

(infant crying)

It was a disaster.

Now the foreign troops are withdrawing.

Whatever they leave behind, so far, it's nothing like what we promised.

My name is Graeme Smith.

Canadian war correspondent

more than 15 years ago.

(gunshots)

I followed troops into battle.

Spent years smelling the death.

The charred flesh of suicide bombers

got stuck in the treads of my shoes.

I returned one more time

before the Taliban swept back into power.

I needed to find out how it all went wrong.

I was also looking for a way to reconcile myself

with the terrible things that we, the foreigners,

inflicted on this beautiful country.

(escalating oriental music)

I've just come back to Kabul

and one of my first evenings out,

I looked at my phone and I heard that

an analyst that I knew a little bit,

he'd been gunned down in the streets.

Probably because of the things he was saying on television.

That was a good reminder about the dangers these days

that, I guess, face everyone who dips their toe

into politics in Afghanistan.

(faint honking)

(casual string music)

I first came to Afghanistan in 2005

as a reporter for The Globe and Mail.

And I stayed for many years after that

as an analyst for NGOs and the United Nations.

(indistinct chatter)

It was exciting for a kid in his twenties

What felt like the edges of civilization.

I had no idea

what I was getting myself into.

When I first arrived,

it felt like a cowboy frontier town.

It wasn't unusual to hear people saying,

"Oh, this is like the opening scene in Star Wars.

You know? With all of the crazy characters walking around."

everyone you can possibly

imagine was crowding into Kabul

in the early years of the war.

(distant sirens)

Today, so much has changed.

I've never seen the city so on edge.

The Taliban, once defeated, can now strike at any time.

(sirens wailing)

(crying)

People try to go about their daily lives

but there's always the danger

of a truck bomb or a suicide attack.

(repeated honking)

And when we venture outside

to talk to local people and do some filming,

we time ourselves to make sure that we don't linger.

There's a lot of kidnappings

by criminals, the Taliban, and other armed groups.

(eerie music)

Kabul used to be crowded with foreigners.

Now the diplomats and aid workers

mostly stay behind the blast walls

and the barbed wire that you see everywhere.

In the sky, surveillance blimps

float powerful cameras

to watch for trouble.

In the streets, posters urge citizens

to dial a hotline to stop terror attacks.

You know, it's the first time coming to Kabul

that I've hired a B6 armoured vehicle.

We've got the bulletproof glass,

the armour-plated doors,

We've got the bulletproof glass,

the armour-plated doors,

you can spray the tires with bullets

and it'll keep driving.

In some ways it feels like overkill

but that's the reality now.

I happen to know the man

in charge of all this security.

I met Hamdullah Mohib years ago

when he was an aid to a presidential candidate.

Now only 37 years old,

he is the National Security Advisor to the President.

(Hamdullah Mohib): Attacks here have caused massive casualties,

people feel fearful.

It has a psychological impact when you live like this.

Every day, my heart is pumping

worried about my children

until they come back from school.

(Graeme): Like many young Afghans

in positions of power today,

Mohib fled his homeland as a child.

He lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan

but was one of the lucky ones who got an education

in the west.

Then he returned home to try to rebuild his country.

(Hamdullah Mohib): The Afghan people have been

desiring stability ever since I was born.

My generation grew up in this war

and all we want to see

is to be able to do the normal things

that everyone else takes for granted.

(indistinct chatter)

(Graeme): Mohib gets daily briefings from his generals

who tell him that they are winning the war.

(Hamdullah Mohib): This is a different kind of warfare.

We have the conventional warfare

that most militaries are prepared to fight.

- Yeah.

- And they're trying to do that.

And then there's this gorilla type of warfare

mixed with terrorism

and tactics used by the Taliban.

(Graeme): These tactics are bringing the war

right into Mohib's backyard.

20 years of fighting has settled nothing.

When I first started coming to Afghanistan

the Taliban were just ghosts.

You would never see them.

I mean, even on the battlefield

just the occasional muzzle flash

or a bit of movement in the foliage.

They were very good at removing their dead

from the battlefield

so you didn't see the corpses.

They were a myth more than anything else.

(dark chiming music)

The Taliban started as

conservative religious students

based in the southern province of Kandahar.

Many had taken up arms against the Soviet troops

that occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s.

(violent whooshing)

But once the Soviets were driven out,

a vicious civil war erupted among rival political factions

in the 1990s.

The Taliban emerged as the dominant force

in this chaos.

Sweeping the country and capturing Kabul in 1996.

Once in power, they closed girls' schools,

banned music and television.

They forced women to wear the burqa

and executed people for minor transgressions.

But they offered an alternative

to the rampant unrest of earlier years.

That made the Taliban popular in some places

especially in the southern villages.

But a lot of educated people fled the country.

(eerie flute music)

(rapid whirring)

(rumbling)

Then, in October 2001, the Americans invaded.

The Taliban had been harbouring

Al-Qaeda leaders

who plotted the 9/11 attacks in New York City.

- On my orders,

the United States military has begun strikes

against the Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps

and military installations of the Taliban regime

in Afghanistan.

The name of today's military operation

is Enduring Freedom.

(oriental music)

(Graeme): I don't know now if there is such a thing

as a good war.

But definitely, at the time,

there was a feeling that the war in Afghanistan

was noble somehow.

