In the city of Kabul, high above the chaos, far from the noise of war, dusk is deceptively peaceful.

 

For while the rhythms of the marketplace continue here unaltered, elsewhere there is change. Massive change. For some, dangerous change as the west negotiates its long goodbye, and peace talks with the Taliban, sometimes on, sometimes off, climb the political agenda.

 

(Amrullah Saleh, Former Head of Afghan Intelligence:)

“It has the potential to lead to civil war, yes. It has. I may not be the commander of the civil war but the undercurrent that I am detecting in the country is massive. Massive. And that’s neglected.

 

The modest office, the lone staffer in the corner, belie the status of the man. Amrullah Saleh is Afghanistan’s former spy chief. Until 2010, in charge of national intelligence.

For him when the Taliban suspend talks it proves the folly of engaging with them.

 

(Amrullah Saleh:)

Taliban look at it this way. They say, ok. Ten years, we have run the marathon. It’s another mile. For them it’s not a peace process. It’s another mile to dominate the country. They have not given up their maximalist agenda. Who have given up? The whole world. It’s a shame.

 

Fawzia Koofi is not giving up her maximalist agenda. She is a member of Afghanistan’s parliament and its deputy speaker, a single, working mother who receives male constituents in her home.

 

Two years ago the Taliban tried to kill her.

 

(Fawzia Koofi, Deputy Speaker, Afghan Parliament:) 

You can die at any second and the bullets were everywhere in my car. I initially tried to hide myself by throwing myself under the seat of the vehicle. They wanted to kill me beacause I am somebody for them and I’m proud of that if I am somebody to Taliban and if they think I am against their beliefs I’m proud of that.

 

What Fawzia Koofi is not proud of is her president, Hamid Karzai. Talks, she says, are a game on his side as well.

 

(Fawzia Koofi:)

Peace talks with the Taliban has been always used politically. Sometimes President Karzai uses that against international community to demonstrate that he is one step ahead of others, sometimes he uses against his politial opponents to say that, ok, if you don’t listen to me I’ll ring Taliban tomorrow. There is no actual process as such that you trust it, that there is like a start and an end to this process.

 

Do you think a process has quietly, secretly, begun?

 

(Amrullah Saleh:)

That’s why we are furious. We say we are betrayed both by the government of Afghanistan and those who are pursuing talks, untransparent talks, from the west. We are not part of it and you may ask who are you? We are anti-Taliban. Anti-Taliban people of Afghanistan are not part of it. So this is not peace, it’s deal making.  

 

Down an icy Kabul lane lives a family with whom the Taliban have had their way.

Mohammad and his wife Malika fled their home province of Bamiyan when the Taliban were in power.

 

He finds work as a labourer when he can. They have just two rooms but they glow with pride, laughing that after three girls, this little boy, child number four, is definitely their last.

It seems he could play hide and seek all day.

 

What he doesn’t know is that his Asiatic features will mark him out as an Hazara, a member of Afghanistan’s most persecuted community, which is shia not sunni, and so set upon by the Taliban.                                 

 

(Muhammad:)

They were coming into our villages. They were in their 4 wheel drives. They did not get out.  They just kept on randomly shooting. In the houses, in the mountain, everywhere. For three days they were just killing everybody.

 

Shekiba listens to the family history, the story of why other kids have grandmothers but she does not.

 

(Muhmmad:)

When they came I escaped. I came to Kabul from the mountains. When everything was on fire my mother tried to save the house by throwing down the firewood burning on the roof. That’s when they shot her.  

 

High above Kabul lies the path to a man who is certain that the ravaged and the ravager can be reconciled. He knows the Taliban. He was one himself.

 

The former Taliban deputy minister for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice now sits on the government’s High Peace Council, scorns on camera interviews, but today relents, just as long as the woman in the room sits at the back.

 

Peace is achievable, he says, though Afghan women, they may have to sit up the back as well.

 

(Maulvi Qalamuddin, Former Taliban Deputy Minister:)

If the peace negotiations are in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or in Afghanistan there may be some restrictions on women whether they participate or not. There may be some places where women can't go. That’s why I’m saying maybe.

 

But to the world of the burqa, of not being seen, not being heard and cowering at home,

Fawzia Koofi does not wish to go back.

 

(Fawzia Koofi:)

And I have experienced looking at the world from the window of my house which the world looks so small. All the opportunities of the world are abandoned to all the women. My fear is that we are obliged to sit home again.

 

Maulvi Qalamuddin bristles at any suggestion that women were treated badly in the past.

 

(Maulvi Qalamuddin:)

You haven’t seen one of them. Someone’s told you. You heard it from the media. You heard it from those people who were against the Taliban. You can not show me one woman in all of Afghanistan who was punished by the Taliban. I was the person in charge.                                     

 

But Maulvi Qalamuddin, fondly remembering the Taliban past, hoping for moderation tomorrow, is the radical of  yesterday.

 

These streets await the future  - where guns proliferate as does corruption, and a bold splash of lipstick can be chosen over the burqa.

