OUR WOMAN IN KABUL
by
Irris Makler


Irris Makler is an award-winning journalist who is presently reporting
from the Middle East, where she files for a number of broadcasters,
including Channel 9. Before going freelance she worked for the ABC for
nine years, including as its Moscow correspondent.  There she covered
breaking news like the sinking of the Kursk submarine and the ongoing
war in Chechnya, as well as unforgettable stories like The Reindeer
Serenade, following an orchestra to the Arctic circle, where they
played Mozart for nomads and their reindeer.

Irris began her career at BBC TV in London, where she speciali sed in
investigative programs, including a series on medical negligence and
the BBC's major current affairs program, Panorama.  There, an
investigation into the case of the Guildford Four won the Royal
Television Society Award.  Irris also worked for independent TV in
the

UK.

5 IRRIS MAKLER

BANTAM BOOKS SYDNEY AUCKLAND TORONTO NEW YORK LONDON Every effort has
been made to identify copyright holders of extracts in this book.  The
publishers would be pleased to hear from any copyright holders who have
not been acknowledged.

OUR WOMAN IN KABUL A BANTAM BOOK

First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2003 by Bantam
Copyright Irris Makler, 2003 All rights reserved.  No part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry Makler,
Irris.

Our woman in Kabul.

ISBN 1 86325 386 6.

1. Makler, Irris.  2. Afghanistan Politics and government 2001-.  3.
Afghanistan History 2001-.  4. Women Legal status, laws, etc. 
Afghanistan  5. Women- Afghanistan Social conditions.  6. Women
journalists Australia.  7. Women journalists -Afghanistan.  I. Title.

958.1046 Transworld Publishers, a division of Random House Australia
Pty Ltd 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, NSW 2061 http://www.random
house.com.au Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road,
Glenfield, Auckland Transworld Publishers, a division of The Random
House Group Ltd 61-63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA Random House Inc
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036 Cover design by Darian Causby
Highway 51 Cover photograph by Jonathan Mossek Typeset in 11/13.5 Sabon
by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria Printed and bound by
Griffin Press, Netley, South Australia 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
1acknowledgements First and foremost I have to thank my colleagues in
the field in such a hostile environment, we were reliant on each other.
I would especially like to thank my friends from BBC Moscow, who helped
me make it in and out of Afghanistan, and the boys from American
network NBC, who hauled me across the Hindu Kush, the country's most
rugged mountain range, and found a way for us out of Kabul.

I also have to thank my friends Greg Bearup, Margaret Coker and Craig
Nelson, and Karen Coleman and Andrew Salgo, for their invaluable help
and support, across continents.

IX For Davo and AI, my inspiration and anchor, who convinced me to
write Prologue

KABUL, NOVEMBER 2001

This is the best Kabul has to offer a huge empty house with blocked
toilets and a bomb in the kitchen.  We don't know about the bomb when
we move in, of course, and initially the owner pretends he doesn't
either.  But afterwards he says he told us all about it, like it was a
feature of the house: there's your downstairs toilet, your double
garage, your concierge, and your guided missile in the pantry.  He's
indignant when we want to move out.  Welcome to Kabul.

I guess he hasn't had many hard-currency tenants.  The Taliban fled six
days ago abandoning the capital they vowed to defend to the last man
and the last breath.  After weeks of US bombing, the leaders left their
weapons stashes behind, loaded their families into their cars the white
Toyotas paid for by Osama bin Laden and simply took off.  While we
journalists were heading towards Kabul, they were driving away from it.
The highway south was clogged with escaping Taliban Toyotas, snaking
all the way back to Kabul, their tail lights a red chain along the dark
road.  The rare Afghan traffic jam lasted all night.

We drove along a road pocked with bomb craters and the wrecks of tanks
into a grimy city where the thin air smelt of petrol, dust and dung.
Kabul is a mountain-encrusted jewel, home to one million euphoric,
wary, war-weary people.  There are restaurants and streetlights and
paved roads and a sewerage system.  This is the Big Smoke.

There is some traffic, and absurdly overdressed traffic police in
elaborate braided uniforms, like costumes from a 1930s Fascist opera.
They look as if they should be directing Lamborghinis and Maseratis,
but many of them stand at empty crossings.  There are more bicycles
than cars on the roads and bike repair shops everywhere.  In fact,
there is every type of repair shop tyres, washing machines, fridges.
This is the opposite of our throw-away society.

The only exception seems to be the 'instant ageing' of rugs -new
carpets are thrown onto the road for cars to drive over, to give them
the patina that only years of life or two weeks under traffic can
produce.  I felt a pang when we drove over our first rug, but once the
process was explained, I considered we were contributing to the revival
of the Afghan economy.  It wasn't easy to find somewhere to stay in a
city destroyed by twenty-two years of war, but the American networks
came to the rescue.  When friends from NBC TV offered me a spot on
their floor in the best house in the best suburb in Kabul, where
Taliban mullahs lived until six days ago, I accepted gratefully.
Covering this war has been about surviving by helping each other out of
tight spots.  I'm a freelance journalist, though, without the resources
of a big news organisation behind me, so I'm not sure what I offered
them in return.

"You give us contacts, flexibility, gossip," said an NBC reporter
kindly, 'and all delivered in that irresistible, incomprehensible
accent."

"Nah, she's like one of those small birds that lives on the backs of
hippos," said an NBC satellite engineer as we walked through a gate
into our new home.

In a way they were both right.  Single white female in a war zone.
Australian accent recommended but not essential.  We gingerly pushed
open the doors of a large two-storey house.  They squeaked, a forlorn
Afghan sound, the closest thing to music during Taliban times.  The air
was stale and musty, as if the house had just been opened for the first
time in months.  There was no furniture, except for an old Russian
fridge in the kitchen, and a 1970s washing machine in the bathroom.  We
were impressed to see carpets on the floor, and two toilets, both
blocked.  There was the possibility that they would be unblocked. Kabul
was all about possibilities now.

This was a classy place to unroll my sleeping bag.  Nine of us would
share the house, eight NBC guys and me.  It belonged to a local
businessman whose family was in Pakistan.  Many now lived like this,
separated for safety's sake.  He said he was not Taliban, and we chose
to believe him.

After four days on the road, with no opportunity to wash, my first
shower was luxurious.  This was not the cold river water delivered by
donkey that we'd become used to everywhere else in Afghanistan.  It was
warm water that came out of a tap, warmly, lazily into a bath, and then
swirled down a drain.  I watched it, amazed.  I was even more amazed at
the mud and dust pouring off me.  I'd never been so filthy.

I looked around my bedroom with delight.  In Afghan terms there was a
luxurious amount of space, since I only had one roommate, a young
Russian sound recordist called Pasha.  He had tweaked our new tin stove
so the room was warm and smoke-free.  Things had looked grim when it
was installed -there was a small explosion, leaving an ugly black stain
on the wall but Pasha sorted it out.  He even gave me a container of
yoghurt, something I hadn't tasted in weeks.  I was too tired to ask
where he obtained such a luxury item.  Instead, I offered him some
pistachio nuts and, for the first time in almost a week, fell asleep
smiling and clean.

Now, on our first morning in Kabul, we are standing in the kitchen
wondering if we can boil water.  Our kettle is nowhere to be seen. Will
the stove work?  The electricity's on so we may be able to coax it into
action.  Where is that kettle?  I am spreading a cracker with apple
jelly from an NBC prepackaged meal, when a stranger saunters in, pokes
his head round the corner, turns back to us and says in a broad
Australian accent, "Youse guys better get out of here."

We look at him in surprise.

He gestures over his shoulder with his thumb: "Unexploded bomb in
there."

I shake my head in disbelief.

"Who are you?"  The tall, laconic Aussie is Ross Chamberlain, Deputy
Director of the United Nations Mine Action Program in Afghanistan.  He
was called here to investigate a reported bomb, and without too much
investigation, he's found one.  I go to the pantry to take a peak, and
recoil.  There, partly buried, is a huge American missile, as sleek as
a shark, thirty centimetres wide and as tall as I am.  It turned in
flight and landed tail first, which will make it more difficult to
defuse.  In the ceiling is the surprisingly small neat hole it made on
entry.  It is just possible to see the sky, and Pasha takes a photo.
His English is excellent, but one thing confuses him.

"Irris on the side it says: MADE IN USA, 5-0-0-L-B-S.  What does that
mean?"

"It means it's a 500-pound bomb."

We'd been sleeping directly above it.  And there'd been that explosion
in our room as we tried out our new tin stove.  It adds a certain zing
to the morning.  Actually, it cheers me up.  I'd been feeling tired and
flat after our dangerous drive across the mountains from northern
Afghanistan, but the bomb puts a stop to all that.  You can't feel
sorry for yourself and lucky to be alive at the same time.  That's the
upside to danger.