Not just the foreign troops

but everybody who came with the foreign troops.

The aid workers, the journalists.

Almost all of them felt

as though they were pushing back

the forces of darkness in Afghanistan.

They were pushing back the forces of evil

and barbarism.

(oriental music continues)

I was swept up in this fantasy

that gripped everyone in Afghanistan.

All the foreigners,

and frankly the entire western world

at that time.

It was a kind of romantic notion,

a flawed romantic notion.

That belief inspired Canada and dozens of countries

to more than 100,000 foreign troops.

One of the soldiers I came to know

was Ayesha Wolasmal.

Born in Norway, she often visited family in Afghanistan.

She joined the Norweigan Army in 2006.

We arranged to meet one morning

in the garden of a heavily protected compound in Kabul.

What was that like putting on the uniform?

- Fantastic. It was very emotional.

Even though I was very young,

I immediately had this feeling that I can,

you know, be a bridge maker somehow

because I grew up in a very conservative

traditional Pashtun family.

And I picked up on a lot of cultural nuances,

that whole kind of tribal thinking.

I have to admit, I wasn't that intellectually invested

in the whole peace and democracy

aspect of it.

It was more the immediate, you know,

relief for the population, as I saw it.

- You're sort of saving the people from the Taliban.

- Yeah, exactly.

So that was a very strong sentiment.

(shouting)

(Graeme): At first it all seemed easy.

In a little more than two months,

the western armies drove the Taliban from power.

(indistinct chatter)

(Ayesha Wolasmal): And I remember music playing,

Afghans love music.

As soon as the regime was toppled, I felt that,

"Okay, now the world has access to Afghanistan.

And Afghanistan has access to the world,

to all the impulses that help a country

move in the right direction."

Practically, that meant development projects coming in.

Girls going to school, something as basic as that.

(lively music)

(Graeme): Much has changed especially for the lucky few

that live in cities.

Foreign troops and foreign aid

brought new freedoms and new opportunities.

(sombre music)

But when you leave Kabul, things get more complicated.

Especially here in the south in Kandahar

where I spent most of my time as a reporter.

(cars rumbling)

(indistinct chatter)

For me it was really important

to cover all sides of the conflict.

So spending time with Afghan Security Forces,

trying to hear what the Taliban had to say.

They'd go... well they stayed outside the wire

beyond the razor-wire fence

that surrounds the military camps

and just listen to ordinary people.

(car honking)

Kandahar is where the Taliban first emerged

and it remains very conservative.

Women in public

pretty much always wear the traditional burqa.

And yet, here is where, with Canadian Aid money,

a friend of mine tried something bold.

In a quiet corner of the city,

these girls escape behind the high walls

of this private school.

They take off their burqas

to attend classes in English and learn computer skills.

(speaking in foreign language)

- Life is good.

Life is good and we see you again.

You're welcome. - It's so nice to see you.

Ehsanullah Ehsan for years.

Thank you so much. You look even younger than before.

(laughing): Oh yeah! - How is it possible?

We wanted to give you a little surprise.

- So good, it's so good. It is a surprise.

- But you're still here.

- I'm still here, I'm still surviving.

It's definitely hard.

It's very risky here

to help all these women get education

and especially modern education.

To go out and work,

to be self-sustained, to be independent,

this is something unacceptable for extremists.

For example, you are developing a magazine, right?

Writing a magazine.

So in the magazine, you need to put some photos

or you are doing a report.

(Graeme): But foreign money has dried up

for his school as Canada and other western donors

lost interest in Afghanistan.

His school has gone from

more than 2000 female students a year,

to 200.

And he struggles to give the young girls hope.

- There is violence against women in some countries

and Afghanistan is one of them.

(Graeme): These girls are here

to get a broad education.

(applause)

(Graeme): In today's English class,

Soraya and her classmates

have an assignment on violence against women,

a radical topic here in the traditional south.

Now it's the turn of 12-year-old Shabnam.

- Islam has given women the right

to work, study, and get education.

I request every family

to let women study, work, and get education.

To shine one day and achieve their dreams.

Let them fly like a bird and be honoured one day.

Thanks a lot.

(applause)

(Graeme): It's not safe outside

for women or anyone else, really.

Canadian troops fought and died

to protect this city

and yet now it's under siege once again by the Taliban.

(vehicles bustling)

(melancholic music)

Police are constantly on the lookout

for insurgents and suicide bombers.

They guard the city

but they can barely protect themselves.

Three police officers are assassinated here in Kandahar

every week.

And across the country, in some weeks,

hundreds of security personnel are killed.

(tires screeching)

So just now, 20 minutes ago, another target killing.

Yet again, some gunmen on a motorcycle

shot and killed an off-duty police officer.

It's amazing the pace of these things.

(speaking in foreign language)

Even if the police are targets,

we have no choice.

We still need to rely on them for our safety.

With two truckloads of armed men,

we drive less than 30 minutes to the frontlines

in the Panjwai Valley.

This is where I first started to understand

that there would be no military solution to this war.

Canada took command of NATO operations

here in the south back in 2006.

It was the country's biggest deployment since World War II

and, eventually, one of its bloodiest.

I think I slept in that shelter over there.

This used to be a Canadian base.

It's called Masum Ghar.

And now, there's hardly anything left.

It's like a ghost town.

This landscape haunts me.

