A few days before the American and British air strikes in Afghanistan began, I visited a man who is being held prisoner in a hole in the desert. The hole is near Dasht-e-Qala, a northern Afghan town a few miles from the Tajikistan border, not far from a hogback ridge of dusty hills that the Taliban have, for some time, been trying to wrest from their main opponents, the Northern Alliance. The Taliban and the Northern Alliance fighters had come to within three hundred yards of one another in places, and on the exposed ridges, where the powdery earth was a grim geometry of sandbagged dugouts and trenches, they traded shots with sniper rifles and heavy machine guns, while their rearguard positions lobbed tank shells back and forth.

The prisoner, a Taliban fighter who says his name is Bashir, had been in the hole for about a month, since the night he was caught by the Northern Alliance mujahideen wandering around on his own in no man's land. His hole-prison is about ten feet deep and three feet wide, and it is covered most of the time by a piece of heavy metal tread from a Russian tank. At the bottom, the hole turns into a cavity that, according to his captors, is a comfortable six feet by six feet. When Bashir is brought up to ground level, he has to climb a wooden ladder. This is a not an easy thing to do, because he also wears leg irons.

On the day I met Bashir, or, rather, observed him—for he was in a trancelike state of detachment—his leg irons had been removed. He was forced to walk over to where I stood, but he appeared to be weak, and he soon squatted down against a mud wall. He is about thirty, very thin, with a black goatee and short-cropped black hair. He wore a filthy green smock and his skin was smeared with dirt. His arms were tattooed with green dots, and there was a string around his neck from which hung a little purple book containing verses from the Koran. He was barefoot. His captors said that he has needle tracks on his arms, although I didn't see them. I did see a scar from a bullet hole on his right collarbone.

A group of mujahideen guards and curious children gathered to watch. Despite promptings from Mullah Omar, the warlord who is holding Bashir and wants to exchange him for five of his own soldiers who are being held prisoner by the Taliban, he didn't say very much—just his name, and that he is from Kandahar, more than four hundred miles to the southwest, where the Taliban have their headquarters. (And where the better-known Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, lives. Many Afghans use only one name, which can be confusing to Westerners.) "All the Kandaharis are like this," Mullah Omar said to me. "They never talk." They were not to be trusted, he said, which was why Bashir had to be kept in a hole. Mullah Omar is a slight, thirty-five-year-old man of Tajik ancestry. He said that the Taliban had offered him only three of his soldiers in exchange for Bashir, and that he and they were haggling about this over their field radios. I asked him why Bashir kept spitting, and he said it was because he was suffering from drug withdrawal. Some of what he had been spitting appeared to be brown, though. Was it blood? Had Bashir been beaten? "No, no," Mullah Omar reassured me. "We give him bread, milk—everything he wants. But we don't give him charas"—hashish, or opium. "He asks for it every day."

After a few minutes, Bashir was taken back to the hole, and Mullah Omar led me inside his compound to meet his sons. He assembled two groups of boys, all barefoot. One of the groups consisted of his ten sons, aged one month to twelve years, including a set of identical twins. The other group was made up of the five sons of his own twin brother, who was killed a few months ago by the Taliban. A few months before that, their eldest brother, Qari Kamir Alem, a relatively famous mujahideen commander, had been murdered. Mullah Omar captured six men who he said had betrayed Qari Kamir Alem and were responsible for his death, and he had them hanged. He had inherited his brother's command on the front line, and he claimed to have two thousand fighters, but this was almost certainly an exaggeration. He told me that he had begun fighting in 1979, when he was twelve years old and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. As for his title of "mullah," he said that he had earned it by studying the Koran and other holy books in his home village—which is in the Khoja-i-Gar district, and is now occupied by the Taliban—and then at a madrasah in Pakistan. I left Mullah Omar as dusk approached and he and his men prepared for the sunset prayers.

The day after the air strikes began, I drove past Mullah Omar's compound, again at sunset, and looked out at the desert, toward Bashir's hole. His guards had brought their captive up for air, and he was standing in a shallow ditch they had dug for him. He was visible only from the torso up. He appeared to be rooted in place, half swallowed by the earth.

