KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — The Taliban were inching closer, encroaching on land that had once seemed secure, the U.S. officer warned. Four of his men had just been killed, and he needed Afghans willing to fight back.

“Who will stand up?” the officer implored a crowd of 150 Afghan elders.

The people in Kunduz province were largely supportive of the Americans and opposed to the Taliban. But recruiting police officers was slow going and, by the summer of 2009, local officials and the U.S. officer — a lieutenant colonel from the Georgia National Guard — landed on a risky approach: hiring private militias.

A murmur of discontent passed through the crowd.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” an old man stood up and said, according to four people at the meeting. “We have seen this before. The militias will become a bigger problem than the Taliban.”

Over the grumbling, a onetime warlord named Mohammad Omar, sprung up and denounced the others as cowards.

“I will fight the Taliban!” he shouted.

The gathering in Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, is not registered in any official history of the war. But people across the province say this seemingly unremarkable moment reshaped the conflict in ways that Washington has never truly understood.

For years, the Americans supported militias in the north to fight the Taliban. But the effort backfired — those groups preyed on the populace with such cruelty that they turned a one-time stronghold of the United States into a bastion of the insurgency. People came to see the militias, and by extensions the Americans, as a source of torment, not salvation.

Omar, for example, who was known as the Wall Breaker, became the poster child of an abusive militia commander, marauding his way into local lore by robbing, kidnapping and killing rivals and neighbors under the auspices of keeping them safe from the Taliban.

And he was just one of thousands of militia fighters unleashed in northern Afghanistan by the Americans and their allies — openly, covertly and sometimes inadvertently.

Comes to a head

The consequences came to a head during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in 2021. The north was expected to be America’s rear guard, a place where values like democracy and women’s rights might have taken hold.

Instead, it capitulated in a matter of days — the first region to fall to the Taliban.

President-elect Donald Trump has blamed President Joe Biden for the messy end to America’s longest war, vowing to fire “every single senior official” responsible for the disastrous exit. Biden, by contrast, blames the Afghans for surrendering to the Taliban so quickly.

“Political leaders gave up and fled the country,” Biden said after the withdrawal. “The Afghan military collapsed.”

But both renderings miss a more fundamental reason for the rapid fall: In places like Kunduz, a New York Times investigation found, the United States set the conditions for its defeat long before the Afghan soldiers laid down their arms.

For years, the Americans helped recruit, train and pay for lawless bands of militias that pillaged homes and laid waste to entire communities. The militias tortured civilians, kidnapped for ransom, massacred dozens in vendetta killings and razed entire villages, sowing more than a decade of hatred toward the Afghan government and its U.S. allies.

The Afghan army, already overwhelmed, recognized that it was defending a government with vanishingly little support. So, when the advancing Taliban offered Afghan soldiers a choice — their lives for their weapons — they lay down arms.

The regions plundered by Omar and other warlords were active battlefields during the war, mostly off limits to outsiders. But more than 50 interviews, conducted in Kunduz over 18 months, showed how U.S. support for the militias spelled disaster, not just in the province but also across the rest of northern Afghanistan.

That state-sponsored misery was central to how the United States and its Afghan partners lost the north — and how, despite two decades and $2 trillion in American money, Afghanistan fell.

Other Times investigations this year have revealed how the United States underwrote atrocities by Afghan forces and recklessly killed its own allies, essentially authoring its own defeat in Afghanistan.

The fall of Kunduz in 2021 was the final word on another unforced American error — its use of criminals to carry out operations against the Taliban.

“The militias shot at civilians and killed innocents,” said Rahim Jan, whose mother, father and two brothers were killed by Omar, which other villagers confirmed. With no other choice, he said, “we supported the Taliban, because they fought the militias.”

U.S. missteps

Even the Taliban, normally eager to boast of battlefield exploits, credit their victory in the province to U.S. missteps.

“The U.S. empowered bandits and murderers in the name of counterinsurgency,” said Matiullah Rohani, a former Taliban commander and the current minister of information and culture in Kunduz. “But it only pushed more people into the hands of the Taliban.”

Human rights groups, academics and journalists have published numerous accounts of atrocities by militias. But the extent of the abuse, and how it helped enable the Taliban’s swift takeover of Afghanistan, is a story the Americans left behind when they abandoned the country three years ago.

