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to Quetta, for nearly a year

Mohammad Rahami told him he was from Kandahar and had been part of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan that fought the Soviet Army

“Muslims make too much trouble in this country.”

the elder Rahami was dubious of the Taliban and detested ISIS.

he had become more religious and had taken to wearing Muslim robes

He used to wear Western-style clothing, and customers said he gave little indication of his heritage.

“It’s like he was a completely different person,” Mr. Jones said. “He got serious and completely closed off.”

“Where did he really go and what did he do overseas that a kid who lived a normal New Jersey life came back as a sophisticated bomb maker and terrorist?”

Both of those cities’ reputations have become entwined with the militant groups who have sheltered there:

Collisions between those worlds sometimes led to rifts with his father, who was more religious and traditional.

Rahami family’s filing a lawsuit in 2011 against the city and its Police Department

He was arrested in 2014 on weapons and aggravated assault charges for allegedly stabbing a relative in the leg in a domestic incident

In June 2010, two of Ahmad Rahami’s brothers, Mohammad K. and Mohammad Q., were arrested after an altercation with police officers who had shown up after 10 to tell them to close down for the night.

The Rahamis said Mr. McDermott told them that “Muslims make too much trouble in this country” and “Muslims should not have businesses here.”

“It was neighbor complaints; it had nothing to do with his ethnicity or religion. It had to do with noise and people congregating on the streets.”

Sept. 16, 2011, said that Mr. Rahami had been hospitalized and that his family was in Afghanistan “but returning over the next few days.

At 10:30 on Sunday night, the bombs having gone off and the hunt for the perpetrator well underway, Junior Robinson, 19, stopped in at First American Fried Chicken for some drumsticks and fries.

Mohammad Rahami served him.

Ahmad Rahami was not there. Mr. Robinson gave that no thought.

To help fill the gaps, Taliban officials are reaching into Pakistan.

Now, the Taliban are privately recruiting them to return and work in the new government.

It is unclear how many former fighters have returned from Pakistan, but there have already been several high-profile appointments, including Mr. Ghayoor.

The new hires are walking into a mounting catastrophe. Hunger is rampant. Many teachers and other public sector employees have not been paid in months. The millions of dollars in aid that helped prop up the previous government have vanished, billions in state assets are frozen and economic sanctions have led to a near collapse of the country’s banking system.

“Running insurgency and state are two different things,” said Noor Khan, 40, an accountant who fled Kabul for Islamabad in early September, among hundreds of other Afghan professionals hoping for asylum in Europe.

Five months after their takeover of Afghanistan, the Taliban are grappling with the challenges of governance. Leaders promised to retain civil servants and prioritize ethnic diversity for top government roles, but instead have filled positions at all management levels with soldiers and theologians. Other government employees have fled or refused to work, leaving widespread vacancies in the fragile state.

Mr. Ghayoor, the baker turned police chief, said that Kabul changed markedly in the two decades that he was away. As part of his duties, he tries to instill order at a busy produce market in Kabul as vendors tout fruit and vegetables, and taxi drivers call out stops, looking for fares.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the militant Haqqani network and labeled a terrorist by the F.B.I., was appointed acting minister of the interior, overseeing police, intelligence and other security forces.

“They have no experience to run the departments,” said Basir Jan, a company employee. “They sit in the offices with guns and abuse the employees in the departments by calling them ‘corrupt’ and ‘facilitators of the invaders.’”

Taliban leaders blame the United States for the collapsing economy. But some analysts say that even if the United States unfreezes Afghanistan’s state assets and lifts sanctions, the Finance Ministry does not have the technical know-how to revive the country’s broken banking system.

“Their response to the catastrophic economic situation is ‘It’s not our fault, the internationals are holding the money back.’ But the reality is that they don’t have the capacity for this kind of day-to-day technical operation,”

Foreigners intentionally evacuated Afghans, most importantly, the educated and professional ones, to weaken the Islamic Emirates and undermine our administration,” Mr. Hashimi said.

“We are in touch with some Afghans in different parts of the world and are encouraging them to return to Afghanistan because we desperately need their help and expertise to help their people and government,”

Then as now, the Taliban preferred filling the government ranks with jihadis and loyalists. But this time, some civil servants have also stopped showing up for work, several of them said in interviews, either because they are not being paid, or because they do not want to taint their pending asylum cases in the United States or Europe by working for the Taliban.

Mr. Ghayoor said in December that neither he nor any other member of the Kabul police force had been paid in months. Nevertheless, he said he decided to sell his bakery in Quetta, a city in southwestern Pakistan, and move his extended family, including nine children, to Kabul.