IN THE LAND OF THE TALIBAN

One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and
plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20's fresh
from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent
hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former
colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside
Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition
of Georges Seurat's "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" -- middle-class
families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing
their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys flying a
kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight pattern
of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction. He had
just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many
others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque.

He was now looking forward to taking a logic course at a madrasa, or
religious school, near Peshawar during his holiday.

Pakistan's religious parties, he told me through an interpreter, would
lodge him, as they did other Afghan Taliban fighters, and keep him
safe. With us was Abdul Baqi's mentor, Mullah Sadiq, a diabetic
Helmandi who was shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan auditing
Taliban finances and arranging logistics.

He had just dispatched nine fighters to Afghanistan and had taken
wounded men to a hospital in Islamabad. "I just tell the border guards
that they were wounded in a tribal dispute and need treatment," he
told me.

And though Mullah Sadiq said they had lost many commanders in battles
around Kandahar, he and Abdul Baqi appeared to be in good spirits,
laughing and chatting loudly on a cellphone to Taliban friends in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. After all, they never imagined that the
Taliban would be back so soon or in such force or that they would be
giving such trouble to the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai and some
40,000 NATO and U.S. troops in the country.

For the first time since the fall of 2001, when the Taliban were
overthrown, they were beginning to taste the possibility of victory.

As I traveled through Pakistan and particularly the Pashtun lands
bordering Afghanistan, I felt as if I were moving through a Taliban
spa for rehabilitation and inspiration. Since 2002, the American and
Pakistani militaries have focused on North Waziristan and South
Waziristan, two of the seven districts making up Pakistan's
semiautonomous tribal areas, which are between the North-West Frontier
Province and, to the south, Baluchistan Province; in the days since
the 9/11 attacks, some tribes there had sheltered members of Al Qaeda
and spawned their own Taliban movement.

Meanwhile, in the deserts of Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is
just a few hours' drive from the Afghan city of Kandahar, the Afghan
Taliban were openly reassembling themselves under Mullah Omar and his
leadership council. Quetta had become a kind of free zone where
strategies could be formed, funds picked up, interviews given and
victories relished.

In June, I was in Quetta as the Taliban fighters celebrated an attack
against Dad Mohammad Khan, an Afghan legislator locally known as Amir
Dado. Until recently he was the intelligence chief of Helmand
Province. He had worked closely with U.S. Special Forces and was
despised by Abdul Baqi -- and, to be frank, by most Afghans in the
south. Mullah Razayar Nurzai (a nom de guerre), a commander of 300
Taliban fighters who frequently meets with the leadership council and
Mullah Omar, took credit for the ambush.

Because Pakistan's intelligence services are fickle -- sometimes
supporting the Taliban, sometimes arresting its members -- I had to
meet Nurzai at night, down a dark lane in a village outside Quetta.

My guide was a Pakistani Pashtun sympathetic to the Taliban; we
slipped into a courtyard and behind a curtain into a small room with
mattresses and a gas lamp. In hobbled a rough, wild-looking graybeard
with green eyes and a prosthetic limb fitted into a permanent
1980's-era shoe. More than a quarter-century of warring had taken its
toll on Nurzai's 46-year-old body but not on his spirit.

It was 10 at night, yet he was bounding with energy and bombast about
his recent exploits in Kandahar and Helmand. A few days earlier,
Nurzai and his men had attacked Amir Dado's extended family.

First, he told me, they shot dead his brother -- a former district
leader.

Then the next day, as members of Dado's family were driving to the
site of the first attack, Nurzai's men ambushed their convoy.

Boys, cousins, uncles: all were killed.

Dado himself was safe elsewhere.

Nurzai was mildly disappointed and said that they had received bad
information. He had no regrets about the killings, however.

Abdul Baqi was also delighted by the attack.

He would tell me that Dado used to burn rocket casings and pour the
melted plastic onto the stomachs of onetime Taliban fighters he and
his men had captured.

Abdul Baqi also recalled that during the civil war that ended with the
Taliban's seizure of Kabul, Dado and his men had a checkpoint where
they "grabbed young boys and robbed people."

