LIFE UNDER TALIBAN CUTS TWO WAYS

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - Karim has never known anything but a world of war.

At the age of 2, he watched the Soviet Union's occupation force retreat
from Kabul after a decade-long guerrilla war. When he was 4, his family
fled their mud-brick house as shelling from two rival Afghan militia,
fighting for control of the capital, reduced their neighborhood to rubble.

When he was 8, Karim's family breathed a sigh of relief, as religious
reformers known as the Taliban ("Seekers") toppled the bickering factions
that had formed an Afghan government and brought peace to a majority of the
country.

In five years, the Taliban has put Afghanistan on the map of the Muslim
world as a bold experiment in "pure" fundamentalist rule. It also has
become an international pariah for its ties to terrorist groups, harsh
treatment of women, and other policies. But Afghans - like the world at
large - are still coming to terms with all that this experiment means for
their lives.

Until last week, Karim's 13-year-old world seemed finally to be getting
better rather than worse. He had begun taking classes at the training
center run by Afghan Streetworking Children in New Approach, or ASCHIANA.
The nonprofit group's acronym means "nest" in Persian.

He receives two meals a day, is learning to read and write, and acquiring
future job skills as a landscape painter.

But with the United States preparing for possible retaliatory action
against the accused Saudi-born terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban government that gives him asylum, Karim's life has once again taken
a turn for the worse.

"Due to 20 years of war, the sources of income for people and the
socioeconomic fabric of the country have been damaged severely," says
Muhammad Naizmand, spokesman for Afghan Red Crescent, a branch of the
International Federation of the Red Cross/Red Crescent in Kabul.

Now, with more than a quarter of Afghanistan's 25 million population
entirely dependent on aid agencies for food and other assistance, the
social fabric that holds Karim's world together is close to unraveling.
Most of the foreign aid agencies and UN relief workers who ran food and
assistance programs have withdrawn, and the UN's World Food Program
estimates that there are now only two weeks of food stocks left in the country.

It's a situation that has many Afghans - both inside and outside
Afghanistan - reassessing the Taliban legacy, and wondering where it will
lead them.

Peace and law

"The biggest achievement of the Taliban is they have brought sharia
[Islamic law] to Afghanistan," says Abdul Qudus, an ethnic Afghan and
religious scholar who runs a madrassah, or religious school, for young
Afghans in the Jalozai refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan. "They have
made a very good peace, they have collected weapons from the people, they
stopped poppy cultivation [a source of opium], they stopped foreign
interference - and especially religious conversions of our Muslims - and
they started electricity in Afghanistan. That is their legacy."

Nasir, a taxi driver in Kabul, takes a much dimmer view, and one shared by
many of the Persian-speaking citizens of Kabul toward the Pushtu-speaking
Taliban rulers. (Afghanistan has two official languages, Pushtu and
Persian, and a variety of ethnic groups. These include majority Pashtuns,
as well as Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Turkmen.)

"These people don't have any home, any food, any income," Nasir says,
gesturing at a group of widows and their children begging in a busy Kabul
market. Like most Afghans interviewed for this story, Nasir asked that his
name be altered to protect his identity.

"With the Taliban, the first thing they build is a mosque and a madrassah,"
he says. "We need mullahs, but we also need other things too: engineers,
doctors, teachers."

When Karim saw his first Taliban soldiers, driving in on Toyota pickup
trucks on Sept. 26, 1996, there was little to indicate that the public mood
might turn against them. The Taliban, unlike the fractious mujahideen
rebels who ousted the Soviets, was able to unify a majority of the country
under one regime and bring a level of peace that hadn't existed here for
almost two decades.

In Kabul, and the five other Afghan metropolises under Taliban control,
this newfound peace allowed Karim and his family to rebuild their home.
Around the country, Afghans returned by the thousands, restoring a
semblence of the lives they had led in the 1970s, before the troubles
began. Hundreds of foreign-aid groups began setting up food-for-work
programs; establishing medical clinics, bakeries, and schools; and
beginning the long, dangerous task of clearing away millions of landmines
and tons of unexploded ordnance.

Today, the Taliban claim to control up to 90 percent of Afghanistan, but
this figure must be tempered somewhat by the fact that Taliban forces still
face fighting in more than half - 17 out of 32 - Afghan provinces. As
recently as yesterday, fighters from Afghanistan's Northern Alliance - the
main Taliban foe - launched a helicopter attack on Kabul itself, destroying
two civilian airliners and detonating tons of ordnance at an ammunition dump.