Dasht-e-Qala is in Takhar Province, and until last year the provincial capital, Taloqan, was the main base of operations for the Northern Alliance's military commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud. But Taloqan fell in heavy fighting, and Massoud retreated to a village closer to the Tajik border, about twenty-five miles northeast of Dasht-e-Qala. He was mortally wounded there on September 9th, when two Arab suicide bombers, posing as journalists, set off a bomb while they were interviewing him. By then, the hills above Dasht-e-Qala were the last barrier between the Taliban and the border that provided the Northern Alliance with access to the outside world and supplies.

Dasht-e-Qala is near the confluence of two rivers—the Amu Dar'ya, which forms the border with Tajikistan, and the Kokcha, which runs into the Amu Dar'ya. The local Northern Alliance organization is called the Kokcha Union and is led by four commanders, each of whom represents a population center. They coöperate with the central Northern Alliance organization, which is nominally headed by Burhanuddin Rabbani, the president of the government formed by the mujahideen who took power in Kabul in 1992, when the Soviet-backed government fell. When the mujahideen were ousted by the Taliban in 1996, Rabbani and Massoud retreated to the northern part of the country, and they and various warlords and other supporters formed the Northern Alliance, which is still recognized as the official representative of Afghanistan by the U.N. and most other countries. Massoud, a brilliant military tactician and a charismatic leader, had been defense minister and vice-president in the mujahideen government, and he was the senior figure in the Northern Alliance.

The local commanders in the Northern Alliance negotiate with Rabbani's government for funds for their troops, but they have a great deal of autonomous authority in their districts. If an N.G.O. wishes to build a school or an irrigation system or organize a food-for-work road-improvement project, it must make arrangements through the local commanders, whose bargaining power vis-à-vis the Northern Alliance as a whole derives from the fact that they have small armies of their own. The commanders supply troops in the war against the Taliban and coördinate their activities along the front with the Northern Alliance defense minister—formerly Ahmed Shah Massoud and now General Muhammad Fahim, who took Massoud's place after the assassination.

The commanders within a district have a rotating system of leadership. Last winter, the Dasht-e-Qala commander, Mamur Hassan, led the Kochka Union troops for a four-month period and then relinquished his duties to one of the four other district commanders. Hassan is a landowner, and his men are extremely deferential to him, as if he were a feudal lord. He says that he has been at war, more or less constantly, for the past twenty-four years. He is of Uzbek heritage, and he studied at an American-built high school in the province of Helmand, in southern Afghanistan, and at Kabul's agricultural university, but he came back home to Dasht-e-Qala to work on irrigation projects. Then the Soviets invaded. He laughed when I asked what he would do after the coming war. "I will farm," he said. "I have three hundred jeribs"—a hundred and fifty acres—"of land. I can be a rich man." For the time being, he supplies trucks to his nephews, who work the farm and split the harvest of wheat, corn, melons, and lentils with him.

Mamur Hassan is a small, sturdy-looking man, and light on his feet. He has a beard of medium length that is mostly gray, and short-cropped black hair running to gray as well. He usually wears a long-tailed tunic and matching pantaloon outfit—which is what most Pakistani and Afghan men wear—and, over it, a military-style multipocketed vest. He has a wide nose, and large brown eyes with crow's-feet at the corners. He listens attentively and speaks with a warm, reedy voice, full of inflection, in Uzbek or Dari, the Afghan variant of Farsi. Mamur Hassan appears to be in his late fifties. Like a lot of Afghans, he does not seem to have thought much about his age, and when we first met he told me that his father, who he said was a hundred and seven when he died two years ago, was thirty when he was born. I pointed out that if that was the case Mamur Hassan would be close to seventy. He hesitated and began counting on his fingers. He said that he was born in the Muslim year 1322—1943 in the Christian calendar—and, since it was now 1380, he agreed that it was possible that he was fifty-seven or fifty-eight.

Hassan lives with his two wives and five of his seven children in a brick-and-concrete house surrounded by orchards, at the end of a dirt drive that passes through a small glade of trees running from Dasht-e-Qala to the Kokcha River. The town itself is little more than a rambling spread of walled family compounds set around an intersection of dirt tracks fronted by little shops with wooden shutters, many of them made from ammunition boxes. On the other side of the river is the front line. Hassan's house is small but comfortable and modern by local standards. The garden is lush—because it is irrigated—with a green lawn and a large plane tree. There is a raised concrete area in a corner for afternoon prayers and for sleeping outdoors in the hot summers. Pink petunias and red and white roses grow next to a concrete bungalow that functions as his staff headquarters and guest house. It has a carpeted room that is used for meals and meetings and prayers, a radio room, a kitchen, and a sleeping room. Large white geese wander along the dirt path outside, near a muddy stream. Two pens house a number of pheasants, which occasionally break out in a peculiar song, a staccato clatter that ranges briefly through several tempos and then stops abruptly. There is an anti-aircraft battery on one side of the house.