Mullah Omar and his followers formed the Taliban in 1994 to, among
other things, bring some justice to Afghanistan and to expel predatory
commanders like Dado. But in the early days of Karzai's government,
these regional warlords re-established themselves, with American
financing, to fill the power vacuum that the coalition forces were
unwilling to fill themselves. The warlords freely labeled their many
enemies Al Qaeda or Taliban in order to push the Americans to
eradicate them. Some of these men were indeed Taliban. Most, like
Abdul Baqi, had accepted their loss of power, but they rejoined the
Taliban as a result of harassment. Amir Dado's own abuses had
eventually led to his removal from the Helmand government at United
Nations insistence. As one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity
out of personal safety concerns, put it: "Amir Dado kept his own
prison, authorized the use of serious torture, had very little respect
for human life and made security worse." Yet when I later met Amir
Dado in Kabul, he pulled out a letter that an officer in the U.S.
Special Forces had written requesting that the Afghan Ministry of
Defense install him as Helmand's police chief and claiming that in his
absence "the quality of security in the Helmand Province has
dramatically declined."

One Place, Two Stories

I went to Afghanistan and Pakistan this summer to understand how and
why the Taliban were making a comeback five years after American and
Afghan forces drove them from power.

What kind of experience would lead Afghans to reject what seemed to be
an emerging democratic government? Had we missed something that made
Taliban rule appealing? Were they the only opposition the aggrieved
could turn to? Or, as many Afghans were saying, was this Pakistan up
to its old tricks -- cooperating with the Americans and Karzai while
conspiring to bring back the Taliban, who had been valued "assets"
before 9/11?

And why has the Bush administration's message remained that
Afghanistan is a success, Iraq a challenge? "In Afghanistan, the
trajectory is a hopeful and promising one," Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld wrote on the op-ed page of The Washington Post earlier
this month.

Afghanistan's rise from the ashes of the anti-Taliban war would mean
that the Bush administration was prevailing in replacing terror with
democracy and human rights.

Meanwhile, a counternarrative was emerging, and it belonged to the
Taliban, or the A.C.M., as NATO officers call them -- the
Anti-Coalition Militia. In Kabul, Kandahar and Pakistan, I found their
video discs and tapes in the markets.

They invoke a nostalgia for the jihad against the Russians and inspire
their viewers to rise up again.

One begins with clattering Chinooks disgorging American soldiers into
the desert.

Then we see the new Afghan government onstage, focusing in on the
Northern Alliance warlords -- Abdul Rashid Dostum, Burhanuddin
Rabbani, Karim Khalili, Muhammad Fahim, Ismail Khan, Abdul Sayyaf. It
cuts to American soldiers doing push-ups and pinpointing targets on
maps; next it shows bombs the size of bathtubs dropping from planes
and missiles emblazoned with "Royal Navy" rocketing through the sky;
then it moves to hospital beds and wounded children.

Message: America and Britain brought back
the warlords and bombed your children.

In the next clip, there are metal cages under floodlights and men in
orange jumpsuits, bowed and crouching. It cuts back to the wild eyes
of John Walker Lindh and shows trucks hauling containers crammed with
young Afghan and Pakistani prisoners -- Taliban, hundreds of whom
would suffocate to death in those containers, supposedly at the
command of the warlord and current army chief of staff, General
Dostum. Then back to American guards wheeling hunger-striking
Guantanamo prisoners on gurneys. Interspliced are older images, a bit
fuzzy, of young Afghan men, hands tied behind their backs, heads
bowed, hauled off by Communist guards.

The message: Foreigners have invaded our lands again; Americans,
Russians -- no difference.

During the period from 1994 to 2001, the Taliban were a cloistered
clique with little interest in global affairs.

Today they are far more sophisticated and outward-looking. "The
Taliban of the 90's were concerned with their district or province,"
says Waheed Muzhda, a senior aide at the Supreme Court in Kabul, who
before the Taliban fell worked in their Foreign Ministry. "Now they
have links with other networks.

Before, only two Internet connections existed -- one
was with Mullah Omar's office and the other at the Foreign Ministry
here in Kabul. Now they are connected to the world." Though this is
still very much an Afghan insurgency, fueled by complex local
grievances and power struggles, the films sold in the markets of
Pakistan and Afghanistan merge the Taliban story with that of the
larger struggle of the Muslim umma, the global community of Islam:
images of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Israelis dragging off young
Palestinian men and throwing off Palestinian mothers clinging to
their sons. Humiliation. Oppression. Followed by the same on Afghan
soil: Northern Alliance fighters perching their guns atop the bodies
of dead Taliban. In the Taliban story, Special Forces soldiers
desecrate the bodies of Taliban fighters by burning them, the Koran
is desecrated in Guantanamo toilets, the Prophet Muhammad is
desecrated in Danish cartoons and finally an apostate, Abdul Rahman,
the Afghan who was arrested earlier this year for converting to
Christianity, desecrates Islam and is not only not punished but is
released and flown off to Italy.