In the kitchen, Ross Chamberlain sets down his laptop, and scrolls
through "Bombs in Afghanistan' in much the same way that other people
might call up "Birds of Britain'.  His job is to identify the bomb so
it can be defused.  The NBC guys agree that it's just as well Ross is
Australian.  An American official would not be so relaxed about
announcing a 'major potential personal danger to citizens of the US of
A'.  It would be much more high octane and we'd be marched out in
double quick time.  Ross sets the tone and none of us panics.

"Our bomb' as we come to think of it was dropped by the US on 12
November, the night the Taliban leaders began packing up their families
and fleeing.  It was one of five dropped in a precision bombing attack
on this residential area, identified by Washington as a Taliban
'command and control' centre.  But many of the bombs that hit the city
that night either missed their targets or failed to explode, or both,
apparently due to a malfunction in their computer guidance system.

"It's 2001, these things are meant to go off," Ross Chamberlain says.

"But it seems there were more misses than hits in Kabul."

We tiptoe around the house, packing up our gear.  I check that there's
nothing left in the bedroom, and see the stain on the wall where the
tin stove exploded.  I am grateful that it's all there the stove, the
room, me.

We are back to square one, but at least it's daylight.  You always feel
more hopeful in the morning.  After nearly two months in Afghanistan,
this is starting to seem normal.  Crowded interiors, dangerous
exteriors.  Chaos, dirt, sleeping bags, eight men and me.  The bomb in
the kitchen is the only wild card.

There are some personal compensations to this strange life.  For once,
the odds are in the gals' favour.  The guys calculate it down to the
last percentage point.

"It's official there are 10.7 men for every woman.  I'll never score,"
one bloke tells me despondently.  You have to feel sorry for them.  All
these Errol Flynn adventure types stuck in the Islamic state of
Afghanistan, where there are no women, not even the prostitutes who are
a fixture in every war zone.  It'll be Vietnam with snow and no
hookers, an old Central Asia hand warns gloomily at the start of the
conflict.

So we are it.  And there are almost none of us.  But opportunity well,
that's another matter.  Until now we have been sleeping six to a room
in sleeping bags on the floor, with Islamic warriors patrolling the
compounds where we live.  So there hasn't been all that much we could
get up to, no matter how good the odds.

"I meet an interesting man I could sleep with every half hour.  How
often does that happen?  Never!  And I can't do anything," a friend
wails.  It's like being a teenager at some strange religious summer
camp with bombs dropping.

As a result, sex is a hot topic of conversation, though it still takes
second place to talking about food.  One reporter who's back from the
front is telling me the latest, until he suddenly smiles and says,
"Let's stop all this war talk, and get back to flirting."  Fighting and
Flirting.  Sometimes I feel I'm covering a war while taking part in an
episode of Bridget Jones in Afghanistan.

But even Bridget knows when she's gotta get going, so we finish packing
and leave the NBC house as quickly as we can.  At the bottom of our
street, we drive past a boy selling balloons.  They shimmer in the
autumn sun, jaunty and hopeful.  I'm spellbound by such a simple symbol
of happiness and glad I'm alive to see him.  The bomb highlights how
much we perplex each other, the Western journalists and the Afghan
locals.

It turns out that one of the translators NBC employs found the bomb
yesterday evening, soon after we moved in, but he decided not to tell
anyone till the morning, 'when we could do something about it'.  While
we think we could have done something about it last night, like
sleeping in our cars, he thinks that if the bomb explodes while we are
in the house, Inshallah, it's the will of Allah.

Allah didn't want us to die, we tell each other happily, as we drive
away from the bomb and into the centre of town, all smiles.  Kabul is
an ancient metropolis, polluted, unfriendly, and vital.  It ignores
you, like big cities do.  It has its own life to live.  Since the
retreat of the Taliban, that life is changing, re-forming, like a
frozen river cracking apart at the end of winter.  It's a confusing,
thrilling, dangerous time to be here.

The city sits in the lower reaches of the Hindu Kush, one of the
highest capitals in the world.  The air at this altitude is thin,
making it difficult to walk here.  The city's demanding hills, or even
the stairs inside a building, can easily wipe you out.

The altitude also starts to affect your vision.  It's a trick of the
thin air, and the lack of industry.  The clear, bright light makes
every image more intense, as if you have put on glasses that are too
strong.  The grand mountains surrounding the city appear closer than
they are.  You feel you can reach out and touch the tawny peaks, dusted
with snow like icing sugar on muffins.

We drive to the bazaar, a crowded, dirty open-air market.  Although we
should be finding somewhere new to live, we get out to look.  People
push by, apparently in a hurry.  Small boys sell toilet paper, two
sheets at a time.  Wooden barrows with vegetables, herbs, nuts and
spices sit next to clothes stalls heaped with Western jeans and
T-shirts imported from Pakistan.  There are mounds of cumin and
coriander and a red spice the colour of dried blood.  I wonder what it
tastes like.  There are piles of sticky sweets and sugary biscuits, and
small stalls frying savoury pancakes, even though it is the holy month
of Ramadan, when Muslims fast between dawn and dusk.

There are suitcases, aluminium pots and pans, buckets and all kinds of
kitchen utensils, as well as Western soap in grubby packets, hair
clips, hand cream and make-up, laid out on stalls in neat rows.  You
can buy karaoke dolls, blonde ones wearing elaborate beautifully sewn
Western clothes, dancing and singing to Madonna, and dark ones, wearing
even more elaborate Pakistani saris, dancing and singing to Madonna.
They're both material girls.  But the batteries to make them jive
aren't easy to find.

Local metal workers, spotting a niche market, are making satellite
dishes by hand.  The journalists need them, to report back to the rest
of the world, and then the locals want them, to catch cable TV.  The
dishes are made of scrap metal, covered with the brand names of canned
goods.  Functional Pop Art objects with Afghan chic.

"Change money?"  The age-old question of every bazaar the world over.
There are two types of currency here, 'up-money' and 'down-money'.  The
notes are almost identical in fact, I never really learn to tell them
apart.  Having just come from northern Afghanistan, I have up-money,
which down here in Kabul is only worth half its value.  I'm sure if I
took down-money up north, the same thing would happen.

"Look, there are lots of burqas shopping," says an NBC journalist.  I'm
not the only woman in the market, but I am the only one whose face you
can see.  Afghan women are just smudges of colour, hidden under burqas,
head to foot cloaks that cover the entire body and face, with only a
small mesh screen at eye level.

The burqa is hot, uncomfortable and constricting, limiting vision and
breathing, turning women from human beings into bird shapes, identical
and anonymous.  But in the context of Islamic women's garb, the burqa's
eccentricity is its colour.  Most Islamic garments designed to cover
women are black, though none is as all-enveloping as the burqa.  As if
to compensate, the burqa is startlingly bright.  Most are blue.  A
white burqa denotes wealth as they are harder to keep clean and
indicate that the wearer can afford more than one, and perhaps even has
someone to do her washing.

After six weeks in Afghanistan, I still haven't adjusted to the sight
of a woman covered in this way, robbed of her individuality and of the
chance of a smile from a stranger in the street.  Or even a friend.
That most basic human contact a meeting of eyes is denied to women
here.

The possibility of being recognised, a sense that you belong in the
public sphere, that there is a space for you here, too -that if you see
someone you know, you can stop to chat all disappear with that swish of
fabric, as it comes down, suffocating and separating.  Most women say
they will remove their burqas when times improve.  Despite the flight
of the Taliban, they don't feel that time has yet come.  My hair is
covered by a scarf, and I'm wearing long-sleeved loose clothes, but I
receive menacing looks.  I can see why women feel safer hidden away.

Osama bin Laden still gazes up at you from sweet stalls.  You can buy
"Super Osama bin Laden Kulfa Balls', coconut treats with a picture of
bin Laden on the packet, surrounded by tanks, jets and cruise missiles.
It seems that bin Laden -like a Teletubby in the West could be counted
on to shift merchandise here.

But now bin Laden bon-bons are making way for postcards of glamorous
Indian movie stars.  They are pinned up on boards in colourful rows,
like butterflies.  Other than the occasional journalist, these are the
only women's faces to be seen.  Teenage boys stand around them in
groups.

Even alcohol is becoming available.

"Is Madam looking for something special?"  they ask meaningfully at a
grocer's stocked with Pakistani goods past their use-by date.  If Madam
is, then for an extortionate price, a bottle wrapped in newspaper
materialises from under the counter.  Like a conjurer's trick they
remove the paper to reveal Gordon's gin.  The north was dry.  Madam
swoons and pays up.

