After the revolution: the city of Kandahar, post-Taliban, is full of reminders that the Taliban were not what they seemed to be.

In the winter of 1988-89, I spent a month in a mujahideen camp in the Argandhab Valley, a few miles north of Kandahar. The Soviets had begun to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, but MIG warplanes were still carrying out daily bombing and strafing runs, and in the slummy southern suburbs of Kandahar there was a front line where both sides were dug in. The commander of the camp, Mullah Naquibullah, known as Naquib, was a tall, beefy fellow, the chief of Kandahar's second-largest tribe, the Alokozai. He had installed about thirty of his fighters on the outskirts of his home village of Charqulba. The village itself was mostly destroyed and abandoned; nearly all the inhabitants had fled to refugee camps in Pakistan. The only civilians in the area were a few Kutchi nomad families who wandered around with their camels and herds of goats. The desert was pocked from years of Soviet bombardment, and unexploded rockets stuck out of the earth at odd angles here and there, like children's arrows. Naquib's camp consisted of half a dozen flat-roofed mud huts and a prayer ground in the midst of vineyards. The day before I arrived, a bomb had landed nearby, leaving a huge crater in which a beautiful black stallion lay dead, its hooves in the air.

The war, such as it was, was fairly abstract by then. You could see bombs exploding in the distance most days, but there was no real threat of ground attacks from the besieged government garrison, and Mullah Naquib pretty much had the run of the Argandhab Valley. His mujahideen prayed diligently five times a day, and, given their devotion and their abstinent way of life, I began to think of them as warrior monks.

One day Naquib sent me off to observe a court session led by two elderly Islamic scholars who were charged with imposing Sharia, religious law, in the region. I was driven at breakneck speed along a bombed-out road by a young man who played tapes of wailing Kandahari love songs at high volume on the cassette deck of a Toyota pickup truck. The court was set up out-of-doors, in the shade of a raisin-storage silo. The judges leaned on pillows propped up against the silo walls and told me how they followed the Koran in reaching verdicts about territorial rights, adultery, theft, and so forth. After some bickering over numbers, they agreed that they had put eighteen murderers to death. Their discourse on justice went on for some time, and then the younger of the two produced a piece of paper and announced that a new edict was being sent to all the mujahideen commanders in the region. Crime had increased, and this was due, they believed, to the playing of recorded music, which was banned from now on.

The ban obviously came as a shock to the mujahideen who had accompanied me. They looked embarrassed but didn't say much, and we left as soon as the court broke for lunch. Driving back to Naquib's camp, the young driver pointedly inserted a tape into the cassette deck and turned the volume up even louder than it had been before. I learned later that Naquib told his men that he was not going to make a big issue of the new edict. He said that they could continue to play music, but only when they were in camp, and that they should keep it low. Meanwhile, he told the judges that he would comply with their order. Naquib's pragmatic way of dealing with the situation seemed to me admirable.

I thought of that rustic court recently when I visited Mullah Naquib in Kandahar, where he has been living on and off since 1992, when the Communist-backed Afghan regime was finally defeated. Naquib is a controversial figure in Kandahar because of his relationship with the Taliban. When Burhanuddin Rabbani was President of Afghanistan, Naquib was made the supreme military commander of Kandahar, but in 1994 he turned the city over to the Taliban. Many people believe that he was also involved in the recent, unexplained disappearance of the Taliban from Kandahar, and they blame him especially for the escape of Mullah Omar.

Naquib didn't remember me at first, but when he did he seemed pleased, and he began introducing me as a friend from the old days of the jihad against the Soviets. Naquib has aged badly; although he is only forty-seven, he looks much older. He wears glasses now, and his long black beard is streaked with gray. He has a bad cough. We reminisced for a while, and he offered to take me back to the Argandhab Valley to revisit the mujahideen camp where we had met more than a decade earlier. The next day, followed by a dozen or so bodyguards, he led me to the carport in his living compound, where two late-model S.U.V.s were parked. We got into a pearl-colored VX Limited Edition Toyota Land Cruiser, and several small boys, the youngest of Naquib's eleven children, climbed into the back. The Toyota had a sunroof and a luxurious tan leather interior, and a CD player with an LCD display. It was a fine car, I said to Naquib. He chuckled. "It was Mullah Omar's," he said. "I have ten of his cars."

We took off, and I asked Naquib how he had come to own Mullah Omar's cars. "They were just parked, so I took them," he replied, somewhat glibly. We came to a gate on the security perimeter of Mullah Omar's property, which turned out to be more or less next door. The sentries at the gate saluted Naquib. Mullah Omar apparently owned a hundred acres or so on the edge of town, with about ten acres given over to a compound of living quarters and guesthouses that were surrounded by a maze of walls. We drove down a dirt road that runs through Omar's property, and soon came to the paved road to the Argandhab Valley, a rural fastness where dusty tracks lead off in all directions into the ...