Even so, in those areas where the Taliban is firmly in control, Afghans say
they feel safer than in previous years.

"When the Taliban came in, the fighting stopped," says Ubaidullah, head of
a food-for-work program that is rebuilding homes in a destroyed section of
Kabul. "Now, it is OK, there is no fighting, no thieves, no rapists. There
is also no work and no money, therefore there are a lot of poor people." As
fellow workers gather, he pauses. "We have a lot of feelings about the
Taliban that I can't tell you."

A 'pure' Islamic state

But more than anything else, the Taliban aimed at remaking Afghanistan into
a nation that adhered to its interpretation of the pure Islamic society
envisioned by the prophet Muhammad. Part of this came from the utter
disappointment many of these young Taliban felt as they watched the
mujahideen turn from liberators into bickering warlords, creating an
anarchic state where robbery, rape, and extortion became the rule rather
than the exception.

"If you look at the constituency of the Taliban, they are mostly the lower
rungs of society, those who have little trust in where the world is going,"
says a Western diplomat in New Delhi with extensive experience in Islamic
societies of the Middle East. "So when the Taliban come in, they say, 'You
have no food? We'll build a bakery. No mosque? We'll go build one. No
school? We'll build one, and we'll even give your son free education in the
Koran."

"When the son comes home, fed and in new clothes, the first thing he tells
his mother is, 'Mother, I have done bad things to you. I should honor you.
I wish you to forgive me," the diplomat adds. "What mother is not going to
be ecstatic about that?"

Even so, the arrival of Islamic law has been greeted with mixed reaction
among Afghans. Some in rural areas say their daily lives have not changed
much, since they had followed sharia for decades, even centuries. But in
urban areas, many Afghans resent the strict rules that govern all aspects
of their daily lives.

Consider the following list of edicts issued by Taliban religious scholars
in Kabul in December 1996:

"To prevent music.... In shops, hotels, vehicles, and rickshaws, cassettes
and music are prohibited."

"To prevent beard shaving and its cutting. After one and a half months, if
anyone [is] observed who has shaved and or cut his beard, they should be
arrested and imprisoned until their beard is bushy."

"To prevent kite-flying."

"To prevent idolatry. In vehicles, shops, hotels, rooms, and any other
place, pictures [and] portraits should be abolished."

"To prevent washing cloth by young ladies along the water streams in the
city. Violator ladies should be picked up with respectful Islamic manner,
taken to their houses, and their husbands severely punished."

Though the list was long, the Taliban vigorously enforced these new rules
through their religious police. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue
and Prevention of Vice now patrols every major city of Afghanistan, armed
with whips and automatic rifles. Though Karim says the police largely leave
him alone, and sometimes even give him alms, other Afghans say the
religious police perform their tasks with zeal, checking cars for cassette
tapes, monitoring beard lengths, and maintaining social order in a
sometimes brutal fashion.

"If you look at the kind of people who are Taliban, they are very poorly
educated, and they stick to the word of the Koran, with no attempt at
interpretation," says Frederic Grare, director of the Center for Human
Sciences in New Delhi. "The rule of the Taliban is ruthless, very
primitive, and cruel. But nevertheless, there is rule," Dr. Grare adds.
"When Kabul fell in the hands of [recently assassinated mujahideen
commander] Ahmad Shah Masood, where was the rule then? Now, you at least
have some predictability."

Praised on drug control

From the Western perspective, the Taliban's most impressive accomplishment
is in the area of drug control. Until last year, Afghanistan accounted for
nearly three-quarters of the world's supply of opium, with much of the
addictive drug reaching Europe, America, and beyond. Even though the
Taliban's interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, specifically bans
addiction, nearly 500,000 Afghan farmers earned up to $100 million a year
from the drought-resistant crop. Local Taliban governments took a 10
percent cut from a zakat, or farm tax.

For years, Taliban officials told Western drug-control officials they
couldn't stop poppy cultivation because of the hardship it would impose on
farmers, particularly during a now-three year drought. But this year,
Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar banned opium outright. To the
West's surprise, adherence has been total within Taliban-ruled areas - and
without a penny of foreign aid. The UN Drug Control Program suspended
assistance two years ago.