We see more food here than in the rest of the drought-stricken country,
and excitedly show each other chocolate and crackers and tinned tuna.
But there is also more unmanageable poverty.  Children black with
grease work as mechanics.  Six-year-olds bent double push heavy carts,
small right angles to their loads.  There are shoe shine boys and
chimney sweeps, barefoot and filthy, like in Dickens' England.  They
only sound like children when they laugh.  The rest of the time they
are small adults, the prime breadwinners for their families, scrabbling
to survive in this brutal marketplace.

There are also beggars, of course.  The most aggressive are women in
filthy burqas, sticking out scaly hands with chipped nail polish.  They
swarm outside the best restaurant in Kabul, once the Taliban's
favourite.  Some women also lie on the edge of the road, their burqas
spread in the mud like wilting flowers, begging money from passing
drivers.  It's a heart-rending sight, but at least they can get out of
the way if they have to the bravest beggars are the legless men who
perch in the middle of the road.  I am horrified when I see the first
one, and then realise there are more heads bobbing up along the road,
like a row of human cabbages, risking their lives and their truncated
bodies in the hope that someone will throw some money out of a car
window.  This is what injured war victims do in Kabul instead of
collecting social security.  It's a dire symbol of the city's poverty
and collapse.

But Kabul does not elicit pity.  It's a tough city, and Kabulis are
resilient survivors.  They seem happy but watchful, aware that
liberation is precarious and could be snatched away at any moment, and
that what comes next might be worse than all they have endured so
far.

As we drive out of the bazaar, I find I am also excited and wary.  So
much is unknown including whether we will find somewhere safe to stay
tonight.  A truck full of Northern Alliance soldiers hurtles past.  The
men are dusty and their weapons are slung over their shoulders at a
rakish victor's angle.  We catch up with them and stop them.  According
to promises made to Washington, they are not meant to be inside the
city.  They tell us they are clearing remaining pockets of Taliban
resistors, and have found al-Qaeda training camps and weapons stashes.
The truck takes off with a crunch of its gears, some soldiers firing
into the air.  We drive over an Afghan rug back into town.  History is
waiting for us.  MOSCOW, 11 SEPTEMBER 2001 I was one of the first
journalists into Afghanistan during the conflict, but my ten weeks here
started almost accidentally.  Like many big journeys, it began with a
series of small apparently unrelated steps .. .

I was reporting in Moscow when the world tilted on its axis on 11
September 2001.1 had been there for almost two years, first as the TV
and radio correspondent for Australia's public broadcaster, the ABC,
who posted me there, and then as a freelance journalist.  When I
explain to Russians that I didn't pick Russia, it picked me, they
understand immediately.  It fits with their concept of sudba, fate.

Moscow is a grand world capital where everything is a struggle
language, politics, money, environment, weather.  The heart of what one
American President dubbed the 'evil empire' is only four hours' flight
from London, but it is another world.  Onion domes, snowflakes, fur
coats, gothic skyscrapers, delicate ballerinas, senseless drunks,
crumbling Soviet nuclear reactors, restored czarist palaces Russia
catapults between extremes.

"We are the barbarians," said a man from Tartarstan, one of the many
nationalities that make up the Russian Federation, as he offered me
flowers and chocolates one day.

"We have to be we are the bulwark against Asia."

It is fascinating to report from this society in transition, sliding
from Communism, to gangster capitalism, to where next?

"We are destroying in freedom what we built in slavery," a scientist
explained morosely.  There are so many other paradoxes: anarchy and
bureaucracy, sentimentality and cruelty, passion and apathy, Communist
modesty and New Russian ostentation.  There is no more May Day Parade
-instead Geri Halliwell was the headline act for Moscow's birthday
celebrations, while a poster advertising the musical 42nd Street
promised "Brodvei' in Moscow.  A statue of Lenin, striding towards
world domination, loomed over a square where a white stretch limo was
stuck in traffic.  Reconciling all these contradictions, or accepting
that they cannot be reconciled, is part of the job of a correspondent
in Russia.

On September 11, I was reporting for a number of American broadcasters,
including National Public Radio and Voice of America.  VOA is the
overseas propaganda arm of the United States government.  Born under
President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II, it came into its own
during the Cold War, when antagonism between Russia and the US was at
its height.  Russians tuned into VOA for two things they didn't receive
from their own government information and jazz, both curtailed under
Communism.  One legacy of these years of conflict is that for some
reason phone lines to the Moscow bureau always drop out at crucial
moments.  Another is that when you say you file for Voice of America
everyone presumes you are a spy.  You can't convince them otherwise,
even if you have an Australian accent.

"Great cover!"  they enthuse.

That Tuesday I was going to an American State Department press
conference about the latest round of talks between Washington and
Moscow on a new US nuclear missile shield.  I caught the metro into
town.  The metro is one of the jewels of Moscow clean, cheap, efficient
and beautiful.  Some stations are like art galleries, with grand marble
halls and chandeliers.  Built during Soviet times as 'palaces for the
people', each station is unique, decorated with paintings, murals or
statues, usually depicting happy peasants welcoming the Soviet
liberators, or heroes of Soviet labour building a Better Future.  But
by the time I was living there Tomorrow belonged to the Mafia.

11 When I emerged in the town centre, it was a balmy autumn day.  I
walked down Tverskaya, Moscow's busy main street, crossing eight
chaotic lanes of traffic.  Tverskaya runs from Red Square at one end
with the Kremlin and the rococo, ravishing onion domes of St.  Basil's
church to the huge wedding cake of Belorussky train station at the
other.  It is said that Communist dictator Joseph Stalin widened all
the streets in the heart of Moscow to reinforce the irrelevance of the
individual, and to make sure that if he needed them, tanks could fit
comfortably.  These days, Stalin's vast sandstone edifices have
street-level stores full of ritzy Western labels: Hugo Boss.  Dolce &
Gabbana.  Benetton.

I passed the statue of Pushkin, Russia's national poet, a traditional
meeting place for Muscovites.  After I moved to Moscow, a bomb tore
apart the metro underpass at that spot, another of the long list of
unsolved crimes blamed on Chechen terrorists.  Every time I passed it,
I had to blink away the images of smoke and noise and blood-covered
people stumbling out from below ground, a scene from Dante's Inferno in
the heart of Moscow.  That Tuesday there were just ordinary crowds of
shoppers and dreamers.

I was heading for the Marriott Hotel, where the State Department was
holding its press conference.  The sunshine magnified all smells of
carbon monoxide and leaded petrol, of hot dogs cooking at the street
corner, and beer and vodka spilt on the footpath.  I was revelling in
the sun's warmth, and willing its rays to hold back the fierce Russian
winter.

At the press conference I heard the first sketchy reports of the
attacks on the World Trade Center.  Not from the State Department, but
from other journalists.  These reports were shocking but garbled, and I
didn't understand the scope of the attack.  My first reaction was as a
journalist -I needed to get back to the bureau to see what the American
media was reporting.  Could the terrorists really have hit the Pentagon
-that symbol of US military might?  It didn't seem credible.  And were
there more attacks planned?

I rushed to catch the metro back to VOA, and on the escalators deep
beneath Moscow, I had time for more personal reactions.  I was shocked
by the terrible audacity of turning innocent people into a weapon and
killing them in order to destroy a target.  It was a sinister
milestone, changing the nature of warfare.  As I stepped off one
escalator and onto the next, two musicians were playing Vivaldi.

"Oh, what beautiful violin," said the woman on the step in front of me,
holding her hand over her heart.  The haunting notes followed us onto
the train, seeming to mourn a tragedy the performers didn't yet know
about.

A drunk snored opposite me as a beggar in a wheelchair was pushed into
the carriage.  He was a soldier who had lost both legs in battle, a
veteran of Russia's war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.  He still wore his
uniform, neatly pressed, the empty pants folded and pinned at the
thigh.  His medals shone.  For some reason of all the beggars, the
injured veterans upset me the most.  He had to compete with people
selling pens, batteries and magazines.  They stepped onto the train and
addressed us, Dear Passengers, projecting loudly and clearly, as they
had been taught in the Communist youth groups.  The soldier half a
soldier rolled silently by.  Most people averted their gaze.  Only
kind-hearted pensioners ever donated anything to the injured veterans,
and there were none aboard.  I gave him some money.  A young woman
bought a pen.

After thirty interminable minutes the train reached my stop and I ran
all the way to Voice of America.  The VOA bureau is located in a
depressing, expensive suburb, away from the grandeur of central Moscow.
It is on the sixteenth floor of a huge Soviet tower block, with views
of freeways and other identical tower blocks beyond.  I raced in and
turned on the TV, but the cable connection had dropped out so there
were no English-language services available.  I switched to Russian
television, which was running American coverage dubbed into Russian,
and quickly realised I had underestimated the scale of events.  I found
myself numb with shock.  I actually didn't believe what I was seeing,
and was aware that I didn't understand it, that this event was too
large to comprehend immediately.  Nevertheless, I watched the
horrifying images of the planes smashing into the World Trade Center,
and the twin towers collapsing, over and over again, as if the
repetition would help make sense of it.

