With the attack that unfolded on Tuesday, the Taliban demonstrated, among other things, how easy it has become for them to get inside the city.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY MOHAMMAD ISMAIL/REUTERS

A trio of true believers from the Taliban blew themselves up in downtown Kabul today, leaving behind the sort of macabre tableau that much of the world has become sadly used to: writhing bodies, severed limbs, wailing mothers. At least thirty people died in the attack, and more than three hundred people were maimed and wounded. But here’s a question worth posing, even now—indeed, especially now, in the fifteenth year of the American war in Afghanistan. What on Earth could the Taliban’s commanders hope to gain from such an act of mass murder, in which many, if not most, of the victims were civilians?

There was a time, not long ago, when Kabul was extremely safe, even as the war raged in the countryside. The city had a restaurant, called Le Atmosphere, that served passable French food, an Italian restaurant called Boccaccio, and an outdoor Lebanese restaurant called Taverna du Liban. There was also a fabulous hotel, owned by an Afghan and Western couple, called the Gandamack. Expats working in Kabul—and there were hundreds, if not thousands—stayed out late to party.

The festive if artificial scene prevailed largely because the Afghans who ran the National Security Directorate, or N.D.S., had made the city largely impenetrable to the Taliban. The N.D.S. was assisted by the U.S. military, but even at the height of the fighting out in the countryside you rarely saw American soldiers in Kabul. There were occasional attacks inside the city, like the bloody assault on the American Embassy in 2011, but those were the exception. (In this respect, the war in Afghanistan resembled the American war in Vietnam, which was also a rural war, more than the war in Iraq, which was an urban conflict from the start.)

Now Kabul increasingly resembles the rest of Afghanistan. With the attack that unfolded on Tuesday, the Taliban demonstrated, among other things, how easy it has become for them to get inside the city. The building that was struck was run by the N.D.S., which oversees much of the security in the capital. As a result of the recent increase in violence, the mood in Kabul has changed dramatically. All those restaurants, as well as the Gandamack, are closed; the Taverna du Liban was destroyed in a suicide attack. In their place are checkpoints and blast walls.

So—to get back to our question—what does the Taliban hope to gain by such an attack? The obvious answer is that the Taliban wants to show ordinary Afghans how weak their government is, that it cannot protect them. The Taliban definitely scored on that front. In a statement posted online, the group claimed that, because civilians are prohibited from going near the N.D.S. building, none were killed. But news reports indicated that many of the victims were, in fact, civilians; the truck bomb that was set off by the first bomber went off near a bus stop.

My own sense is that the Taliban leaders who planned the attack aren’t especially concerned about the deaths of a handful, or even dozens, of ordinary Afghans, as long as the assault helps make their larger point. Despite their claims to the contrary, the Taliban’s leaders have never been especially worried about civilians; according to a comprehensivesurveyreleased this week by the United Nations, of the two thousand Afghan civilians killed or wounded by fighting last year, approximately sixty per cent of the casualties could be attributed to the Taliban.

What conclusions should we draw on our own, apart from the message the Taliban was trying to send? The obvious one, it seems to me, is that the chances for a negotiated peace with the Taliban, which the U.S. and the Afghan government have been pursuing, is utterly remote. In the past two years, Taliban fighters have made extraordinary advances against the Western-backed government in Kabul, taking cities in thenorthand inHelmand Province,in the south, among others. The attack on Tuesday underscores their willingness, and their ability, to strike the very heart of the capital. Under such circumstances, why would the Taliban ever sit down with the government in Kabul and make a deal? At this point, in the spring of 2016, events are proceeding exactly how they want them to.