The first time I visited Hassan, he sat in a chair about twelve feet away from the one that had been placed on the lawn for me. He raised his arm in the direction of a soldier standing twenty feet behind him, and called for his worry beads. An aide came running with a set of amber beads, which Hassan began working with his left hand. I noticed that when he put the beads down his hands trembled. From time to time, he took out a small round tin case of naswar, the tobacco-spice-herb mixture—a mild stimulant—that many Afghan men are addicted to, and tapped a little onto his hand, then popped it into the gap between his teeth and his lower lip. Two bodyguards paced around us, and when I reached into my bag for a notepad they looked especially alert. Later, after I had spent some time at the compound, they laughed and said that they thought I would understand their nervousness about journalists, since the men who killed Massoud had passed themselves off as reporters in search of an interview. When they were no longer suspicious, they greeted me with thermoses of tea and dishes of almonds and candies and tried out English phrases on me. Hassan invited me to stay at the compound when the air strikes became imminent.

It is not the custom in Afghanistan to invite guests into one's living quarters, since wives are not supposed to be seen. I never met the women in Hassan's household, but Hassan's youngest son, Babur Shah, a three-year-old toddler, played around our feet while we talked. Hassan occasionally called out to the little boy, remonstrating with him gently, but for the most part he just looked at him fondly. Babur Shah's older brother Ataullah, who is twenty, was also usually present, and took care of him. Ata, as he is called, has just received a scholarship to study journalism in China. Hassan has two other sons who live and study in Tehran, where one of his wives has a house. Hassan didn't want to send his sons away, but Ahmed Shah Massoud advised him to, so that he would not be distracted by having to look after them while fighting a war. He sent them to Iran because he could not afford to send them to Europe.

Mamur Hassan said that he was one of only two men still alive among the thirty from Dasht-e-Qala who took up arms as mujahideen against the Soviets in 1979. They had started out on their own, without any affiliations, he said, but later on, when Afghan Muslim leaders began receiving arms and funding from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S., they threw in their lot with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the radical leader of an ethnic Pashtun mujahideen group. Hekmatyar was Massoud's rival. "At first, I was a member of Hekmatyar's party, and I fought against the Soviets but also against other Afghans," Hassan said. "We killed a lot of people and destroyed many places, and I regret this. I tell my sons not to have anything to do with political parties." He finally broke with Hekmatyar and joined Massoud, who offered to make a place for him when the mujahideen formed a government in Kabul in 1992. Hassan chose to return to Dasht-e-Qala instead. Now he helps out the Northern Alliance but maintains his independence. "I control a lot of men and a large area," he said. I asked whether the men he commanded owed their loyalties to him or to the Alliance, and he said, "To me."

There are apparently around five thousand soldiers in the Kokcha Union, with maybe a thousand in Dasht-e-Qala. "They are ready to fight for me whenever I order them to," Hassan said. The Alliance gave him two hundred Kalashnikovs, and he regularly receives food for six hundred soldiers, but he makes up the shortfalls and provides everything else that is needed, like clothing and medicine. "I pay for it myself," he told me, "out of my own pocket." He laughed. "My family was rich, but we spent it all in the jihad"—the war against the Soviets in the nineteen-eighties and then for four years against the Afghan Communist government.

I asked Hassan what Islamic state he admired, or could see as a model for Afghanistan, and he said that Islam, as he understood it, was a civilized religion and allowed for states in which, for example, Muslims and Christians could live together without problems: "This is the kind of Islamic state we want." He cited Egypt and Saudi Arabia as two nations that he thought had managed to balance the Muslim faith while retaining basic freedoms and also bringing modernization to their countries. I asked what he felt toward unbelievers. "I don't think anything," he said. "I don't mind what they are." I thought that perhaps he was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, but Hassan does seem to enjoy a reputation locally for moderation and fairness. "He's not all that worked up about religion," Shahmurat, a hulking farmer who has known Hassan for most of his life, said to me. "He's a democrat." Massoud Aziz, an engineer who lives in Dasht-e-Qala, said that Hassan is highly regarded, especially by the middle-class intelligentsia. "He has evolved since his early mujahideen days," Aziz said. "He was not a democratic man then, but he is now."