Tearing myself away from the TV, I covered Russia's response to the
unfolding events for an American audience.  It was swift and
passionate.  People were sobbing in front of the American embassy in
Moscow, where they gathered to pile candles, flowers and icons.

"Our hearts are with them," one old woman said, adding a beautiful
Russian icon of Jesus, black-eyed with a flat gold face, to the sea of
tributes at the embassy gates.

"I know what it's like, I was buried under rubble during World War II,
but I knew they could rescue me."

"This is terrible, I have been to the World Trade Center.  It could
have been me," said a young man holding back tears.

"I have friends in New York, I don't know if they are safe."

They were standing at the same spot where Muscovites had last gathered
to protest the NATO-led bombing of Belgrade.  This was the first of
many signs that the September 11 attacks were a watershed, which would
redraw the geopolitical map and alter the balance of alliances.

The political reaction from the Kremlin was also immediate and
supportive.  President Vladimir Putin expressed horror, extending
sympathy to the American people.  He emphasised, self-servingly, that
Russia understood the need to fight terrorism because it was involved
in its own battle with terrorists, fighting Islamic rebels in
Chechnya.

Within days, Washington launched a War Against Terror, with the aims of
toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, capturing Osama bin Laden and
destroying the al-Qaeda network.

Journalists anaesthetise themselves against the terrible things they
see by keeping busy, and I veered between shock and trying to figure
out where I should go to best cover this breaking story.  Like most
foreign correspondents, I wanted to get as close to the action as
possible.  This is one of those incomprehensible things people born
with the journalist gene have to do.  My curiosity overcomes my fear. I
want to be there when history is being written.  I want to see it, feel
it, touch it for myself.

And in purely practical terms, no one was taking any of the usual
stories we filed from this region anyway.  There was only one foreign
story in the world and this was it.  In any case Moscow correspondents
generally cover Central Asia, the former Soviet satellite states
sandwiched between Russia and Afghanistan.  Of all 'the Stans',
Tajikistan, which lies to the north of Afghanistan, appeared to be the
best starting point because it bordered the only part of the country
controlled by the opposition to the Taliban.  I reasoned that US troops
would have to come in from the north since access was impossible from
Iran in the west and problematic from Pakistan in the south and east.

Tajikistan was the place to go.

But before I went anywhere, I had to finish some overdue work for BBC
radio.  It was strange to be editing a frothy piece on Russian cooking
while the drums were beating for war, but I completed the assignment
and went to the BBC's Moscow bureau on Monday 17 September to send the
story to London.

The BBC bureau is in the Slavyanskaya Hotel, a "New Russian' venture
unimaginable in Soviet times.  It has Western decor, reworked in the
ornate Russian style to service long-legged prostitutes and
black-leather clad biznyessmen.  Their beefy guards wear holsters and
earpieces, and loiter near the restaurants and specialty shops, looking
menacing.  Smile at them and they reach for their guns.

I decided not to take the lift, preferring to climb past these regulars
Make exercise a part of your day musing about the hotel's American
owner Paul Tatum, a man who thought he could do business in the new
Russia.  Tatum was involved in a struggle for ownership of the hotel
during the mid-1990s, and lived holed up in his suite for months
because there was a contract out on his life.

The first time he left the hotel he was shot.  He'd barely made it out
of the gates when he copped eleven rounds from an AK-47 at close range.
In that classic Moscow underworld touch, his bodyguards did nothing to
protect him, though they did take him to hospital afterwards.  He was
dead on arrival.  The blood he'd left on the snow was soon covered by a
new flurry.  Like so many crimes in Moscow, Paul Tatum's murder remains
unsolved.

I was distracted from this grisly story when I reached the BBC's office
and had to battle to feed my story to London -always a mysteriously
trying process from their studio, where the equipment only seemed to
work intermittently.

Afterwards, I went to see BBC reporter Jacky Rowland, one of the close
community of foreign journalists in Moscow.  On screen she is
formidably fluent, self-assured and serious, but off screen it is her
ready laugh and her mischievousness that strike you immediately.

Sinking into a seat opposite her I suggested that we should go to
Tajikistan.

"Yes," she replied in her cool blonde way, 'we're going tomorrow. We've
chartered a plane.  The bureau chief paid for it on his credit card and
he's very chuffed!  Do you want a seat?"

"Tomorrow?"  I gulped.  I'd been hoping for a bit of a discussion of
regional politics, and didn't expect it to become so practical so
quickly.

"Tomorrow?"  I repeated.

"Can I get back to you?"

"You'd better be quick seats are going like hotcakes."

So I put my name down and left the building mulling over the logistics
of leaving Moscow for Central Asia in fifteen hours' time.  The charter
would be expensive, almost three times the cost of an ordinary flight,
and I had very little time to contact all the broadcasters I worked
for, check on visas, pack, get cash never an easy business at short
notice in Moscow and learn some more about Tajikistan.

I learned one crucial fact that helped me make my decision: the
ordinary Tajik Air flights were booked solid for the next ten days with
Tajik market gardeners bringing the autumn harvest of tomatoes and
melons to Moscow.  You probably could get a seat if you paid a bribe,
but it was unlikely to be cheap (like with the melons, prices were
market driven) and it was certain to be time consuming.  To reach
Tajikistan simply and quickly, it seemed a charter flight was the best
bet.

So I'm going.  At 1 a.m. I'm still up, talking to colleagues who've
been to Tajikistan, and downloading facts from the Internet.  That's
the extent of my preparation.  I don't even have time to buy a book on
Central Asia.  Five hours later my taxi arrives.  It's a wheezing,
beaten-up yellow Lada belonging to a Russian sports coach called Alexei
who moonlights as a driver, when his car's working and he can fit it in
with his sports schedule.  I've known Alexei for about a year, and 6
a.m. suits him better than it suits me.  He is cheerful until he hears
where I'm going.

"But why are you going there a woman?  On your own?"  Alexei moans.

"I wouldn't go to Tajikistan on my own and I'm a man.  It's not safe.
Why are you doing it?  Why?  Why?"

Alexei could get a third job in a Greek Chorus, vocal ising 'your worst
fears'.

He wails at me before I've had a chance to wake up, and I don't have a
good enough answer certainly not in my basic Russian so the trip to the
airport takes on a funereal air, with Alexei shaking his head and
repeating "Why?  Why?"  reproachfully every so often.  Alexei has that
peculiarly Russian terror of the provinces of their former Empire.

We arrive at Moscow's Vnukovo airport at 8 a.m. on Tuesday 18
September.  This small airport services flights to Central Asia, and it
already feels more Asian than Russian.  There are almost no blonde
wide-cheeked Slavs, instead it's teeming with smaller darker Tajiks and
Azeris.  Since the airport has no seats, people sit on their bags, or
squat on their haunches as they wait.

Alexei says goodbye as if he'll never see me again, so it's a relief
when I find my BBC friends.  We perch on our luggage like the locals,
too tired and grumpy to be anxious.  Jacky Rowland shows me her one
indispensable bit of war-zone kit a proper full-sized pillow.

"I'm wearing a green jacket for my live shots Islamic green," she
jokes.

It turns out I'm lucky to still have my seat as the Moscow press corps
fought hard for places on the BBC plane.  In the end there are around
fifty of us: journalists, producers and camera crews from the BBC, the
English newspapers, and European and American broadcasters.  Having
made an effort to get here early, we are forced to sit and wait for
hours.

We are told that 'the Minister' hasn't given permission for us to land
in Tajikistan.  So we call.  He's in a meeting.  Then another meeting.
Then lunch.  A BBC correspondent based in Tajikistan shakes her head,
muttering darkly that this is a bad sign.

We sit outside in the sunshine of a Moscow Indian summer and eat stale
caviar sandwiches.  While we're there, a German journalist comes up and
asks, "Is English your That if langvidge?"

I say, yes, rather sharply, it is what we speak in Australia, and he
beams.  "Good, zen you can doze "lives" for the Deutsche Welle English
service.  I am very content to find you."

This chance meeting with Christoph Wanner, a Moscow correspondent for
German public TV channel Deutsche Welle, sets me up with a huge amount
of work, and when fortune smiles like that I regard it as a reward for
taking risks.  I choose to see it as a blessing on this decision to go
to Tajikistan, and it improves my mood as we wait.

I fall asleep on a patch of grass in the sun, and when a BBC engineer
wakes me up it's 3 p.m. The Minister has given us the green light.  We
board the plane, the first of its type we've seen, with leather couches
and armchairs, French-polished walnut inlaid tables, and DVD players
with a stock of in-flight porn.  We conclude this is how Russia's oil
barons traverse the country.  Someone examines the couches for semen
stains before we sit down.  Swivelling in a leather armchair, an
English journalist announces that in future, he's always flying BBC.