I almost died in this valley.

I remember the bone-jarring intensity of the explosions.

Just over there in the hazy distance,

you can see Taliban territory.

The Canadians, the British, the Germans, the Americans,

they all fought to defeat the Taliban

and they failed, essentially.

(explosions blasting)

(men yelling, gunshots)

(man): Everybody okay?!

- I was just over there listening on the radio

as Canadians on this hillside

were trying to move north at Taliban positions.

(tense music)

(gunshots)

Year after year, battle after battle,

I witnessed the same pattern.

Foreign troops hammering away with modern fire power,

the Taliban coming back again, and again, and again,

with nothing more sophisticated

than stubbornness.

(reporter 1): NATO's top commander

had great words of praise today

for Canadian forces...

(reporter 2): Canadian troops here

have been very successful. The Taliban...

(reporter 3): ...defeating

a significant Taliban presence.

(reporter 1): ...declaring the recent operation there

a clear military victory.

(Graeme): Canadian politicians and generals

kept hailing the Afghan mission as a spectacular success.

But looking back,

it was really a string of failures.

They just retreated

and then launched a renewed insurgency that grew

and engulfed the whole country.

(desolate music)

In my reports back then,

I tried to sound a note of caution.

But I often felt like a lonely voice

in a crowd of media cheerleaders.

I really questioned my own sanity sometimes

in Afghanistan.

I could see things were happening in front of me

and I was trying to write them down

and put them in the newspaper,

and then military officers and government PR people

would sort of tell me,

"No, no that's not what you saw."

It was a head-spinning experience.

And I think that's what happens in a war

where countries get swept up in this fervour.

And they don't care what's true.

They want to know, "How great are our boys?

How true is our cause?"

And I think that's the madness of war.

(sombre music)

For Canada, the madness would go on

for five more years.

We started to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2011

with 158 soldiers dead and at least 2000 injured.

I began to question

whether those sacrifices were worth it.

I also began to realize

that while fighting what we saw as evil

that we ourselves had sometimes crossed the line into darkness.

I had to go back

to where I first saw that darkness.

Maybe more than any other single place,

where I really started to lose faith

in the war in Afghanistan

was inside the crumbling jail cells of Sarpoza prison

on the west side of Kandahar City.

Some of the stories I heard inside these walls...

I can't forget. They're still with me.

The prison has always housed common criminals

but also plenty of political prisoners.

You can hear the murmuring of men here

inside the political section of the prison,

that's where they keep the Taliban.

We're not allowed to film inside there right now

but the last time I was here,

I spent a number of visits

inside the political section here,

and they told me terrible stories

about torture and abuse

at the hands of the security forces.

And it really started to change the way

that I thought about the war.

This was kind of a turning point for me

in my whole thinking about the conflict.

When I first came here in 2007, I interviewed 30 detainees,

the majority of them suspected Taliban.

Many of them captured by Canadian soldiers

and transferred

over to the Afghan authorities.

(indistinct chatter)

I spoke to men who showed me the scars on their bodies.

They told me they were beaten, choked, frozen, whipped.

There was one guy who'd been beaten so badly

that he'd forgotten who he was.

There was one young man

who had a very vivid memory of being electrocuted

and he showed me how he was flopping around

on the ground like a fish.

Terrible things happened to these prisoners

when they were being interrogated.

(eerie music)

This shook me because it wasn't an accident of war.

It was deliberate.

It was a part of the design of the war.

On a daily basis,

prisoners transferred from Canadian custody

into cruel hands.

(reporter 1): ...have no evidence

of the specific allegations in the global...

(reporter 2): Why was this information

not brought up in this house before?

(Graeme): My stories caused uproar, debate,

and investigations.

The Afghan and Canadian governments

tried to deny that torture was happening.

(reporter 3): ...evidence there is any access

blocked to the prisons.

(reporter 4): Pourquoi n'avez-vous pas eu

les mêmes exigences?

to confirm the truth.

Ansari Baluch, an investigator

for the Afghanistan Independent

Human Rights Commission.

He wasn't afraid to call out abuses

by both the government and the Taliban,

angering the Taliban all the more

because he worked with people like me,

western journalists.

Working with foreigners can taint you.

Everyone in your community

thinks that you are a spy for the Americans.

So I was worried about the fallout

and how that was going to affect Ansari.

Several months after my stories appeared,

Ansari disappeared.

I found out later

that the Taliban

had kidnapped and beheaded him.

(dark music)

I always felt bad

about dragging Ansari into the spotlight

because he was trying to do his human rights work quietly,

behind the scenes,

and I was trying to make a headline.

(sombre oriental music)

in Afghanistan.

But I think how you feel about that

depends on whether you feel responsible.

And that's why today's meeting is going to be tough.

I've tracked down Ansari's family.

(speaking in foreign language)

Mokhtar is his nephew. Anargul is his daughter.

They say that the human rights advocate

wouldn't listen to the family's

concerns about his safety.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Graeme): When the Taliban snatched Ansari

and asked for a ransom,

to meet the kidnappers.

(Graeme): You started digging in the earth.

- Yeah.

(Graeme): Ah, the clothes.

- Yes.

(Graeme): I'm sorry, my friend.

That must have been incredibly hard.

(sighing, sniffling)

- And his hands.

I'm sorry, my friend.