One morning, Mamur Hassan took me with him on an inspection tour of the front line. He sat next to the driver of his Russian UAZ jeep and I sat between two of his bodyguards in the back seat. Two more bodyguards were squeezed into the space behind us. We drove up a huge dirty-yellow hill that housed a labyrinth of bunkers, dugouts, sandbagged bivouacs with howitzers, and Russian T-55 tanks disguised with straw matting, their cannons pointing toward the Taliban positions, which were barely visible through clouds of dust. We sped from bivouac to bivouac, and Hassan popped out of the jeep at each stop, dressed in a powder-blue tunic and green Army fatigue jacket, a white skullcap on his head. He poked around the soldiers' dugouts and asked them what they had and what they needed, and jotted down what they told him on a pad. I went with him into an underground bunker with bare floors and Kalashnikovs and ammo clips hanging on the walls. "Only two blankets for ten men," Hassan noted. "My mujahideen are in bad shape."

The hill where Hassan's men were dug in overlooks the Amu Dar'ya, near where the Kokcha meets it. The flat plain between the hill and the river was honeycombed with large holes, and I realized later that this was what was left of the archeological excavation site of Aï Khanum, where a great Hellenistic city flourished from the fourth to the second centuries B.C. The city had been surrounded by brick ramparts, with a monumental gate and several square towers. It was a formidable citadel with a palace, mansions, a theatre, a temple, and an arsenal. There has been widespread looting of antiquities in Afghanistan, not to mention the destruction of ancient sites by bombs and religious zealots. Many of the treasures from Aï Khanum were displayed in the Kabul Museum, which has been vandalized, its collections dispersed in bazaars and on the illicit art market. The pockmarked plain I saw had apparently been bulldozed to facilitate the looting. The site is one of the main transit points for supplies and equipment coming into Northern Alliance territory from Tajikistan, and we watched people landing on the Afghan side of the river in what looked like a rubber raft. Trucks and other heavy items are brought across by barge. One of the bases of the Russian border guards who are still in charge of security in Tajikistan was visible on a craggy promontory on the far side of the river.

Around four o'clock that day, when the sun was already beginning to descend, I found Mamur Hassan at prayers with some of his commanders in his garden. When they were finished, he called me over and said, in a hushed, edgy voice, that the Americans were supposed to have begun bombing at 2 P.M. that day, but, because there was a sandstorm and poor visibility, they hadn't. "Maybe they have already begun bombing Kandahar or Kabul, or will tonight," he said. The Alliance's front-line units had been ordered to cease shelling, he explained, so that they wouldn't be mistaken for Taliban positions and get bombed. Driving back to the compound where I had been living, thirty minutes or so from Hassan's home, I heard explosions in the distance. They didn't sound like the usual howitzers or rockets. I turned around and returned to Hassan's base, to stay there for the night.

Mamur Hassan inherited his position in Dasht-e-Qala. He said that his grandfather owned a lot of livestock, and that his father made the first irrigation canal in the area. "This was just a desert then," he said. The area still looks like a desert, but there is a series of irrigation ditches between Hassan's house and the river, and the land around them is fertile and tilled. Hassan's grandfather held the title of arbob—headman—which he passed down to his son, Hassan's father. Hassan explained that the title is no longer used. He is called Commander, he says, because of the war and because he leads soldiers, but he retains a social rank equivalent to or greater than that of his forefathers. "There are no more arbobs," he said.

Hassan explained that his duty as a commander is to provide security, and that during the years of jihad against the Soviets he also had to act as a judge. "Normally, there are courts, laws, and judges," he said, "but during the war, if someone killed someone else, then it was my responsibility to deal with these people. A commander must be educated and understand about courts and laws. Before the fighting, I didn't understand anything about courts, laws, or human rights, but later, after I took charge of Dasht-e-Qala, I sought out advice, and now I understand." His teacher, he says, was a Muslim priest who was killed in fighting among the mujahideen. "In those days, I rode around on a horse and we had no courts or anything, but now we have courts and laws."