High on anticipation, flying into the heart of the biggest story in the
world, the four-hour trip whizzes by.  The girls swap war stories, and
two tough blokes from the British broad sheets do some male bonding,
discussing their divorces.

It's night when we land in the Tajik capital Dushanbe.  We walk across
the tarmac, which smells of fuel and some indefinable Asian spice, and
Passport Control let us in without local visas because we have Russian
multi-entry visas.  An NBC producer is not so lucky.  They want to
exclude him because he is smooth shaven in his passport photo, but has
a goatee now.

"No, no, I don't want to shave off my beard," I hear him remonstrating,
as I walk out into the warm Central Asian night.  After some spirited
arguing, he emerges with his facial hair intact.

Dushanbe is a dusty, gracious, tree-lined city of half a million
people.  It has Soviet buildings, the legacy of decades of Russian
rule, but they are softened by pastel colours and Asiatic decorations.
Unlike in Moscow, where every edifice is gargantuan, designed to dwarf
the individual, these buildings are more human scale.  But there is a
regulation oversized Presidential palace, a vast Stalinist structure
with armed guards stage lighting, and fountains gushing in its
forecourt, despite the worst drought in seventy years.

There are almost no cars on the road and the few that chug by are old
and drab.  An ancient grey trolley bus putters along the empty main
street, sparks flying from its overhead wires.  This is how Communist
cities used to look before the collapse of the Soviet Union from Prague
in the West to Vladivostok, eleven time zones away across Siberia.  In
fact, Vladivostok still looks pretty much like this today only there
are more cars.

The buildings loom over empty streets in a series of appealing pastels,
trimmed with white.  This is a well-maintained city.  Despite its
poverty, there is even a casino that symbol of post-Communist success
but we barely have time to drink this all in because we have to find
somewhere to sleep.

If every war has its hotel, in Dushanbe it's the Hotel Tajikistan.
There are two other 'first class' hotels, but the Tajikistan, at 22
Communist Youth Street, has the longest waiting list, and is the base
of operations for three major news broadcasters.  It is also the main
TV feed point for satellite dishes belonging to the European
Broadcasting Union, Reuters, and the TV arm of the Associated Press
wire service, APTN.

A gloomy 1960s Soviet building in regulation dreary grey, with terrible
food and without working telephones, the Tajikistan is an unlikely
winner.  Every time you want to file a story you have to go down to the
front desk and watch a good-natured Tajik woman do battle with an
ancient PABX telephone system.  Only one call in four gets through and
she often shakes her head apologetically and asks you to come back
later.  Needless to say, our Moscow cell phones don't work here, though
advertising leaflets promise, "The footprint will extend to Tajikistan
next year!"  Since some quirk of the phone system means it's equally
difficult for our news desks to ring in to us, we hire brick-sized
fifteen-year-old mobile phones, paying usurious rates and counting
ourselves lucky because there are soon none left the journalists have
hired every last cell phone in Dushanbe.  All ten of them.

The hotel has long corridors with worn red carpet disappearing into the
distance.  It seems to stretch forever, reminding me that the
definition of infinity is the point where two parallel lines meet.
Will it ever reach the next corridor?  On my first night it seems that
infinity is probably here in Tajikistan, at the end of a distant
corridor, as far as possible from the only (rarely working) lift.

But to reach infinity, you have to pass by the keeper of the keys, that
old Soviet stalwart, the Floor Lady.  The dezhur-naya was once a
powerful figure spying on you, informing the authorities, and doling
out unobtainable products like soap, in return for the right gift, of
course.  She still hands out soap and towels and she still spies on
you, but it's all less vital now the Soviet Union has collapsed.

The dezhurnayas are Russian and Tajik women with hard lives, spending
the night on sofas behind their shabby desks, minding our keys and our
business.  The floor lady's desk is strategically placed opposite the
lift, and she doesn't like it if you use the stairs because it makes it
harder for her to keep an eye on you.  Whichever floor you go to,
before you even open your mouth, the dezhurnaya looks at you and pipes
up, "No he's out.  He's been out for a while."  She's usually been
observing you so closely she can pick it in one, but if it turns out
she's made a mistake, and you're looking for someone else, she says
dismissively, "Oh, that one.  No, he's not in his room either.  I
haven't seen him all day."

The dezhurnayas also know how to drive a hard bargain, lording it over
weaker women with a flash of their former power.  The hookers who
stream into the hotel when we arrive aren't going to be allowed onto
the floor without a fight.

"This is an illegal activity," one dezhurnaya huffs to me in pretended
anger.

"It shouldn't be allowed."  In the end, the hookers have to pay the
dezhurnayas as well as their pimps and the bar, leaving the girl who
did the work with less than half the money about US$8.

Watched closely by the dezhurnaya, I make my way to my gloomy room and
fall into one of the two single beds.  Being freelance means that after
two days spent travelling and organising, tomorrow I'll have to start
earning money to pay for the hotel room and the flight.  But like
Scarlett O'Hara, I'll think about that in the morning.

DUSHANBE, 19 SEPTEMBER 2001

I am run off my feet.  There turns out to be a lot of interest in
Tajikistan's potential as a base for American troops, and as a haven in
the looming refugee crisis.

During the day we accumulate material, attending press conferences and
conducting interviews with politicians, aid workers and refugees.  At
night we file our stories and any live updates from the roof of the
Hotel Tajikistan, where the European Broadcasting Union has its feed
point.  The European Broadcasting Union, EBU for short, was formed when
Europe's TV stations banded together to share the cost of satellite
equipment.

I meet the boys from EBU Moscow all over the world -from Chernobyl to
Chechnya at every disaster and war in our region.  The Moscow bureau is
run by a band of charming, efficient multilingual Belgians.  Bruno
Beeckman worked at EBU Moscow for most of the 1990s, and he's back from
Geneva for this conflict.  To hear him switch effortlessly from Russian
to English and then to any of the five other languages he speaks
fluently is actually dazzling.

"It's my only talent," he says modestly, and then goes on to organise
complex satellite operations in difficult remote locations.  It's a
pleasure to run into him and Joris Wauman here.  I feel safe as soon as
I see them.  After my fortuitous meeting at the airport, I am filing
to the English service of German TV Deutsche Welle.  There appears to
be an endless appetite for analysis of Russia's role in any future
conflict, since Tajikistan's border with Afghanistan is still patrolled
by Russian troops as well as Tajik troops ten years after Tajikistan
became independent from the Soviet Union.  There is also avid interest
in what appears at this stage to be the central question for any ground
war: Russia's attitude towards American troops landing here in Russia's
traditional sphere of influence.  Will Vladimir Putin prove he is a
'man the West can do business with', as Margaret Thatcher memorably
described Mikhail Gorbachev?

I also file on what the representatives of the Northern Alliance the
opposition to the Taliban have to say about their willingness to fight
a ground war and to co-operate with the US.  My satellite feeds are
sandwiched in between European reports Dutch, Slovakian, Slovenian
which are being filed back to the same time zones.  I climb through a
window and hop down onto the roof of the hotel.  After the first day,
someone thoughtfully places a TV packing case there so that we don't
fall.  EBU has set up a generator and satellite dish at the far corner
where the signal is best.  They also have a remote communications
centre in a tent nearby, with phones, TV monitors, lights, and
sometimes even coffee.  They ferry all this equipment with them
wherever they go, setting it up and connecting it to the rest of the
world if necessary from a field in the middle of nowhere.  I head
towards the tent.  The generator hums like a lawnmower and the
satellite crew trade jokes in every language.

No matter how many times I do it, I've never been able to quite
comprehend that this ten-minute feed, with all the worry about whether
Berlin has the right number, and whether they can hear you properly,
and if the presenter is ready, and whether there's a problem with the
tape, will actually be seen on cable TV around the world.  It all feels
like a much smaller affair, relevant only to the two or three people on
the spot here.  Perhaps it's because I just speak to a camera, and can
only hear the interviewer in my earpiece on a good day, when
everything's working.  On a bad day, I don't even hear them properly.
It seems part of the absurdity of television that I speak to someone I
can't see, but the rest of the world can see me.

I also always have to remind myself that no one back home knows or
cares what we've been through to get to a feed point and to file a
story.  They just expect to look up from their dinner and see the
reporter filing coolly and authoritatively in their news bulletin.
Fluency is all.  Then comes the ability to look un flustered no matter
what crises are occurring around you, and it seems that maybe only
third on the list is actually knowing what you are talking about.  That
is also part of the absurdity of television.

For a year 12,000 refugees who have fled the fighting in northern
Afghanistan have been huddled on two sandy islands in the Pyang River,
which marks the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan.  Most are
women and children, and their lives on the islands are desperate.
There's no water or sanitation.  They have almost nothing to eat except
grass and dwindling supplies of flour.