It is not at all clear that Afghans want the return of a Taliban
government. But even sophisticated Kabulis told me that they are fed
up with the corruption. And in the Pashtun regions, which make up
about half the country, Afghans are fed up with five years of having
their homes searched and the young men of their villages rounded up in
the name of counterinsurgency. Earlier this month in Kabul, Gen. David
Richards, the British commander of NATO's Afghanistan force, imagined
what Afghans are thinking: "They will say, 'We do not want the
Taliban, but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant
life that that might involve than another five years of fighting."' He
estimated that if NATO didn't succeed in bringing substantial economic
development to Afghanistan soon, some 70 percent of Afghans would
shift their loyalty to the Taliban.

Nation-Building, Again

In the middle of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, a metal
sign tilts into the road advertising the New York English Language
Center. It is a relic of the last American nation-building scheme.
Half a century ago, this town, built at the confluence of the
Arghandab and Helmand Rivers, was the headquarters for an ambitious
dam project partly financed by the United States and contracted out to
Morrison-Knudsen, an engineering company that helped build Cape
Canaveral and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Lashkar Gah (literally, "the place of soldiers") was to be a model
American town. Irrigation from the project would create farms out of
the desert.

Today you can still see the suburban-style homes with gardens open to
the streets, although the typical Afghan home is a fort with walls
guarding the family's privacy.

Those modernizing dreams of America and Afghanistan were eventually
defeated by nature, culture and the war to drive the Russians out of
Afghanistan in the 1980's. What remains is an intense nostalgia among
the engineers, cooks and farmers of Lashkar Gah, who remember that
time as one of employment and peace.

Today, Lashkar Gah is home to a NATO base.

Down the road from the base stands a lovely new building erected by an
N.G.O. for the local Ministry of Women's Affairs. It is big, white
and, on the day I visited, was empty except for three women getting
ready to leave. "It's so close to the foreigners, and the women are
afraid of getting killed by car bombs," the ministry's deputy told me.
She was a school headmistress and landowner, dressed elegantly in a
lime-colored blouse falling below the knees and worn over matching
trousers. She weighed the Taliban regime against this new one in terms
of pragmatic choices, not terror or ideology.

She said that she had just wrapped up the case of a girl who had been
kidnapped and raped by Kandahari police officers, something that would
not have happened under the Taliban. "Their security was outstanding,"
she said.

Under the Taliban, she said, a poppy ban was enforced. "Now the
governors tell the people, 'Just cultivate a little bit,"' she said.
"So people take this opportunity and grow a lot." The farmers lease
land to grow poppies.

The British and the police eradicate it. The farmer can't pay back the
landowner. "So instead of paying, he gives the landowner his daughter."

A few weeks before I arrived in Helmand, John Walters, the director of
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told reporters
that Afghan authorities were succeeding in reducing opium-poppy
cultivation. Yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars being
allocated by Congress to stop the trade, a United Nations report in
September estimated that this year's crop was breaking all records --
6,100 metric tons compared with 4,100 last year. When I visited
Helmand, schools in Lashkar Gah were closed in part because teachers
and students were busy harvesting the crop. A prosecutor from the
Crimes Department laughed as he told me that his clerk, driver and
bodyguard hadn't made it to work. They were all harvesting. It
requires a lot of workers, and you can earn $12 a day compared with
the $2 you get for wheat.

Hence the hundreds of young, poor Talibs from Pakistan's madrasas who
had flocked to earn that cash and who made easy converts for the
coming jihad.

Walters had singled out Helmand for special praise.

Yet just a short drive from the provincial capital, I was surrounded
by poppy farmers -- 12-year-old boys, 75-year-old men -- hard at work,
their hands caked in opium paste as they scooped figlike pulp off the
bulbs into a sack tied around their waists.

One little boy was dragging a long poppy stem attached to a car he had
made out of bulbs.

Haji Abdul, a 73-year-old Moses of a man, was the owner of the farm
and one of those nostalgic for the heyday of the Helmand Valley project.

He had worked with Americans for 15 years as a welder and
manager.

He was the first to bring electricity to his district.

Now there was none.