There is, apparently, a good deal of overlap between the duties of a commander and those of the son of the district's former arbob. Once a month, Hassan and the three other commanders of the Kokcha Union meet with delegates from the villages and towns in their communities to discuss problems, hear proposals, and seek agreement on actions to be taken. "We try to see how we can help the people," he said, "and most of them give their sons to us to be soldiers."

As a child, Hassan listened to his father's stories about fighting the Russians in the nineteen-twenties, when the Central Asian republics were forced into the new U.S.S.R. There was a Tajik revolt against the Russian Communists. "The Russians forced the Tajiks into Afghanistan, and my father joined in their guerrilla raids. I wanted to grow up to be a fighter like that. But now I am tired of fighting." He says that when he was young Dasht-e-Qala was a very different kind of place. "We had everything we needed, even though we lived in a small village. We had schools, peace. There were several companies doing business here. But then the Russians crossed the Amu Dar'ya, and the people of Dasht-e-Qala took their children and fled into the mountains, and many of them died. At the time, I had only ten men with guns, and when I reached where the people were at sunrise the next morning, I found women and children there, dead under the snow. It is one of my most terrible memories."

During the jihad against the Soviets, Hassan and his men hid out in a forested section of the mountains east of Dasht-e-Qala, in the neighboring district of Rostaq, from which they carried out raids. "There were only animals there, goats and things," he said. "It is a hard place to get to—twelve hours by horse from Dasht-e-Qala. We had a big underground cave, several guns, and five Russian jeeps. I spent fourteen years there. The Soviets tried to attack us several times in the summer, but they were unable to get close to us. One winter, though, in the snow, they came right up, wearing white, and we didn't see them. They laid siege to us for three months and tried to starve us out, but even then we knew ways to obtain food. And in the end they weren't able to get us."After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, leaving the puppet government of President Najibullah in place, Hassan helped lead the mujahideen's successful military campaign to reconquer Taloqan. This was managed with the collusion of two Najib commanders who decided to switch sides. In their joint offensive, they killed the top government commander in Taloqan and seized the city. From then until 1992, when Najibullah's government fell to the mujahideen,Takhar Province was one of the main mujahideen bases in Afghanistan.

Hassan is one of five brothers. Two of them, he said, were killed by the Soviets, along with his mother and five of his nephews. He said that his mother was killed in reprisal for his mujahideen activities. He was in the mountains, and one night he sneaked down to her house and she slaughtered a lamb and fed him and his men. Hassan said that the Russians heard about this and came to her and asked if he had been there. She said no, but they killed her anyway. Within two months, his two brothers were also dead. "The person who helped the Russians"—that is, the man who informed them about Hassan's visit to his mother's house—"was a relative who lived nearby," Hassan said. "The mujahideen had killed his father, and this was his way of taking vengeance. Later, we caught him and I said to him, 'We killed your father and you killed my mother and that's the end of it.' We ended things there." When I expressed surprise at his merciful gesture, he laughed. "Now I am amazed at what I did. But, because of it, this place is secure and no one threatens me or wants to kill me."

Hassan told me that he had also employed conciliatory tactics in 1992, when Dasht-e-Qala reverted to his control. He called an assembly, a jalsa, which lasted two or three days. The area had been bitterly divided between non-Communists and pro-Communists. He proposed that they leave their rancor behind and rebuild their communities under a single commander—him. That is why, he repeated, "Dasht-e-Qala is a secure place and at peace and no one wants to kill me."

Hassan's wives wear burkhas, the extreme, head-to-toe coverings that the Taliban require and that are common in Northern Alliance territory also. "We must follow our customs," Hassan says. But he doesn't necessarily favor them. "Why is it that in Mecca, the holiest Islamic place, women go with their faces uncovered—and men, too, wear nothing on their heads? If that is the center of Islam, then why don't they wear burkhas?" He concluded, with a rueful smile, "I think the burkha is just an old-fashioned Afghan custom."