There are no trees on the islands.  People don't have tents or even
plastic sheeting.  They dig holes and construct coverings made of reeds
for shelter.  People live in holes, like animals.  Even in summer,
dozens die, sleeping outdoors at night.

One nine-member family fled Avul, a village in northern Afghanistan,
carrying only one pot and several shabby blankets.  The youngest of the
five children is a little over a year old.  He has no nappies and is
wrapped in his mother's dress.  Few families here have warm clothes and
most children have no shoes.  Many have frostbite scars.

Aid workers say conditions here are worse than in other refugee camps
around Afghanistan.  It is almost impossible to grow vegetables or
fruit on the sandy islands.  In the past the refugees had some flour,
and ate cooked grass to survive.  But the drought has removed even that
desperate option.  This summer their main source of food has dried up.
Many are now starving, and only a recent food drop funded by Iran has
saved more from dying.

Water is also a problem.  The refugees have dug shallow wells, but sand
quickly seeps into the holes.  What little water they collect in this
way is salty and muddy, and as there is no sanitation, the groundwater
is becoming contaminated.  As a result, people are sick all the time,
racked by epidemics.  Last winter it was typhoid fever.  This summer,
malaria.  Women are anaemic.  Children suffer from scurvy.  Diarrhoea
is rife and families bury babies every day.  Mothers sit by simple
graves and sob.

But despite the appalling conditions, the refugees fear the idea of
returning home.  They are ethnic Tajiks, and the Taliban from the rival
Pashtun tribe have conquered their villages after bitter fighting. They
say if they go home, the Taliban will kill them.  Alleviating their
situation on the islands is complicated, however, by the presence of
Northern Alliance soldiers.  Many aid agencies haven't been allowed
onto the islands because they can't treat combatants, although they
need to reach the women and children who live with the armed men.

Now, though the islands are becoming over-crowded and provision of aid
is complex, Tajikistan has closed its doors to these refugees.
Tajikistan had previously granted asylum to some Afghans, but faced
with the possibility of a flood of refugees if conditions inside
Afghanistan worsen, it has sealed its borders shut.

"Our country is still recovering from a five-year civil war," says
Deputy Prime Minister Saidamir Zuhurov.

"We are not in a position to provide shelter and fair living conditions
even to our own refugees.  To admit the Afghan refugees we will need
billions of dollars for food, housing and medical services."

Another official is more blunt.

"A rich country like Australia won't have them why should we, who are
so poor that we cannot even feed our own people?"

When I ask people on the street in Dushanbe what they think of the
policy of closing Tajikistan's border to these refugees, many of whom
are Tajiks, I am surprised at the numbers who are against it.

"We should let them in, after all they are Tajiks, and they are
suffering."

Iranian film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf has worked in Afghanistan for two
decades, making powerful, evocative movies, intimate, intense and
unforgettable.  He is Iran's most celebrated film-maker and was a
political prisoner under the Shah.

When filming in Tajikistan in 1999 Makhmalbaf witnessed a terrible
scene where tens of thousands of starving Afghans, who had reached the
border on foot, were turned away.  He describes it in a lecture, later
reprinted in an Iranian magazine.  An Iranian journalist gives me a
copy in Dushanbe.

"It looked like doomsday.  The war-stricken and hungry children had run
for miles and miles barefoot.  Later on, the same fleeing crowd was
attacked by Tajiks, and was also refused asylum in Tajikistan.  In the
thousands, they died in a no-man's land between Afghanistan and
Tajikistan .. . These scenes are never shown in the media anywhere in
the world."

Makhmalbaf's most recent film set in Afghanistan is Kandahar.  It deals
with the impact of war and chaos on the lives of ordinary people,
through the story of a woman trying to return from the West to
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.  She wants to see her sister, who was
left behind by their fleeing family because she stepped on a land mine.
Her sister had been warned to avoid mines, but they are often brightly
coloured to make them attractive to children.  After fifteen years as
an amputee, surviving without family in Afghanistan, the sister has
lost the will to live.

Afghan suffering haunts the Iranian film-maker.  When he describes the
Taliban's destruction of the ancient statues of Buddha at Bamian, he
reaches a bitter conclusion: 'fIt] was not demolished by anybody; it
crumbled out of shame.  Out of shame for the world's ignorance towards
Afghanistan.  It broke down knowing its greatness didn't do any
good."

He concludes bleakly that the destruction was all in vain -the Buddha
shattered to inform the world of Afghanistan's poverty and oppression,
but the world only saw the demolition of the statue.

"A Chinese proverb says: You point your finger at the moon, the fool
stares at your finger.  Nobody saw the dying nation the Buddha was
pointing to."

Mohammed Barbar is an Afghan refugee who made it into Tajikistan five
years ago.  A diffident man in his mid-thirties, Mohammed runs a radio
program and a centre in Dushanbe where Afghan refugees learn English
and computer skills.  It is in a small, dusty, single-storey building
not far from the Hotel Tajikistan.  Twenty pupils, ranging from young
children to women in their thirties, are squashed into tiny desks and
chairs in a makeshift classroom.  None of the women or girls wears a
headscarf.  They are reading from an American textbook about a fire in
the Ritz Hotel.  It seems an odd text post-September 11.  They stumble
as they read, in thick accents.  I record the lesson and ask them why
they are here.

"We escaped because there was a bloody war in our country and girls
could not study," eleven-year-old Nasrine says in English.

"We want to learn English so we can migrate to the West and improve our
lives," says Setareh, a beautiful fifteen-year-old whose name means
star.

The boys are more reticent.  They have to be pushed to answer, and
falteringly repeat what the girls have said.

"Please don't ask me anything too political," Mohammed begs before I
interview him.

"My family is still in Afghanistan and I fear for their safety.  I
don't want them to be punished or to suffer because of this."

Mohammed says he works hard here in Tajikistan.

"Life is difficult everywhere.  I am setting up an educational NGO
[non-government organisation], and organising funding.  We've set up
this school, and we feel ourselves happy because we help our nationals,
who are homeless, and we provide jobs, especially for the women."

But he remains worried about the people left behind in Afghanistan.

"They need schools, not more destruction.  The best way to fight
terrorism is to build schools and train people.  Those who want to
become terrorists do it because they don't know much about life.  We
must train the people.  We must tell them, "Life is important, for you.
Don't kill."

After the interview, Mohammed invites me to come home with him for
lunch.  I accept and we walk in the warm sunshine down a quiet street,
under large overhanging trees.  We reach a sky-blue block of flats six
storeys high.  The cheery paint can't hide the Soviet dreariness that
characterises identical apartment blocks from here to the Arctic.

We climb four flights of stairs to a simple apartment with very little
furniture.  Everyone removes their shoes at the door and sits on the
floor to eat.  Mohammed's flat is a drop-in centre for the local
community.  At lunch there is a former professor of architecture from
Kabul University who speaks English, as well as two older women who
speak Dari, and two young men who speak some Russian.  A waxy,
patterned tablecloth is spread on the floor.  They serve naan bread and
some tomatoes, cut into wedges.  The food is simple, the quantities
small.  The cook, Genia, a talkative blonde Russian woman in her
fifties, brings a bowl of laps ha meat soup with noodles.  How poor
must she be, this woman from the colonial superpower, sent out here to
settle the far reach of the Empire, to be a cook for the most recently
arrived refugees in Dushanbe?

"Yes, times are very difficult," Genia says, sighing.  She has five
children and her husband doesn't contribute to the family's upkeep. She
flicks the skin under her chin with her middle finger, the evocative
Russian shorthand for drunkenness.

"Well, what with the drink .. ."

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, she worked in one of the
countless bureaucratic jobs that allowed Moscow to maintain the myth of
full employment.  She now receives a pension, and when she tells me how
much it is I am incredulous it works out to US$3.50 a month.

"It is very little, it is too little," she agrees, which is why she
does the cooking and cleaning here and for other families.  But she
remains optimistic.

"You know, others get less than me," she says a moment later.

"I was a high-ranking office worker.  Some women only get two dollars a
month, or even one dollar fifty."

Dushanbe is a city of monuments.  In 1929 it was renamed Stalinabad,
when the dusty town of thirteen streets was invested by Moscow with the
status of a city and turned into the capital of the Soviet Republic of
Tajikistan.  Stalin arbitrarily created the five Central Asian
republics by drawing lines on a map.  The new state of Tajikistan, for
example, consigned half of the Tajik people to the state next door,
Uzbekistan, which also netted the most famous Tajik landmarks the
fabled Silk Road towns of Samarkand and Bukhara.

It was only in 1961, eight years after Stalin's death and long after
the formal process of 'de-Stalinisation' had been carried out in the
rest of the Soviet Union, that the Tajiks dared to change the name of
their capital.  They played it safe.  No local heroes were invoked.
Instead they reverted to the city's original name, "Dushanbe'.  It
means Monday.

