ROAD RAGE.

Kathy Gannon talks about reconstruction and warlord rule in Afghanistan

Mullah Muhammad Khaksar is a burly man in his early forties with a thick, curly beard that falls halfway down his chest. He lives in a modest house in a poor suburb of Kabul, but he travels often to Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan, where he was born and where his family owns an electronics shop. When I first met Khaksar, in 1999, he had two grand houses in the center of Kabul, with servants and manicured gardens. The Taliban controlled the city then, and Khaksar was the deputy minister of interior. He was something of an oddity among the Taliban, in that he collected books and would furtively scour the few bookstores that were still open, looking for volumes written in Pashto, the language spoken by most Afghans in the south and the east. He also had a stash of photographs, which were forbidden under the Taliban, and he showed me pictures that had been taken of him when he was fighting the Soviets alongside one-eyed Mullah Omar. Khaksar is a heavy smoker, and even though Mullah Omar had ordered his ministers to give up cigarettes, Khaksar refused to quit. Like his smoking, our meetings were often conducted in secret.

Khaksar was a founding member of the Taliban movement, which arose in Kandahar in the early nineties. After the defeat of the Soviets by the Afghan mujahideen in 1989 and the collapse of the Afghan communist government in 1992, Kabul had been taken over by mujahideen factions that fought bitterly. Meanwhile, Kandahar was at the mercy of violent, thieving warlords. Their militias stopped cars at every other intersection to demand money or weapons. Even Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's current president, who is also from Kandahar, supported the Taliban's intervention in the anarchic post-Soviet period.

In the early years of the movement, Khaksar was the Taliban intelligence chief in Kandahar, but he lost power when he began speaking out against influential Afghan mullahs who had been trained at Pakistani religious schools and were manipulated by Pakistani intelligence officers. The mullahs and, later, Osama bin Laden had ingratiated themselves into Mullah Omar's inner circle. "I asked Mullah Omar, 'Why do we need these people?' " Khaksar recalled not long after I met him. " 'The jihad' "--against the Soviets--" 'is over. They should go back to their country.' " Many of the men who had helped found the Taliban could no longer even arrange a meeting with Mullah Omar.

The Taliban sent Khaksar to Kabul in 1996, shortly after they took control of the city, and he was demoted to deputy minister. In April, 1999, he travelled to Peshawar, in Pakistan, where he spoke with J. Peter McIllwain, the C.I.A. chief there. Khaksar told McIllwain that the Taliban could not be defeated militarily by the Afghan opposition, but that the leaders who were most closely aligned with Osama bin Laden and the Pakistanis could be undermined if more moderate elements within the Taliban were supported by arms and money from the West. Khaksar risked a great deal to make this overture to the United States. He knew that Osama's intelligence was good and that the meeting could cost him his life. Before Khaksar returned to Afghanistan, McIllwain gave him half of a five-rupee note and told him not to talk to anyone who claimed to represent the United States unless he had the other half of the note. The clandestine encounter, as Khaksar described it, sounded like an episode in a cheap spy novel, but McIllwain recently confirmed the details of the meeting, and Khaksar still has his now tattered half of the five-rupee note, along with a letter from McIllwain saying that the Americans were unwilling to do as he asked.

When the Taliban fled Kabul, after dark on November 13, 2001, Khaksar stayed behind. I was in Kabul then, too, and was for nearly three weeks the only Western journalist in the city. The Taliban had encircled Kabul with tanks, and on that last night checkpoints were manned by skittish young men with rocket launchers and automatic rifles. American jets circled overhead, and rockets from gunships slammed into pickup trucks carrying Arab fighters. Smart bombs hit several buildings, including one next to my office, which had been home to the Taliban's police chief and defense minister.

Khaksar's decision to remain in Kabul identified him publicly as a traitor. This does not cause problems for him in Kabul now, since nato forces police the streets. But in the south and the east, where the Taliban live and where they have been increasingly active in recent months, killing and kidnapping with impunity, Khaksar has to move more carefully. He drives to Kandahar perhaps once a month, even though many people along the route know who he is.