(speaking in foreign language)

And Shahid in red is a martyr.

- Yeah.

(melancholic string music)

(Graeme): I think what happened

to my friend Ansari Baluch

is symbolic of the ways that we as foreign journalists

put our friends into danger.

It's something that we really have to grapple with

about whether or not the things that we ask people to do

are worth it.

Ansari was just one of the many people I've known

killed in this endless war.

A journalist who worked with Canadian reporters,

a tribal leader who helped me to understand local politics,

A Canadian soldier who protected me in battle.

Like so many others who died,

they wanted a better Afghanistan.

One of the things

is how much of that striving was wasted.

In part because of the abuses and the corruption

of our supposed allies.

A lot of the western aid money for schools and hospitals

In recent years, poverty's gotten worse.

More than half the population

now lives

These days, what separates squalor from splendour

are guards and gates.

(vehicles bustling)

Inside wealthy enclaves,

the elites enjoy their parks and fountains.

(hooves clopping)

None of this existed when I first came here

to Kandahar.

Certainly not this fountain.

I mean, this is a dry country.

It's one of the poorest countries in the world.

And so to see this, it's pretty stunning.

And it really gives you a sense

that some people are doing pretty well for themselves

in this war.

And it's actually, you know,

this is part of the reason why the war goes on

because it's good business.

Not all of the wealthier is from corruption,

but this is not the kind of neighbourhood

where it's safe to ask people how they made their fortunes.

The drug trade, stolen aid money,

all kinds of schemes

have made Afghanistan

one of the world's most corrupt countries.

A problem so big, so obvious

that government leaders don't really try to deny it,

as National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib told me.

- To get quick fixes,

we empowered some of the very warlords

that people were fed up with.

We put them in positions of ministries and governors.

As businesses, they were given lucrative contracts.

(Graeme): Police chiefs.

(tense music)

Vice presidents.

Governors.

Men who have been accused

by international human rights organizations

of gross violations.

Many of them warlords of the past

still have a grip on Afghanistan.

- I think there has been a lot of injustices

in the last 18 years

conducted by our government or people,

and I think whether willingly or unwillingly,

however it has happened,

but I think it has led to people

joining the Taliban.

There has been a lot of corruption in the government

and I think we should not free ourselves from that.

Own it and fix it.

(rumbling)

(indistinct chatter)

(Graeme): Widespread corruption

has not been the only thing driving people to the Taliban.

There have also been mounting civilian casualties

in the US-led war.

This is where they count the numbers

and track the abuses,

the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

It says a lot about the situation

that any sort of official building

looks like a fortress with intense security checks.

It's so tight that they took my chocolate away from me.

(laughing)

They think I'm going to kill someone

with a chocolate bar.

- They took the pills too.

- Oh yeah, the cough drops.

My good friend Shaharzad Akbar heads the commission.

(Graeme): Akbar's family spent the Taliban years

in a refugee camp.

Her parents firmly believed in education for women

and she went on to become the first Afghan woman

to study at Oxford University.

- The future of human rights...

(Graeme): At 33 years old,

she's probably the leading human rights advocate

in Afghanistan.

- ...for our international partners.

(Graeme): What bothers Akbar

is the sheer level of carnage inflicted by both sides.

(eerie flute music)

(Graeme): You can really see that footprint of war

on the most vulnerable, the children.

Over the years, I've seen far too many

of the war's youngest victims.

This generation has grown up in a world shaped by violence.

Recent years have been

because of increased fighting on all sides.

(indistinct chatter)

One of my friends is trying to do something

here at an orphanage just outside of Kabul,

home to 150 children from toddlers to teens.

Mariam Wardak takes in as many orphans as she can.

- We have people coming to our door every day

saying that we have another orphan.

We can't accept it

because we have exceeded our capacity.

Everybody has become numb to the children of war.

How can you become numb to something like that?

(Graeme): Wardak comes from a prominent family.

Her father was a famous rebel against the Soviet invaders,

she recently worked as a senior security official

for the Afghan government.

And now, she's dealing with the human consequences

of rising insecurity.

The children at Wardak's orphanage

have suffered at the hands of all sides of the war.

The Taliban as well as the Americans

and the Afghan government.

in the fighting.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Graeme): Hamidah saw her mother gunned down

by the Taliban.

his family was killed in crossfire.

- Do you know who fired against your family?

(children screaming)

- War is blind.

They don't know who to be angry with,

they don't know who to look forward to,

they just understand that there is violence

and that they're afraid that they can get in the crossfire

between the Taliban

or the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces

that could cost them their life

like it has cost their parents' lives.

They know that they need to fear both.

But they don't understand

who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.

(eerie flute music)

(Graeme): It can be hard

at times to tell the difference

between the supposed good guys and the bad guys.

That's what Ayesha Wolasmal discovered

once she took off her soldier's uniform.

- When I was in a uniform,

my entire understanding of the situation

was a very kind of security-based understanding.

But it was only when I actually came back

to Afghanistan as a civilian, you know,

as Ayesha, Masuma's daughter,

that I got a reality check

and I think the strongest symbol of that

was when we took a taxi like a Corolla

between Kabul and Kandahar.

And I'd say it's like 45 degrees

and it's really, really hot

and we're both in our burqas.

And there was an American convoy

passing.