Soviet war memorials still gaze down on the city white plinths topped
with laurel wreaths.  In the city centre there is what looks like an
ancient triumphal stone arch, painted red and topped with a garish gold
crown.  It turns out to be less than five years old and is a monument
to the first Tajik Emperor, the national hero Somoni.  Since the
collapse of Communism, the tenth-century emperor has replaced the
Soviet idols and everything is named after him restaurants, websites,
even the local currency.

There are also many monuments to Tajikistan's President, the former
Communist boss Emomali Rakhmonov.

"Ah, your standard Central Asian tyranny," one of my Russian colleagues
murmurs.  It is incredible what Russians feel they have to be superior
about.

President Rakhmonov appears in posters and murals plastered and painted
over walls throughout the country.  Posters of Emperor Somoni,
represented as a winged beast with a human face, are everywhere, too
but this mythical creature is painted with President Rakhmonov's face.
People explain sheepishly that it's legitimate because no one knows
exactly what Somoni looked like.  I consider buying a rug featuring
Somoni, with President Rakhmonov's features staring out forcefully from
between his wings, but I decide that it's one of those gifts that won't
travel.

Even the traditional teahouse or chaikhana has been turned into a
monument called the Rohat.  Purpose built in the centre of town by the
Soviets in the 1950s as a 'representation of Tajik culture', the Rohat
is four floors high, as tall as the Presidential palace which is down
the street.  Beautiful yellow columns hold up the ceiling that soars
thirty metres high.  The airy room, so vast it echoes, is open on two
sides.  Its two walls are decorated with sweeping murals, pale blues
and greens swirled with yellow.  The murals continue on the ceiling,
diagrams of colour like a Cubist Sistine chapel.  A teahouse of such
grandeur is irresistible.

All the tables are on the ground floor, but the best seats in the house
are the raised benches in the windows.  Waitresses wear traditional
dress.  Their teeth gleam gold when they smile.  The food is plain and
doesn't really suit the setting.  A man stands at a barbecue outside
grilling lamb, and the restaurant serves meat noodle soup as well as
vodka in the Russian manner "Fifty grams or 100 grams?"  and of course
tea.

Dushanbe's twin city is Boulder, Colorado, and the people of Tajikistan
have built a teahouse on a smaller scale in downtown Boulder.  I can't
see much evidence of Boulder in Dushanbe.

One of my favourite spots for a working lunch in Dushanbe is more
simple.  In a small lane outside the city's only Internet 'cafe' - a
bare office with two computers there is an improvised roadside
restaurant.  A man and his wife put out plastic tables and chairs and a
small kerosene burner, near a drainage ditch under some trees.  From
ten o'clock every morning, except Friday, they cook on the spot for
Dushanbe's taxi drivers and anyone else who might want some home-made
plov, the national dish of rice, chickpea, carrot and meat stew.  The
smell is appetising but as I'm a vegetarian I ask for a portion without
meat.  They look astounded and give me extra tomato salad to make up
for it, along with some delicious naan bread that is the local
specialty.

The whole meal costs forty US cents, and I sit under the umbrella of
trees, drinking green tea and writing my script on the sun-dappled
table.  I have transcribed the interview with Mohammed Barbar, and the
refugees in the English class, and now I am writing up the story.  I
enjoy the relaxed form of Islam in Tajikistan.  No one appears bothered
by me.  Men greet each other in the warm Muslim way, hugging one
another close and touching their hands to their hearts.  Some wear
Patterned skullcaps, others wear Western clothes, and all seem happy to
speak to a Western woman.

Women in Dushanbe also choose what they wear either Western clothes or
the traditional Tajik dress of brightly coloured and patterned smocks
over crushed velvet pants in contrasting colours.  Since their head
scarves are another hue again, they are modest but riotously colourful.
They have striking, square faces, with thick painted-on eyebrows and
red lipstick.  They look like the Mexican artist FridaKahlo and their
clothes look like Latin American murals.

But the important thing, in the context of a Muslim country right next
door to Afghanistan, is that you can see their faces.  Women talk and
smile and are part of the life of the city.  There are no head to foot
coverings here.  The Soviets banned the veil in Tajikistan in the
1920s, but even in the 1960s it was not forgotten.  The writer and
famous foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski, who came here in the
1960s, observed that women in the countryside turned their backs as he
drove past and hid their faces in their hands.  As he succinctly put
it, "The veil was gone, but the reflex remained."  In 1963, Rochat
Nabijeva was the first Tajik woman to receive a university degree.  Her
thesis was on the struggle to abolish the veil.  During the 1920s, many
women who dared to bare their faces were killed some publicly executed.
Sitting in the sun, with the woman who cooked the plov smiling at me,
all that seems very distant.

The ease here is partly the result of a civil war which ended in 1997.
Former Communists, funded by Russia, fought assorted Islamic groups,
including Islamic militants.  After seven years of bitter fighting that
cost more than 50,000 lives, the ex-Communists won.  But the war took
its toll on Tajikistan, leaving it the poorest of the former Central
Asian Republics which is saying something.

Now, after years of severe drought, relief agencies estimate that half
of Tajikistan's six million people face possible famine this winter.
But it's still not as poor or as backward as Afghanistan.

The journalists who've come to Dushanbe are scrambling to get into
Afghanistan.

To get our visas we make our pilgrimage to the Afghan embassy run by
the opposition to the Taliban, the Northern Alliance.  Although it
rules only between five and ten per cent of the country, the Northern
Alliance is still the internationally recognised government of
Afghanistan, holding the country's chair in the United Nations.  Only
two countries recognise the Taliban as the legitimate government of
Afghanistan: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

But over the past year the Alliance's fortunes have been waning- It has
been beaten back even within its stronghold in the north of the
country, as officials concede at their embassy on Pushkin Street, just
around the corner from the Hotel Tajikistan.  September 11 has altered
many factors, and it is crunch time for the Northern Alliance.  How
they handle this crisis will make or break them, as officials in
Dushanbe are aware.  However, the Alliance has been crippled by the
assassination of its Defence Minister, the charismatic Ahmed Shah
Massoud.  He was killed by two Arab suicide bombers posing as
journalists two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center.  The
Northern Alliance accuses Osama bin Laden of organising Massoud's
murder and condemns the terror attacks in the United States, calling on
the Taliban to give up Osama bin Laden to the United Nations.  The
Northern Alliance says everything must be done to save Afghanistan from
possible US attacks.

Positioning itself as an ally for Washington in the War Against Terror,
the Northern Alliance says it is prepared to discuss military action
against the Taliban.  But despite having a fighting force on the ground
in Afghanistan, with a consistent history of opposition to the Taliban,
the Alliance says it has not yet been approached by the US regarding
any military action.  In Dushanbe, the Northern Alliance's military
attache, Saleh Mohammed Registani, says the Alliance would be prepared
to launch military action on behalf of the United States.

We report this offer, but Northern Alliance officials tell us
accusingly that Washington has remained silent.

"Why does Washington talk to Pakistan and not to us?  They created the
Taliban."

They are looking to us for a response, as if we are spokes-people for
the US government.

Journalists meet daily at the Afghan embassy, sitting under trees as we
wait to be admitted for meetings with Afghan consular officials.  Some
of the journalists are friendly, others frenzied.  Their news desks
want them inside Afghanistan, and they want them there now.  They don't
want to hear why it's difficult to get in.  Their despondency catching.
Everyone smokes and gossips, exchanging rumours as we wait to see the
Afghan officials.  One rumour doing the rounds is that CNN paid
US$15,000 to hire a Northern Alliance helicopter to take them and their
satellite gear into the Panjshir Valley, the spot the Northern Alliance
holds nearest Kabul.  The waiting is endless, and while most people are
friendly, many are competitive with their main rivals the American TV
networks look over their shoulders at each other, and reporters from
the British papers keep a wary eye on other British hacks.  The Sunday
Times' Moscow correspondent is being given a hard time because the
Daily Telegraph's Moscow man is already inside Afghanistan.

"He was at Massoud's funeral.  The Tele ran it on page one and I've
been getting my arse kicked every day since," says our man in Dushanbe,
exhaling gloomily.

Here in Central Asia it's all 'face' you have to meet officials and
then meet them again, and more often than not pay a small fee before
you are granted any favours.  An English journalist I meet summa rises
it neatly: "I like the Tajik bureaucracy the prices are modest, the
service flexible."

At the Afghan embassy, our contact is Amroullah Saleh.  He's clean
shaven, wears Western clothes and speaks four languages, including
French and English.  He is their very savvy media flack in fact, he's
the best person I've encountered in this role anywhere in the world.
It's almost mysterious that he is so sophisticated, and the only hint
he gives of being an Islamic Holy Warrior comes when he tells us that
he spent six months in Moscow as a student.  Back then he had a long
beard and looked like a mullah, and was frequently stopped by the
police.