"Why do you think people put mines out for the British and Italians
doing eradication when they came here to save us?" He answered his own
question: "Thousands of lands ready for harvest were destroyed. How
difficult will it be for our people to tolerate that! You are taking
the food of my children, cutting my feet and disabling me. With one
bullet, I will kill you." Fortunately he didn't have to kill anyone.
He had paid 2,000 afghanis per jerib (about a half acre) of land to
the police, he told me, adding that they would then share the spoils
with the district administrator and all the other Interior Ministry
officials so that only a small percentage of the poppy would be eradicated.

When I asked Manan Farahi, the director of counterterrorism efforts
for Karzai's government, why the Taliban were so strong in Helmand, he
said that Helmandis had, in fact, hated the Taliban because of Mullah
Omar's ban on poppy cultivation. "The elders were happy this
government was coming and they could plant again," Farahi told me.
"But then the warlords came back and let their militias roam freely.
They were settling old scores -- killing people, stealing their opium.
And because they belonged to the government, the people couldn't look
to the government for protection. And because they had the ear of the
Americans, the people couldn't look to the Americans. Into this need
stepped the Taliban." And this time the Taliban, far from suppressing
the drug trade, agreed to protect it.

A Dealer's Life

The Continental Guest House in Kandahar, with its lovely gardens,
potted geraniums and Internet access in every room, was mostly empty
when I arrived, a remnant of the city's recently stalled economic resurgence.

To find out how the opium trade works and how it's related to the
Taliban's rise, I spent the afternoon with an Afghan who told me his
name was Razzaq. He is a medium-level smuggler in his late 20's who
learned his trade as a refugee in Iran. He was wearing a traditional
Kandahari bejeweled skull cap, a dark blazer and a white shalwar
kameez, a traditional outfit consisting of loose pants covered by a
tunic. He moved and spoke with the confident ease of a well-protected
man. "The whole country is in our services," he told me, "all the way
to Turkey." This wasn't bravado.

From Mazar-i-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan, he brings opium in the
form of a gooey paste, packaged in bricks.

From Badakhshan in the northeast, he brings crystal -- a sugary
substance made from heroin.

And from Jalalabad, in the east on the road to Peshawar, he brings
pure heroin.

All of this goes through Baramcha, an unmanned border town in Helmand
near Pakistan. Sometimes he pays off the national soldiers to use
their vehicles, he said. Sometimes the national policemen.

Or he hides it well, and if there is a tough checkpoint, he calls
ahead and pays them off. "The soldiers get 2,000 afghanis a month, and
I give them 100,000," he explained with an angelic smile. "So even if
I had a human head in my car, they'd let me go." It's not hard to see
why Razzaq is so successful. He has a certain charm and looks like the
modest tailor he once was, not a man steeped in illegal business.

Razzaq's smuggling career began in Zahedan, a remote and unruly
Iranian town near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is
filled with Afghan refugees who, like Razzaq and his family, fled
after the Russian invasion in 1979. Razzaq apprenticed as a tailor
under his father and eventually opened his own shop, which the
Iranians promptly shut down. They said he had no right as a refugee to
own a shop. He began painting buildings, but that, too, proved a
bureaucratic challenge.

He was paid in checks, and the bank refused to cash them without a
bank account, which he could not get.

Razzaq was newly married with dreams of a good life for his family. So
one day he took a chance. "I had gotten to know smugglers at my
tailoring shop," he told me over a meal of mutton and rice on the
floor of my hotel room. "One of them was an old man, so no one ever
suspected him. The smugglers asked me to go with him to Gerdi Jangel"
- -- an Afghan refugee town in Pakistan -- "and bring back 750 grams of
heroin to Zahedan. The security searched us on the bus, but I'd hidden
it in the heels of my shoes, and of course they didn't search the old
man. I was so happy when we made it back. I thought I was born for the
first time into this world."

So he took another chance and managed to fly to Tehran carrying four
kilos in his bag. Each time he overcame another obstacle, he became
more addicted to the easy cash. When the Iranian authorities imported
sniffing dogs to catch heroin smugglers, Razzaq and his friends filled
hypodermic needles with some heroin dissolved in water and sprayed the
liquid on cars at the bus station that would be continuing on to
Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz. "The dogs at the checkpoint went mad. They
had to search 50 cars. They decided the dogs were defective and sent
them back, and that saved us for a while." Eventually, he said, they
concocted a substance to conceal the heroin smell from the new pack of
dogs.

After the fall of the Taliban, Razzaq moved back to Helmand, built a
comfortable house and began supporting his extended family with his
expanding trafficking business.