One afternoon in Dasht-e-Qala, two women, one in a deep-violet burkha and the other wearing emerald green, floated past, briefly enlivening the backdrop of beat-up olive-green military vehicles, brown desert, and dusty shop fronts. The sight of women, or at least discernibly human creatures in feminine clothes, is about the only thing that relieves the harshness of the landscape. The visible part of Afghan society is unremittingly male, as is the land, which is drab and muscular. There is nothing soft about anything here, none of the creature comforts a Westerner takes for granted. Dust clogs your throat and coats hair and skin, and the people, who cover their faces with scarves and turbans, have learned to live with it in much the same way the British have grown used to rain. Much of northern Afghanistan today is a pre-industrial society, without electricity, running water, or telephones. There are not even toys for the children. Water is pumped by hand from wells that have been dug with shovels, and roads are made by crews who break rocks and produce gravel with sledgehammers. Barefoot boys walk back and forth through beds of harvested rice, turning the grains with their toes to dry them in the sun. In the bazaars, porters carry poles with reed baskets on the ends, filled with everything from water to rock salt, which is sold in pinkish-gray chunks before being ground down to powder. Lambs are tethered next to men with long knives who slaughter them and hang the carcasses from hooks, hacking them into a steadily diminishing mess of blood and meat and bone and fat by day's end. Grain and vegetables are weighed in tin scales that are balanced with stones. On market days, people walk from distant villages—some even cross Taliban lines—to buy livestock (donkeys, camels, cattle, and horses) and then they herd the animals back home. The flat horizon is dotted with robed men riding donkeys, others on camelback, and the odd motorbike spitting up clouds of dust.

There is a new primary school for boys and girls in the village of Nawabad, a couple of miles from Dasht-e-Qala. Six hundred boys study in the morning, and the girls, four hundred and thirty of them, come to class in the afternoon. They study the Koran and Islamic religion, history, mathematics, and geography. Some of the older children are learning English. Most of them come from families who fled the Taliban's military advance last year, when they seized Taloqan and the area right up to the Kokcha River. A couple of hundred displaced families still live in miserable little shacks on a scorching wasteland just outside the village, but some five thousand families have been resettled with host families by N.G.O.s. The school is supported by Unicef, which pays the salaries of the teachers, and Shelter Now International, which built the latrines and provides some of the classroom materials. The school opened in May; many of the girls had not been in a classroom since they fled their home towns and villages, where the Taliban had closed all their schools.

I visited the school a half hour or so before the day's classes ended. In twelve separate rooms off a mud courtyard, girls in headscarves sat on reed mats, reciting their lessons in unison. The teachers, mostly young women in their late teens and early twenties, stood in front of blackboards, their heads uncovered. Each of them held a twig switch, as a pointer, and as I entered classrooms or passed by doorways, many of them froze, or shifted their scarves. I asked Headmaster Muhamadi if one of the teachers might be willing to speak to me, and he said no, that was not a good idea. Not because of them, or him, but because of what people in the village would say.

The women teachers were beautiful, with large brown eyes and fair skin. They wore colorful tunics, some of which were decorated with flower patterns, and billowy pantaloons. One woman wore several gold bracelets, and most of the women had dark kohl painted around their eyes. When the classes ended and the students piled out from the school through the mud doorway, the teachers slipped silently down the dirt lane, garbed in white burkhas. They had become wraiths, stumbling along on foot or riding donkeys, bobbing away amid a throng of chattering, happy, barefaced girls.

The day of the first air strikes, Mamur Hassan was in the nearby town of Khoja Bahauddin, where the Northern Alliance defense ministry has its headquarters. He returned around sunset and prayed with his lieutenants in the garden. Then everybody became somewhat frantic, and Hassan rushed around between his house and the radio room in the bungalow. When several men were getting ready to leave in their jeeps and began making a lot of noise, he shouted at them to be quiet and to remain on high alert at their bases. He told one man that if he wasn't prepared he would kill him. After they left, Hassan stood under the plane tree, watching the sky above and looking at his wristwatch, twitching with tension.

The men who stayed in the compound listened to Radio Tehran and the BBC's Farsi Service on short-wave radios. When reports of missile attacks began coming in, an exchange of tank and Katyusha rocket fire—baritone booms and clattery whooshes, respectively—could be heard in the distance. A dozen or so mujahideen stayed up most of the night, listening to the news and eavesdropping on enemy field-radio conversations. Hassan's personal secretary, Osman Muhammad, a twenty-four-year-old medical worker who had given up his job to fight the Taliban, had a long conversation on his radio with a Northern Alliance defector he knows. Osman explained to me that the man had had a misunderstanding with Qasi Qabir, Mamur Hassan's counterpart in Khoja Bahauddin, and had fled the district with his family. For the past two and half years, he had been serving as an officer with the Taliban near Taloqan. Osman said that he had called the man when the bombing began to say, "Come back now or else you will die." The defector had replied that it was too late, that there was no going back, that Qasi Qabir would kill him. Osman said that he had given him his personal guarantee of safety if he returned, but he admitted to me that the promise was worthless, and that Qasi Qabir would have the final say about the defector's fate. "It would be a big problem if Qasi Qabir found out the man came back and stayed here with Mamur Hassan," he said. "He would ask, 'Why are you protecting my enemy?' " I asked Osman if the defector agreed with the Taliban. "No, that's what so terrible about this," he said. "He doesn't understand why fate has driven him into the arms of his enemies."