 

So what do today’s Taliban think? The classified Nato report State of the Taliban 2012 based on 27,000 interrogations of some 4,000 captured Taliban came to this conclusion. Quote: Taliban commanders and their rank and file members increasingly believe their control of Afghanistan is inevitable and while they suffered severely in 2011 their strength, motivation, funding and technical capacity remain intact. In which case some ask would they really be interested in talking peace. We went to Kabul’s main prison to ask one of them.

                                                                                   

Abdul Aziz is indeed today’s Taliban. Incarcerated in Pul-e-Chakri prison he is neither bowed nor broken and he is certainly not offering peace.

 

Merely scratch the surface and out tumble extraordinary predictions.

 

So do you expect that the Taliban will win and come back to Kabul?

 

(Abdul Aziz, Taliban Prisoner)

For sure, if the foreigner troops leave, the Taliban will come back to Kabul soon.

 

You say that the Taliban will come back to power in Kabul if foreigners leave. How quickly will that happen?

 

(Abdul Aziz:)

I believe in 1-2 months the Taliban will capture Kabul.

 

It is the smile that says it all.

 

(Amrullah Saleh:)

That confidence of the Taliban come from a corrupt political Kabul. So when they see this government stands for nothing and it is a government for the political survival of its leaders and it’s ready to enter into any dirty deal, that gives the Taliban the confidence. We know the Taliban and they know us. We will not be defeated in twenty days.

 

If the Taliban take control of Kabul do you expect that Mullah Omar will come out of hiding?

 

(Abdul Aziz:)

If the Taliban capture all of Afghanistan including Kabul, yes, Mullah Omar will show himself on the media and he will talk with the media and he will show himself on tv.

 

Abdul Aziz calmly returns to his cell, confident the Taliban will prevail and adamant there will be no peace talks until all Taliban prisoners are set free and the bounty is taken off Mullah Omar’s head.

 

(Amrullah Saleh:)

Where is moderation? They are the same. It’s the same Mullah Omar. Could Pol Pot of Cambodia be modified? No. Mullah Omar and Pol Pot in his policy are the same. Mass murderers.

 

In the camps of the displaced all the talk of victory, of talks started, stalled or suspended,  rings hollow and obscene.

 

This is where war washes up, where plastic shoes suffice in mounds of snow, where the feeble undertake the futile, and pain is all around.

 

Mirralam fits his surname well. Ramgin means sorrow. Yet somehow he faces destitution smilingly.

 

(Mirrilam:)

This is my youngest child.

 

Mirrilam and his family are Pashtun, same as the Taliban. From the south, same as the Taliban, and he respected them when they were in power.

 

(Mirrilam:)

During the Taliban if you had a bag of gold on you there was no one to steal it from you or take it from you anywhere, be it the moutains or the desert. The Taliban had that effect on people.

 

But Mirrilam has no bag of gold. He feeds his children bread and potatoes.

 

(Mirrilam:)

During the cold there was a time I kept the stove on all night. Honestly, I sold things to buy fire wood.

 

They are here because this is better than being caught in the cross fire in their home province of Helmand.

 

(Mirrilam:)

If one Talib were to  shoot from behind my house, there will be airstrikes on our house and our children will be under the dust.

 

It is perhaps Afghanistan’s most common refrain. That all of this suffering somehow is someone else’s fault. Yet at least in part the evidence keeps rolling in that it is.

 

That same classified Nato report found that senior Taliban leaders meet regularly with Pakistan’s intelligence agency who advise on strategy and relay any Pakistan government concerns. Said one detainee the Taliban is not Islam, the Taliban is Islamabad.

 

Amrullah Saleh argues it’s Pakistan that should be attacked.

 

(Amrullah Saleh:)

You have 27,000 reports showing that the headquarters of your enemy is headquarters of Pakistan army. So hit it.

And yet you know--

Don’t sell us--

But you know that would bring about a regional conflagration.

If that is the big problem so why should the west sell us out to appease Rawalpindi?

Because you don’t have nuclear weapons.

Exactly. We are poor. Our blood and our dignity is not counted. You have come to the point, exactly.

 

As night falls Fawzia Koofi’s daughters sing through their homework, laughter fills the house and death hovers close.

 

Their father died in a Taliban prison.

 

The girls were in the car during that failed assassination.

 

Now their mother has set her sights on the presidency.

 

And they all know the potential cost of public service.

 

(Fawzia Koofi:)

I got a letter from our security that the Haqqani group would like to assassinate you so please take some measures and it’s very funny because you know you are going to be assassinated what measures can you take in a situation that they could already enter the bedrooms of our politicians when they wanted to kill them.

So you are never, you are never sure, they might be under any identity, any clothes, any face that will come to your house. Especially when you know that something is going to happen, it’s like every moment that thing will happen.

And yet you’re smiling. You’re laughing. This is not funny.

Do you want me to cry before I get killed?

 

So as the west searches for the ending to its story, for Afghans it feels more like another beginning, for this nation which lives amdist heavenly beauty but has walked its journey for so long through hell.