And I'm sitting there

for the first time not in a convoy

but just like a normal civilian.

And I sat there and I felt...

Suddenly I felt that I witnessed

the occupation in action.

Even though I had been part of these convoys myself

but we ended up waiting three and a half hours

for this convoy to do whatever they were supposed to do.

And me and my mom were fine

but there were tons and tons,

long lines of cars with women, small children.

For them it was a full-blown occupation,

for them it was seeing

people that don't look like them

control their cities, control their check post,

control their movement.

(gunshot)

(Graeme): In the villages,

people told her about being terrified

of foreign troops or Afghan government forces

as they hunted for the Taliban.

- I remember so many stories

about my relatives telling me about how their sons

were just like taken out in the middle of the nights,

you know?

In front of their mothers.

Black paper bags were placed on their heads

and they disappeared.

Even two weeks ago,

I met with people not faring night raids by the Americans

but the Americans have trained the Afghans that well

that now the Afghans are doing it.

Sadly that's everyday life.

The bloodshed, uh...

I mean, the sons, the husbands, the fathers,

but also the young children.

I mean, it's absolutely devastating.

(Graeme): The numbers are staggering.

Since the war began in 2001,

hundreds of thousands have been killed.

No one knows the exact count.

A cemetery for bodies that are unclaimed,

unidentified, unknown.

It was a sad enough place

when I visited a dozen years ago

and today it is unbelievably bigger.

More people are killed in this war every year

than in any other conflict in the world.

(melancholic music)

Sometimes memories drift back to you

in unexpected ways.

I remember one night I was attending a play

and I started crying,

and I wept, and I wept.

I hadn't cried like that in years.

I really, really want this war to end.

(sirens wailing)

NATO is the most powerful alliance in human history

by some measures.

But military efforts to bring peace and stability

have failed.

The Taliban have only grown stronger.

(upbeat music)

In propaganda videos posted on their website,

the Taliban claim they are well armed, well trained,

they can strike anywhere

and they do.

(singing in foreign language)

To find out how the Taliban are pulling it off,

I went to see my good friend Rahmatullah Amiri,

one of the country's most respected

political analysts.

- Taliban are not just only getting stronger,

they're getting organized,

they're becoming some sort of a conventional

kind of army.

If you compare the Taliban of today

versus the Taliban of 2014,

you see a much different group.

(sirens wailing)

(Graeme): Amiri barely survived

a Taliban attack on the American University

in Kabul in 2016.

13 people were killed and more than 40 injured

including Amiri.

- Four bullets hit me,

two in the abdomen

and one in the leg, one in the arm.

(indistinct chatter)

I was pushing myself against the ground

to get to the police

because the police was probably 10 metres away from me.

They could hear my voice but they could not come

because the attackers were pretty close by.

Then I thought, "Okay, let's try a bit more."

Because my mom lost four sons.

I knew that if she lost me,

I don't think she would survive

because I am the solo breadwinner of the family.

And...

And she's very close to me.

So I didn't give up.

(Graeme): Amiri slowly recovered,

rebuilt his strength,

and he believes the Taliban were doing the same.

By 2019,

from safe havens in Pakistan,

expanding their control across Afghanistan.

(Rahmatullah Amiri): From experience travelling

across the country,

I would say in terms of terrain,

Taliban control between 50 to 60 percent of the country

under their full control.

That's what I would say their full control is.

If you add the contested area, I would say 60 to 70 percent.

(indistinct shouting)

(Graeme): That is not what National Security Advisor

Hamdullah Mohib told me.

He seems confident of victory.

(Hamdullah Mohib): We have broken the back

of the Taliban.

They will lose their capacity

to take and hold territory.

We have a military part to victory in this conflict.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Rahmatullah Amiri): That's not true.

If the back of the Taliban could be broken,

that would be from 2009 to 2014.

Where hundreds of thousands international trips were there

and billions of dollars

were poured into reconstructions

and nation building and everything.

That was the only times

where the Taliban were on the back foot.

When the government talks about that, you know,

breaking their back,

I'm telling them they haven't reached their peak yet.

(Graeme): Wow.

(indistinct chatter)

(Rahmatullah Amiri): The government needs to accept

Taliban as a very strong, powerful force.

They cannot treat them as a bunch of, you know,

insurgents who are outside there.

No, they have a very strong system,

both a civilian and military system

that is right now running almost half of the country.

(melancholic music)

(Graeme): It's hard to get a sense

of the Taliban's real power

because it's dangerous for an outsider like me

to travel into the vast territory

they control.

One night in Kandahar,

we arranged to meet Abdullah,

a former Taliban commander who grew weary of fighting

but who still stays in touch with his former comrades.

For his own safety,

we are concealing his identity.

We hire him to take a cellphone camera

into a Taliban region not far from Kandahar City.

- You have to keep everything on this little chip here.

It'll be good.

(Graeme): Local fighters allowed him

to film these images.

They want to show the outside world

how secure they feel in their strongholds.

(speaking in foreign language)

(laughing)

(Graeme): These days, the Taliban allow girls

to join the boys in study at the local religious school.

But many families

pull their girls out of classes

when they reach puberty.

And these students are just memorizing

verses from the Quran,

not really getting a broad education.

(Graeme): Farmers don't seem to mind being filmed

as they finish harvesting the hashish crop.

Drug cultivation is the biggest source

of cash income for these people.