Razzaq's main challenge today is Iran. While the Americans have turned
more or less a blind eye to the drug-trade spree of their warlord
allies, Iran has steadily cranked up its drug war. (Some 3,000 Iranian
lawmen have been killed in the last three decades battling
traffickers.) To cross the desert borders, Razzaq moves in convoys of
18 S.U.V.'s. Some contain drugs. The rest are loaded with food
supplies, antiaircraft guns, rocket launchers, antitank missiles and
militiamen, often on loan from the Taliban. The fighters are Baluch
from Iran and Afghanistan. The commanders are Afghans.

Razzaq's run, as he described it, was a scene out of "Mad Max." Three
days were spent dodging and battling Iranian forces in the deserts
around the earthquake-stricken city of Bam. Once they made it to
Isfahan, however, in central Iran, they were home free. They released
the militiamen, transferred the stuff to ordinary cars and drove to
Tehran, where other smugglers picked up the drugs and passed them on
to ethnic Turks in Tabriz. The Turks would bring them home, and from
there they went to the markets of Europe.

Should he ever run into a problem in Afghanistan, he told me, "I
simply make a phone call. And my voice is known to ministers, of
course. They are in my network.

Every network has a big man supporting them in the government." The
Interior Ministry's director of counternarcotics in Kabul had told me
the same thing.

Anyway, if the smugglers have problems on the ground, they say, they
just pay the Taliban to destroy the enemy commanders.

Razzaq has at times contemplated getting out of the smuggling trade,
he said, but the easy money is too alluring.

Depending on the market, he can earn from $1,500 to $7,500 a
month.

Most Afghans can't make that in a year. Besides, he said, "all the
governors are doing this, so why shouldn't we?"

Losers Become Winners

In December 2001, not long after the Taliban were routed, I visited
the Shah Wali Kot district, several hours' drive on unpaved roads from
Kandahar, a Mordor land of rock mountains shaped like sagging
crescents and mud-baked houses melting into the dunes.

The Taliban leaders had fled, mostly to Pakistan. Gul Agha Shirzai,
formerly a local warlord and soon-to-be new governor, and his soldiers
had swarmed into power while the Americans set up their operations
base in Mullah Omar's Xanadu-like residence.

I was with a large group of Populzai, the clan of the Afghan
president, Hamid Karzai.

We were in a big guest room with more than a dozen men gathered in a
circle, all wearing the kind of turbans that look like gargantuan
ice-cream swirls.

The ones in black turban swirls were giggling, chatting and slapping
one another on the back. The ones in white turban swirls were sulking,
grumbling or mute. In this group, the miserable white turbans were
Taliban men. They had just lost their pickup trucks, weapons, money,
prestige and jobs, all of which had gone to the gleeful black turbans.

Today those miserable white turbans have taken to the mountains to
fight. The gleeful black turbans are under siege.

I saw one of the black turbans this summer, the Shah Wali Kot district
leader, in the garden of the Kandahar governor's palace.

He was a mess. He chuckled loudly when I asked him how it was back in
Shah Wali Kot. "Frankly, we are just defending ourselves from the
Taliban," he said. "Our head is on the pillow at night, but we do not
sleep."

That small division among the Populzai in Shah Wali Kot echoes the
larger division of the Pashtun into two main branches: the Durrani and
the Ghilzai. The Durrani, Karzai's tribe, have dominated for the last
two centuries in Afghanistan and regard themselves as the ruling
elite. In the south, the Ghilzai were often treated as the nomadic,
scrappy cousins.

With the exception of Mullah Omar, who had been a poor Ghilzai farmer,
the leaders of the Taliban tended to be Durrani. These days, the
perception among the southern Ghilzai is that they are persecuted,
that the jails are filled with their people, while the Durrani in the
south received all the Japanese, U.S. and British contracts and jobs.
From what I could gather during my weeks in Afghanistan, these
perceptions were mostly true. But even if they were exaggerated, such
perceptions, in an illiterate society, have a way of quickly morphing
into reality.

Take Panjwai, a district just outside Kandahar, where hundreds of
Taliban massed this summer, taking advantage of the changeover from
American soldiers to a NATO force of Canadian troops.

One afternoon I met a red-haired propagandist and writer for the
Taliban in a Kandahar office building.

With his slight lisp, chain-smoking habit and eclectic reading --
French novelists and Arabic philosophers -- he seemed more a tormented
graduate student than the landless villager from Panjwai he was.
Panjwai is a mishmash of tribes, and the Taliban were exploiting the
grievances of the Nurzai, a tribe that has felt persecuted and
unfairly targeted for poppy eradication. Traders in Kandahar, he said,
were donating money to the Taliban. Landowners were paying them to
fight off eradicators. The Taliban were paying poor, unemployed men to
fight.