The next morning, I asked Mamur Hassan how he had slept. He chuckled and said he had watched TV and listened to the news until 1 A.M. He has a satellite dish and an aerial, and is thus one of only a few people in Dasht-e-Qala who can watch television. He said that if the Americans kept up their missile strikes and bombing raids the Taliban would go to the mountains to wage a guerrilla campaign. This was not his speculation, he said, but a plan already outlined by the Taliban. He also said that the Northern Alliance had an agreement with the Americans to launch a military offensive in tandem with their raids. Without the air strikes, Hassan said, the Northern Alliance would be able to do very little. He refused to be drawn out on the question of how anyone was going to defeat the Taliban in a guerrilla war in the mountains, although as a veteran of fourteen years in similar mountains he seemed qualified to comment.

"So," I said, "all this talk about finishing off the Taliban in a week once the bombing started was just hot air?" He smiled. "It was to boost the morale of the mujahideen. You understand. The fact of the matter is that the Taliban are very powerful. We need the air strikes in order to make any headway." He claimed that the Taliban had recently increased their troop strength along the hundred or so kilometres of the Takhar Province front line from fifteen to twenty-five thousand soldiers. "This will give you some idea of what we face." Hassan said that if the Americans were able to inflict real damage with the air strikes and if they and the Russians would give the Northern Alliance the military equipment they had promised, then the Taliban could be taken down in a couple of months. "General Fahim has told me to collect all my soldiers and to be at the ready. But it is very difficult for me. I have food for only six hundred men and I have one thousand to feed. So the conditions are not right for a sustained attack. The truth is this. In these conditions, it's impossible."

Hassan had promised to introduce me to Sadruddin, the man who betrayed him and caused his mother's death during the years of the jihad. Sadruddin is forty-five, but he looks closer to sixty, a thin man with a goatee and a deeply furrowed, weatherbeaten face. He arrived one morning a few days after the air strikes began. Sadruddin is Mamur Hassan's second cousin, and he is married to Hassan's niece. I asked him to tell me his version of the story. Had Mamur Hassan killed his father? Yes, Sadruddin said, although Hassan did not give the order. The leader of the mujahideen group that Hassan belonged to at the time had ordered him to capture Sadruddin's father, a well-off landowner, and six others like him from the Dasht-e-Qala area. They took them back to their cave in the mountains of Rostaq, where the mujahideen commander executed them with a pistol. He killed them, Sadruddin says, not because they were pro-Soviet but because they were influential and wealthy people, and he was jealous and afraid of their power. "My father was a good man, and many people followed him. When he died, I was just a boy, and all the responsibility of my family fell upon me." He said that his desire for vengeance was so great that he joined the army of the Najibullah regime. "After I joined the Najib government, I told my soldiers to kill Mamur Hassan's mother." Had he been present at the execution? "Yes," he acknowledged. "But I stood some distance away. We killed her with guns."

Mamur Hassan had been unable to retaliate immediately, Sadruddin said, but "when Najib fell, and Ahmed Shah Massoud occupied this valley, Mamur Hassan became the mujahideen commander, and I fled with thirty-five soldiers to a village that we secured. Mamur Hassan laid siege to us. I held out for four days, until an assembly of arbobs, led by Mamur Hassan's father, who was the most respected of all of them, arranged a reconciliation between us. We resolved our differences then, and have been friends ever since. Afterward, all of my soldiers joined the mujahideen, under the command of Mamur Hassan, and later I married his niece." Sadruddin didn't think that this was all that anomalous. "In the Holy Koran it says that if someone kills someone in your family, then you must kill that person. It also preaches forgiveness." Sadruddin is a wheat farmer now. "No more war for me," he said.