Today, with the militias gone, the scale of their acts — in both human and political costs — is visible.

Previous accounts have blamed Afghan officials in the north for raising their own militias. But the Times found that the United States had recruited militias in Kunduz far earlier than was known, with a fallout far worse than U.S. officials have acknowledged.

During its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the United States pushed an ever-evolving series of programs to recruit, train and support local resistance to the Taliban. Some formally created armed groups under the auspices of the police, while other backing was ad hoc, with money and training provided here and there. In many cases, the Afghan government doled out American cash, giving militias the imprimatur of Washington’s support.

Almost all of the efforts were problematic. Militias soon grew too powerful to disarm.

One of the first militias was born in the Kunduz district of Khanabad, the brainchild of the Georgia National Guard officer desperate to beat back the Taliban. And one of the earliest efforts involved Omar, the Wall Breaker.

‘Saying right things’

“There was no doubt in my mind that Mr. Omar was a leader in that community,” said the now-retired officer, Lt. Col. Kenneth Payne, of the 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment of Georgia’s 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. “And I firmly believe that, at the time, he was saying all the right things.”

Instead, he wound up unwittingly supporting the only group in the region less popular than the Taliban.

Months after the summer meeting, a Taliban fighter lay against the floor of a collapsed guesthouse. Outside, Omar, the newly minted militia leader, paced the street.

“Come out now, or I will blow the walls of this house down!” he shouted into a megaphone, as his men prepped mortars, witnesses said. “I am the Wall Breaker!”

The insurgent weathered round after round of mortars, each one collapsing nearby homes and terrifying residents with the indiscriminate explosions.

Finally, Omar retreated with his men, fearful that the Taliban might send reinforcements. But on the way out of town, for good measure, his militia looted a local store and roughed up a few locals, residents said, actions that turned much of the community against him.

Omar had waged an all-day battle to chase down a single Taliban fighter. And still, somehow, his target had survived.

But the Wall Breaker moniker stuck.

President Ashraf Ghani took office in Afghanistan in 2014 and realized the militias were running amok. He promised to bring security to Kunduz by bringing people like the Wall Breaker under control.

The effort proved disastrous. Some militias soured on the government, former Afghan officials said. Some militias even switched sides, joining forces with the Taliban.

“The split between the militias was crucial for us,” said Hesmatullah Zalmay, a Taliban commander in Kunduz.

Within a year of Ghani’s threat to curtail the militias, Kunduz was on the verge of collapse.

Far from drawing lessons from the failed militia strategies, the Afghan government doubled down. To maintain order, Ghani’s government turned to a man even more ruthless than the Wall Breaker.

In a province shattered by ethnic and political divides, where factions of factions fought other factions, everyone agreed on one thing: Haji Fateh was the worst, most notoriously violent of all the militia commanders.

Accounts of his medieval torture methods — branding people with hot metal rods, burying them alive or keeping them chained in underground dungeons — still haunt the residents of Kunduz.

A scourge

Fateh was widely seen as a scourge, a villain who killed innocents and charged their families to retrieve the bodies.

Gul Afraz lived with her family in the village of Dana, a small community of Tajik families numbering fewer than 150 people.

Fateh planted roadside bombs that killed her son and two of her nephews, she said. Fearing that the village might take revenge, Fateh bulldozed every home there, villagers said, sending survivors fleeing.

Rival militia fighters moved in, committing their own offenses, a tit-for-tat brutality that pushed more of the locals who remained to support the one group that wasn’t killing them — the Taliban.

Within a year of Fateh’s arrival, the entire village had all but been wiped out.

“There was no Taliban here at first,” Afraz said, “but I am so grateful they are here now.”

In February 2020, when the Trump administration reached a peace deal with the Taliban, the die was cast: the Americans were leaving.

The Taliban went from district to district, using elders to encourage the Afghan army to lay down its arms. It was not much of a negotiation. Thanks to the militias, the Taliban were stronger than ever, and there was no goodwill left for the government. By the time the United States announced its timetable for the withdrawal in 2021, the Taliban had all but taken most districts in Kunduz.