Other farmers plant poppy seeds for the next season's opium.

Both sides of the war

earn tens of millions of dollars a year

from illegal drugs.

The profits allow them to buy more weapons,

seize more territory.

The drugs fuel the war.

(speaking in foreign language)

wants to hide his face

but he has a message to broadcast on television.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Graeme): This is not an empty boast.

Intelligence estimates say that by early 2021, the Taliban

already dominated much of the countryside.

With only major cities under government control

and under constant threat.

(tense music)

The Taliban have shown their strength

with spectacular attacks like this car bomb in 2018

in the southwestern province of Helmand.

(faint sirens)

But this attack was different.

Instead of suffering quietly,

ordinary citizens decided to speak up.

(speaking in foreign language)

In all my years in Afghanistan,

people usually debated how to win the war

and now they started to argue about how to make peace.

I came to this neighbourhood in Kandahar

to find one of the organizers

of a new grassroots peace movement.

(speaking in foreign language)

A young father of five children Bismillah Watandost

makes his living as a freelance journalist

and full-time activist.

(speaking in foreign language)

(rhythmic music)

(Graeme): The Helmand blast inspired Bismillah and others

to launch a people's peace march.

They started with just a handful of people

but grew to a few hundred,

trekking more than 700 kilometres

across deserts, through villages,

for almost two months.

(Graeme): Bismillah even took the risk

of arranging to meet with local Taliban leaders

face to face.

(Graeme): As the peace marchers

were making their way to Kabul in June 2018,

the government and the Taliban

declared an unexpected ceasefire.

For three days,

Afghans got a glimpse of what peace could look like.

(lively music)

Mujib Mashal covered this story for the New York Times.

Born in Kabul,

he is one of the best journalists in Afghanistan.

- The miraculous thing about those three days was

it was completely peaceful.

To me, that was a sign that everybody's really tired.

I remember we reported an episode from Kunduz

where some of these Taliban fighters would come in,

so we kind of chronicled their day,

you know, where they had kebabs, where they had their ice cream,

at the kebab shop they listened to music,

and as they were riding back on their motorcycles...

it was dusk time and the ceasefire was ending

and they were crossing a bridge,

and they were actually hugging goodbye with the people

including the soldiers on this side of the line.

- They were hugging the same guys

they were going to be shooting the next day.

- They shot at three days before

they were going to go back to shooting them,

and probably a bunch of those guys

are dead by now.

There was something about that moment,

I think we have lost even the power to imagine

that there could be a moment

where everybody feels like they can breathe

and they don't have to shoot.

And as short as that period was

and as insignificant in the larger loss of the war,

it kicked a sense of possibility

into people, you know?

it kicked a sense of possibility

into people, you know?

And no matter how it came about,

it was for the first time in a long time,

not just in this conflict,

in the spectrum of 40-year conflict

at least for my generation,

to think that the two sides can say,

"Okay, we'll stop" and that it actually stops.

(lively music)

(Graeme): But even as

that dream of peace took shape,

Afghans started asking questions.

And at what cost?

Resistance to any compromise with the Taliban

has always been especially strong

within the urban middle class.

Many women are fearful

of losing their hard-fought freedoms.

And I was curious about the young generation of people

who grew up surrounded by foreign troops

and foreign aid.

So I came here, to Kabul University.

Mariam and her friend Adiba study photography

in a country where the Taliban had once banned cameras

and they have no intention

of letting anyone turn back the clock.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Graeme): Despite these struggles,

this generation dreams big.

And also small

with personal goals

that are breathtakingly modest.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Graeme): What clothes would you want to wear?

(speaking in foreign language)

- I, myself?

Like men's clothes.

(Graeme): Mini skirts?

- Men's clothes, suits.

(Graeme): Men's clothes. Oh, okay, okay.

(speaking in foreign language)

(laughing)

Something like this.

(Graeme): You want to wear colourful clothes?

(speaking in foreign language)

Why can't you wear colourful clothes now?

(Graeme): I want to go

for many of these young women.

She's the most famous feminist in the country.

Your phone just pinged? Something just happened?

Another explosion?

- Yeah, in PD 12, there was a blast.

And we still don't know if it has harmed anyone or not.

(Graeme): This kind of security

it used to be only embassies that did this.

We're in what's known as an airlock,

heavy steel doors

that are closed on both sides of the driveway

and they're never open at the same time.

And so, you're in a little metal box, basically,

just in case the car explodes while it's being checked.

(soft music)

Farahnaz Forotan is only 28

but she is one of Afghanistan's

best-known television journalists.

I noticed you have Frida Kahlo everywhere. Here...

Forotan revels in provocation.

She decorates her office

with the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo ,

selecting images that would shock most people

in this conservative society.

(speaking in foreign language)

- That's like you.

(laughs)

(Graeme): She used her fame

to launch a social media campaign

called My Red Line.

(speaking in foreign language)

Asking people to talk about the lines

that they are not willing to cross

for the sake of peace.

(Graeme): She has travelled across the country

collecting videos with messages of defiance.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Graeme): My Red Line has generated dozens of videos

with tens of thousands of followers on social media.

But it is mostly an urban phenomenon

in a country that is mainly rural.

(Ayesha Wolasmal): Obviously there's a lot more at stake

for women here, you know?