And religious scholars were delivering the message that it was time
for jihad because the Americans were no different from the Russians.
Just a few weeks earlier, the Taliban went on a killing spree in
Panjwai. They beheaded a tribal leader in his home, shot another in
the bazaar and hanged a man near a shrine with a note tacked on his
body: "SPY."

The Taliban were feeling bold enough that one afternoon Mullah
Ibrahim, a Taliban intelligence agent, dropped by my hotel for lunch.
He was a Ghilzai, from Helmand, and told me he had tried to lead a
normal life under the official amnesty program.

Instead, he was locked up, beaten and so harassed by Helmandi
intelligence and police officers that his tribal elders told him to
leave for Pakistan and join the Taliban there.

Then, about a year ago, he decided that he was tired of fighting and
living as a fugitive and accepted a reconciliation offer from an
Afghan general.

Pakistani intelligence got wind of this and imprisoned him; upon his
release, the Pakistanis gave him money and a motorbike and pressured
him to go back to war. He is still tired of war, but the Pakistanis
won't let him live in peace, and now if he tries to reconcile with the
Kabul government, he told me, the Taliban will kill him.

When fighting broke out on the main highway near Kandahar, I saw that
the police had tied up a group of villagers -- but the Taliban had all
escaped.

One of those village men, his hands bound behind his back, told me
that he had peeped out from his house earlier that day and saw some
200 Taliban with new guns and rocket launchers.

They wanted food and threatened him and other villagers. "But I am not
afraid of them," he said loudly. "I am only afraid of this
government." Why? "Look at what they do. They can't get the Taliban,
so they arrest us. We have no hope from them anymore.

And when we call and tell them Taliban are here, no one comes." As an
engineer from Panjwai who had been an Afghan senator during the
Communist era told me: "We are now like camels.

In Islam, a camel can be slaughtered in two different
ways.

"The Taliban are using rivalries and enmities between people to get
soldiers, the same tactics as the mujahedeen used against the
Russians," the engineer continued. "Just like in Russian times they
come and say, 'We are defending the country from the infidels.' They
start asking for food. Then they ask the people for soldiers and say,
'We will give you weapons.' And that's how it starts.

And the emotions are rising in the people now. They are saying,
'Kaffirs have invaded our land."'

Qayum Karzai, the president's older brother and a legislator from
Kandahar, seemed utterly depressed when I met him. "For the last four
years, the Taliban were saying that the Americans will leave here," he
said. "We were stupid and didn't believe it. Now they think it's a
victory that the Americans left."

With the Americans on their way out and the NATO force not yet in
control, the Kandahar Police were left on the front line:
underfinanced, underequipped, untrained -- and often stoned.

Which is perhaps what made them so brave.

One afternoon I ran into a group who said their friends had just been
killed when a Talib posing as a policeman served them poisoned tea. A
shaggy-haired officer in a black tunic was standing by his pickup,
freshly ripped up by a barrage of bullets, and staring at my feet. "I
envy your shoes," he said, looking back at his own torn rubber
sandals. "I envy your Toyota," he said and laughed.

And then looking at my pen and notebook, he said, "I envy you can read
and write." It's not too late, I offered feebly, but he tapped his
temple and shook his head. "It doesn't work anymore," he said. "I
smoke hash. I smoke opium.

I'm drinking because we're always thinking and nervous." He was 35. He
had been fighting for 20 years.

Four of his friends had been killed in the fighting the other
night.

He had to support children, a wife and parents on a salary of about
$100 a month.

And, he said, "we haven't been paid in four months." No wonder, then,
that the population complained that the police were all thieves.

At Kandahar's hospital I met a 17-year-old policeman (who had been
with the police since he was 14) tending to his wounded friend.

He was in a jovial mood, amazed he wasn't dead. He said they had been
given an order to cut the Taliban's escape route.

Instead they were ambushed by the Taliban, ran out of bullets and had
no phones to call for backup. "We ran away," he said with a nervous
giggle. "The Taliban chased us, shouting: 'Hey, sons of Bush! Where
are you going? We want to kill you."'

Last month, NATO forces struck back around Panjwai with artillery and
aerial bombardments, killing an estimated 500 Taliban fighters and
destroying homes and schools.

But unless NATO can stay for years, create a trustworthy police force
and spend the millions necessary to regenerate the district, the
Taliban will be back.

[continued in Part 2 at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v06/n1422/a08.html ]