"It's really quite remarkable," says Bernard Frahi, director of the UN Drug
Control Program in Islamabad, speaking last March, when UN teams of
monitors confirmed that the Taliban poppy ban was total. "If this had
happened in Colombia, where the US is spending billions of dollars and
reducing drug cultivation by maybe 5 percent, this would have gotten the
Nobel Prize. But because it's the Taliban, there's a different reaction."

Diplomatic isolation

Only three nations - Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates -
have granted official recognition to the Taliban government.

Most Western democratic nations object to the Taliban's authoritarian rule,
and its often brutal suppression of free expression and human rights,
especially restrictions on women. But Western diplomats say the main
obstacle for Western recognition is the Taliban's alleged patronage of
militant groups within its own borders.

"This has become a breeding ground for radical Islam," says the Western
diplomat.

The US and the West bear some responsibility for creating this breeding
ground in the 1980s and early '90s, as the US encouraged zealous Muslim
leaders to recruit Muslims worldwide to come to training camps in Pakistan
and Afghanistan to overturn the Soviet invasion. Once the Soviets left,
Western nations lost interest in the region and distanced themselves from
the mujahideen - Afghans, North Africans, Arabs, and even Southeast Asians
- - who fought in Afghanistan.

More than a dozen of these training camps are still in operation. Some are
thought to be funded by Mr. bin Laden. Authorities believe they trained the
perpetrators of numerous attacks, from from Khobar, Tanzania, and Kenya to
Yemen, New York, and Washington. A major part of their ideology is the
overthrow of America, and of less-than-pure Islamic governments in places
like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

"They're winning the battle of the minds of the people, and we're losing it
... because we don't speak Arabic and we don't understand Muslim culture,"
adds the diplomat. And with little credibility or leverage in the region,
there is little the US and its allies can do to influence Afghanistan,
outside of the use of military force.

Humanitarian aid

Now, more than a week after UN relief officials and foreign aid workers
have withdrawn from Afghanistan, Afghans like Karim who depend on aid
programs for food and work are having to rely on other means, primarily
their families. World Food Program officials estimate there are only two
weeks of UN food stocks left in Afghanistan. Already, thousands of Afghans
are reported leaving their homes, both out of fear of US bombing attacks
and in search of a stable source of food.

Like some 6 million Afghans, Karim and his family spend their daily lives
fending off starvation. Nearly 1 million urban Afghans and 4 million rural
Afghans are almost entirely dependent on food relief.

While more than 400,000 Afghan civilians have lost their lives in the 1990s
alone, the humanitarian crisis has had a particularly hard effect on Afghan
children, who make up nearly half the nation's population - 10.3 million of
a total 25 million Afghans here. Nearly a quarter of all infants die by the
age of 5, mostly from malnutrition. Only 12 out of 20 school-age boys, and
one out of 20 school-age girls, go to school.

Karim's family is so poor that he and his his four brothers must leave the
house by 5:30 a.m. and start the day's work: picking through trash and
roadside filth in search of wood, metal, and bits of paper to sell to scrap
dealers. His father is unable to work; his mother earns some money washing
clothes and baking bread for neighbors.

On a good day, Karim earns about 30 cents, enough to buy five pieces of
bread. His first meal of the day - a glass of milk and a hunk of bread -
comes at 9:00 a.m. at the training center run by ASCHIANA.

Karim gets two meals a day through ASCHIANA. At noon he rushes out to the
local bazaar for two hours to scavenge for wood and metal.

"It's dangerous, because there are lots of places in Kabul where there are
mines," says Karim. "There are some mines beside the rivers and in the
destroyed areas. We learn what the mines look like, and how to avoid them."

Karim has never been to school, but after a year at ASCHIANA, he can now
read and write. He has even read the Koran once, and the lessons from that
holiest of books in Islam give him hope, he says. But his favorite pastime,
by far, is painting. "I'm learning to be an artist," says Karim, smiling.
"I have one wish: to be a good teacher, so that I can teach others to be
good painters."

At the end of the day, Karim walks home with his friends. He's supposed to
be gathering scrap metal, but on this day he and his classmates stop at the
playground in Sharinow Park. They take turns pushing a rickety
merry-go-round, which tips and sways and sends some of the boys flying into
the dust as it gathers speed.

For 10 minutes, Karim's world is like that of any child in the world, a
world of play.