They've come a really long way

and they're right to be really scared

of what a Taliban government would look like.

I would struggle to sleep at night

if I was one of them.

(Graeme): Raised in the western world,

Ayesha Wolasmal understands the fears of urban women.

She's no longer a soldier.

She now works with rural women in the villages

and that gives her a different perspective.

(casual string music)

(Ayesha Wolasmal): That fear is very different

from the fear that women in the rural areas have.

Because they haven't

had the same level of progress there,

they haven't gone from their mud house

to become parliamentarians. (Graeme): Yeah.

- They're still in that same mud house.

Illiteracy rates are extremely high,

there are still girls being married off at age 14.

So life hasn't changed.

And I always noticed this throughout my travels.

The more remote places you visit,

the more it becomes evident

that the discussion at central level

is very removed from the realities

of rural Afghanistan.

(eerie flute music)

(Graeme): I wanted to meet women like that

but local traditions make it very hard for a foreigner,

let alone a man.

So I asked Wolasmal to introduce me to her friend

Dr. Aziza Watanwall Azizi

and I went to see her in Kandahar.

(indistinct chatter)

Azizi was part of an older generation of women

who came of age in the 1970s

before Afghanistan plunged into war.

She studied and practised medicine in Europe

and then she came back

at a clinic in Kandahar.

walk through her doors.

(speaking in foreign language)

(crying)

(Graeme): Dr. Azizi invited a group of women she knows

to a tea party at her home,

a rare occasion for these women

to talk to a foreign man

and an even rarer opportunity

for me to hear their point of view.

In Kabul, we interviewed some women

who don't wear burqa and they don't wear hijab even.

They say this war is about freedom against peace.

If peace comes

and the Taliban come back to Kabul,

they will lose their freedom.

And I want to know if the women here

feel the same way.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Graeme): I think in foreign countries,

people think if Taliban come back

to take a share of power

that it will be bad for women,

that women are afraid of the Taliban coming back.

But these women are not afraid, I think.

Can we ask why?

(laughing)

(laughing)

(slow string music)

(Graeme): Even here under anonymous burqas

behind high walls,

everyone has their own ideas about the key to peace.

(child crying)

Over the mountains,

more than 1000 kilometres away,

those divergent ideas about peace in Afghanistan

were being debated

in a city that feels like a different world.

Doha, the capital of Qatar.

(tense music)

I've been shot at by the Taliban,

nearly kidnapped a couple of times,

so it feels strange

to come here and arrange interviews with them.

you can find something remarkable.

A kind of unofficial embassy and headquarters

for the Taliban

with the support of the Qatari government.

They've been here since 2013,

a sign of how far they've come diplomatically.

The Taliban meet openly with visiting delegations,

plan their political strategy,

(speaking in foreign language)

I was curious to meet the younger Taliban thinkers.

Amar Zmarak is 35 years old.

Like a lot of new leaders

who work in the Taliban's political office,

he's well-educated and worldly.

He works diligently to spread the movement's message.

The Taliban once banned television

but now they have a sophisticated web presence,

active on social media

in Pashto, Dari, English, and Arabic.

- We are the age of technology.

In our elder time even all over the world,

there was not as much technology as we have now.

So due to technology, there is more knowledge,

there is more education,

there is more progress in any field.

So we are more progressive than the past generation.

When the world gives an opportunity to us

to prove ourselves to the world,

what we are and what we want,

they will be surprised

and they will find us

very different.

(Graeme): Zmarak dreams of returning to a homeland

that he has never seen.

(Amar Zmarak): I was born in exile.

My children are now living in exile.

So exile is now kind of life for us.

Every day and every night even in sleep we have dreams.

Every night we live in Afghanistan in our dream.

(Graeme): He and his fellow Taliban comrades in Doha

now sense that they have a chance

of getting back home.

(soft sombre music)

The United States waged war

against the Taliban for almost two decades.

some not even born when the war started in 2001.

And now the Americans also wanted to go home.

A desperate America needed to change strategy.

After decades of refusing

the US began to do just that.

In 2018, the Americans came to Doha

to start official negotiations with the Taliban...

without the Afghan government.

Mujib Mashal of the New York Times

says the stunning reversal came about

because the Americans felt trapped.

(Mujib Mashal): The noose had tightened too much.

- The military noose. - The military noose.

The Taliban's gain of territory,

the Taliban's confidence.

The Taliban's gain of territory,

the Taliban's confidence.

There's an acknowledgment of the fact internationally

that they are a power to reckon with.

(Graeme): So the Americans were forced to reckon

with Taliban's stalwarts

like this leader, Khairullah Khairkhwa,

who was the Taliban's interior minister

and a provincial governor.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Graeme): Captured shortly after the fall

of the Taliban regime in 2001,

Khairkhwa spent 12 years

in the American military prison

at Guantanamo.

His detention file describes him

as a trusted and respected Taliban official,

a high risk to US interests.

But he was set free by the Americans

in a prisoner exchange.

Khairkhwa went from wearing a prison jumpsuit

to more dignified clothing at five-star hotels.

(speaking in foreign language)

(Graeme): Khairkhwa became a key player

in the Taliban's talks with the Americans,

surrounded by lush gardens and palm trees.

The Taliban negotiators,

and tortured,

found themselves face to face with US military commanders.

