'The Face of a Killer?' : A former U.S. ally runs afoul of Kabul, setting up a showdown that could disrupt the war on terror.(Padcha Khan Zadran)(Brief Article)

Padcha Khan Zadran is lucky if he can find a stretch of ground to lay down upon. Gone are the heady days when he slept in plush hotels--as he did last December during the Afghan peace process in Bonn, fawned over by United Nations officials and U.S. diplomats. These days, with a small cadre of loyal, gun-toting soldiers, he patrols a rocky, potholed stretch of road that connects one lonely Afghan town, Gardez, to another, Khowst. He's too old now, 60, to sleep in the hills as he did during the jihad against the Soviets. More often that not, he winds up in an ancestral mud hut in Outmani, with his toothless uncle Zafar, swatting away flies and pondering, inconsolably, his precipitous fall. "Do I have a scary face?" he asks. "Is this the face of a killer?"

Many people would say yes. After Zadran rained rockets on Gardez last month in a bid to reclaim the governorship he had lost two months earlier, Hamid Karzai accused his old friend and ally of murder and ordered his immediate arrest. Three dozen civilians were killed in the indiscriminate attack, and 60 more wounded. If Zadran doesn't surrender by this Wednesday, says Karzai, troops will swarm down to take care of him. The warlord insists he was attacked first and was only defending himself against bandits and Qaeda sympathizers, who he claims have infested Gardez. Zadran is convinced that Karzai is on a personal mission to destroy him because he didn't vote for him in Bonn. "Karzai is the one who should be counting his days," he rails. "He's the guilty one in all of this. We'll see what happens if he decides to attack me."

The standoff is exacerbating growing tensions in Afghanistan. With only a month left in his interim administration, Karzai has yet to assert full control over the various warlords who continue to rule bits and pieces of the country. Ongoing U.S. military operations in the rugged mountains south of Gardez further complicate the situation. Zadran controls, through family ties, three key commanders working with the Americans in the border areas around Khowst. His brother Kamal Khan's 600 soldiers provide security and manpower to soldiers at two U.S. bases outside the city. His son Abdul Wali last week brought another 300 of his own soldiers to bolster the American force. Zadran is sure the Americans won't get involved in his dispute with Karzai. "They will lose ...