(Mujib Mashal): It's a really, really odd, bizarre image

around the table.

You have people in uniform at the table,

people who have been involved in special operations,

people who are very well-known

for the kill/capture missions and things like that.

On the other side

you have pretty much half of the Taliban delegation,

some of the most key negotiators

who've spent a decade in orange jumpsuits

in Guantanamo.

Now the two of them sitting across as equals.

but by negotiating directly with the Taliban,

the Americans outraged many of their allies

in the Afghan government.

(eerie flute music)

National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib,

who spent his life fighting the Taliban,

felt betrayed.

(Hamdullah Mohib): I think what the Taliban

would achieve out of this was legitimacy.

And that's goal number one.

Establish yourself

as the legitimate saviour of Afghanistan

who has defeated a superpower

and freed the country from their invasion.

Once you've legitimized yourself

and delegitimized everybody else

then you want to negotiate.

That is not a negotiation, that is a surrender.

The Afghan government, the Afghan people

stand no chance, no fighting chance

once that deal is struck.

Because like I said, moral is gone.

I mean...

Perception is reality.

The perception there would be

is the Taliban defeated the United States

and all its allies, NATO allies.

Who in their right mind in Afghanistan

would stand in their way?

(Graeme): Activist Farahnaz Forotan

is doing her best to stand in their way.

Her My Red Line campaign has mustered a lot of opinion

against compromise with the Taliban.

(speaking in foreign language)

(tense music)

(Graeme): This poses a dilemma for Shaharzad Akbar.

As the head of Afghanistan's human rights commission,

she has always advocated for women's rights.

But she is also in favour of peace talks.

(Graeme): Interesting.

(Graeme): And what did you say?

(tense upbeat music)

Akbar went to Doha

along with other prominent Afghans

to meet the Taliban.

She pushed Khairkhwa and his comrades

on where they stood on women's rights.

But his answers were too opaque

to reassure her.

(speaking foreign language)

(Graeme): So when the Taliban say

they're committed to protecting the rights of women

that have been given to them

by the sacred religion of Islam,

what does that mean?

(indistinct chatter)

(Graeme): Despite the tensions and mistrust,

by February 2020,

the Americans and the Taliban managed to pull off a deal.

The Taliban paraded to the signing ceremony,

triumphant.

Maybe they didn't win the war,

but the Americans had failed to defeat them.

And the United States was finally admitting it.

(shouting in foreign language)

- It doesn't show our victory,

but definitely shows the loss and the weakness

of the Americans

and all other foreign troops and foreign countries

who have troops in Afghanistan.

(indistinct chatter)

(Graeme): Inside a Doha hotel ballroom

packed with dignitaries from around the world,

a historic handshake

between the US Special Envoy for Afghanistan

and a Taliban leader.

Something hard to imagine in previous years.

(applause)

(sombre music)

But this was not a peace deal.

There was no ceasefire on the horizon,

no vision for the future Afghan state.

The Taliban promised to prevent Al-Qaeda or other groups

from using Afghan soil for terrorism.

The Americans promised to pull out of the country

if the Taliban started talking with the Afghan government.

The US hoped that somehow the two sides could reach

a compromise across the battle lines.

(music escalates)

(sirens wailing)

But that hope vanished

once the Americans withdrew the last of their troops.

A corrupt government and its demoralized forces

collapsed in a matter of weeks.

By August 2021, the victorious Taliban

had swept back into power.

Hamdullah Mohib remained

to the President until the very end.

(Hamdullah Mohib): I think the word peace

gives warmth to everyone's heart.

People immediately assume that we will have stability.

Unfortunately, that's not always the case.

(speaking in foreign language)

If you strong-arm us

into accepting whatever deal you strike,

you're going to banish us from our own country.

We would be seen as traitors.

There would be no space, there would be no room for us.

The Taliban are extremists

so you may see a bloodbath on the streets of Kabul.

So this was not a simple matter of negotiation

in a difference of opinion over policy,

this is about the future of my country, my people,

quite literally, our lives.

(slow string music)

(Graeme): Those left behind will live

under Taliban rule, something they could not ever have imagined.

(speaking foreign language)

(Graeme): Already, threats to her life

had forced Farahnaz Forotan to flee the country.

Shaharzad Akbar chose to stay until the last minute,

even as she saw her dreams for the future vanish.

(Rahmatullah Amiri): People want peace,

that's one thing.

How they want it

is subject to different interpretations,

different groups, different ethnicities,

different areas.

Most of the people in Afghanistan

want international troops to withdraw from this country.

Having said that,

they also want the Taliban to compromise

with the other Afghans.

That's the two things.

Nobody wants to go to the Taliban Rule

of 1994 to 2001.

And nobody wants the current

corrupt government options either.

So there must be some story in between.

(Graeme): That dream of an "in-between",

of a compromise at the peace table that would include all Afghans,

crumbled with the Taliban victory.

At the time, this journey inspired me,

because I felt, however briefly,

that there was a chance for some kind of negotiated end to the war.

Now very little remains of the foreigners' plans for Afghanistan

and the dreams we inspired,

except for painted slogans on fortified walls.

Soon, even those will disappear.

(daunting music)

(indistinct chatter)

Now girls are putting their burqas back on,

and venturing out, like so many others,

into an uncertain future,

once again under Taliban rule.

(daunting music continues)