"I tried to keep them talking so that I could improve my Russian.  I
didn't have much chance to talk," he says with a wry smile.

Amroullah Saleh says the Northern Alliance will make some of its
military helicopters available for us.  But they can't always fly, he
warns, due to the weather.  If it's cloudy in the Panjshir, they can't
land.  They have no navigational equipment and rely on the pilot's
vision to co-ordinate landings.  Visibility is crucial.  And sometimes
the Northern Alliance will need the four helicopters it has here for
ferrying military supplies, not journalists.  There is also the
requirement for approval by the Tajik government.  So it is not yet a
done deal.  All the journalists gathered around him nod.

"But having said all this, the Northern Alliance wants reporters on the
ground it's in our interests and we will do our best to help you get
there."

Pointing to a map, Amroullah Saleh shows us where they can take us,
indicating the Panjshir Valley or, failing that, to a small speck in
the far north, not named on any map, called Khoja Bahauddin.  From
there, we could drive down to the Panjshir, or perhaps catch another
chopper.

One journalist points to another spot on the map and asks whether we
could fly there.  Amroullah Saleh looks uncomfortable for an instant.

"No, not any more that's now under Taliban control."  Noticing my
sleeveless top he adds that once we are inside Afghanistan we will have
to respect local feeling and wear more modest clothing.

Before we can go to Afghanistan, however, we need to have our name on
The List.  In classic Central Asian style, there are two Lists, one at
the Tajik Foreign Ministry and one at the Afghan embassy, with two sets
of fees.  Modest amounts of US$30 and US$50 respectively, which later
climb to hundreds of dollars as the number of journalists swells.

People devote days to commuting between the two buildings, befriending
different staff to make sure they're on both lists.  I am not so
driven.  I feel myself being carried on the tide of my colleagues'
energy towards Afghanistan, but I don't have a producer able to queue
at both places for me and I'm too busy filing to give it my full
attention.  While there is the possibility of America landing ground
troops here, there is huge interest in this story from broadcasters all
over the world.

So, in between filing, I troop to the Tajik Foreign Ministry, a vast
apricot-coloured Soviet building with outsized white columns, marble
stairs and wooden doors five metres high.  Inside it's all grand vistas
and high ceilings, with most of the space wasted on long corridors,
leaving only small, poky offices for people to actually work in.
Despite a smart paint job, the Foreign Ministry is undergoing a re mont
the all-purpose Russian word for repair and renovation, used to cover a
variety of situations including 'closed for re mont which usually
means that a business will never reopen.  The Foreign Ministry doesn't
dare to scale down its operations with the prospect of so much hard
currency to be earned.  So, despite the fact we can't use the main
doors or the grand marble stairs, we scramble in via scaffolding on a
side door to conduct the endless administration and payments required
to obtain two documents a Tajik press pass and a Tajik double-entry
visa.  Both are only valid for four weeks, so the whole rigmarole will
have to be repeated again in a month's time, by which time prices will
no doubt have tripled.

The Afghan officials tell us that on Thursday 20 September, when the
lists held at the Tajik Foreign Ministry and Afghan embassy will be
complete, they will post up the Final Final List of people able to
travel to Afghanistan, on a notice board outside the Afghan embassy in
Pushkin Street.

"Please be here at 8 a.m. on Thursday, ready to travel," says Amroullah
Saleh.

I file till late on Wednesday night and, with no anticipation of being
on both lists, I turn up at the Afghan embassy at 11 a.m."  without my
bags and without having checked out.  A Russian colleague runs up to
me.

"What are you doing, where have you been?  You're on Chopper Number
3."

I can't believe it or comprehend it, although it's true that one person
is easier to fit in than a group of six, and the Northern Alliance is
trying to send as broad a selection of journalists as possible into
Afghanistan.  Voice of America is also a name they know and respect,
because it broadcasts in local languages into Afghanistan.  Radio is an
important medium in a country where many people have no electricity and
no television.

But I suffer a moment of real uncertainty.  There are other journalists
here, in torment because they are not on the list or because only two
or three from a team of six have been allowed to go.  People are
gathered around Amroullah Saleh, arguing with him.

Here I am, in a box seat, not sure what to do next.  I look at the
neatly typed list stuck on the embassy wall.  I'm the only female
freelance journalist on this chopper, heading for a lawless country,
which the US is about to carpet bomb.

Until this moment the enormity of that has not hit me.

I didn't expect to have to make a decision about Afghanistan so soon.
My name in black and white on the list calls my bluff.  I will be going
to a dangerous location without the protection of a big organisation if
anything goes wrong without a chopper to medivac me out if I'm wounded,
without an office to campaign on my behalf or pay a ransom if I'm
kidnapped.

I call a friend in Moscow to ask her advice.  Lygia O'Riordan is the
conductor of an orchestra, and she's tough, but generally errs on the
side of caution.  I tell her all my doubts, ending my litany with "I
have a bad feeling about this."

"Is it a bad feeling like when I didn't go back to Ireland to see my
mother, the last time before she died?"

"No, it's not that kind of bad feeling."

"Then get on that chopper."

So I check out of the Hotel Tajikistan and go to the local market to
buy provisions for Afghanistan.  There an old Tajik man is selling
Russian piroshki, pastries filled with meat or potatoes, and I stop to
ask for one without meat.  The man tears a page out of an old book,
wraps the pastry in it and hands it to me.  My oily page contains
Lenin's ideas about revolution, written in 1905.  I ask the piroshki
man which book he is using.

"No, no, don't worry, we have many like this," he assures me, showing
me an old Communist history book.  He is more interested in why I don't
eat meat.  Is it a religious prohibition?  Or a national one?  Is there
no meat in Australia?

I buy fresh apples and tinned food.  Since I arrived so late, my
colleague Christoph from Deutsche Welle says he will buy me a sleeping
bag when he gets one for himself, a kind offer that saves me time.  I
rush back to the Afghan embassy and settle down to wait.  Another suave
official, who wears a different Western suit every day, solves the
mystery of how I come to be on The List.

"I put you there," he says.

"I made sure you were on both lists, because I so enjoyed our
conversations in Russian."

We'd chatted each day at the gate but I never even knew his name. Makes
eighteen months of lessons worthwhile, I guess.  Store that one up to
tell my Russian teacher, if I ever come back alive.

There's a rustle among the waiting journalists.  We are to move to the
airport, a hopeful sign.  But we sit there for the afternoon, and no
choppers fly.  We drive despondently to the Hotel Tajikistan and check
hack in.  I file till late about Russian troop movements near the
Afghan border.  News is also breaking that Washington is making its
first overture to the Northern Alliance.  At a press conference,
jubilant Northern Alliance defence spokesman Saleh Mohammed Registani,
is asked exactly what this means.

"Before we have no tanks, and now we have.  Before we have no air force
and no missiles and now we have air support and missiles.  We had
ground forces, but now we have air support."  He smiles.

"I think that's what it means, don't you?"  Thank you Mr.  Registani,
that's a grab.  Pressed about a timetable for the US attacks, he says,
"I don't agree that it should be soon.  We need a little bit of time to
understand the situation.  The Taliban have changed their places, they
live with civilians.  We can't attack the new targets until we find
their new positions."

In the morning we check out again, going directly to the airport to
wait again in the dust.  Cars and journalists and bags are spilled
everywhere.  It's strangely festive, like a picnic, except without food
or water or toilets.  One of the taxi drivers has his tape recorder
blaring.  Frank Sinatra sings "I Did it my Way' over and over again, an
ironic counterpoint to people stuck waiting for someone else to tell
them what to do.  Everyone is smiling at the incongruity of that velvet
American voice in the middle of a dusty field in Dushanbe.

Morbidly, we compare statistics about helicopter crashes, one of the
biggest dangers we face here.  The helicopters are ageing and poorly
maintained.  If we're going to die, says a reporter who has been to
Afghanistan many times, that's the most likely cause of death.

In the background Frank is crooning about the end being near and facing
the final curtain.

Then one chopper takes off, followed by a fixed-wing aircraft, flying
to Faizabad in the north-east of the Panjshir Valley.  I wave goodbye
to new friends.  After nine hours, Chopper Number 3 is ready to take
off.  Now it's our turn to wave goodbye and we heave our bags onto a
creaky old Russian military helicopter.  Our passports are stamped.
We're on our way to Afghanistan.  Nothing can stop us now.  Until our
bags are thrown back into the dirt.

No reason is given.  It appears the Russian Security Service had
approved everything, the problem was with the Tajik Security Service,
which everyone here still calls by its old name, the KGB.

"Try again tomorrow," says Amroullah Saleh, 'the Tajik KGB changed
their minds at the last minute.  We don't know why."

So much officialdom in Central Asia works this way, but all your doubts
rise up to confront you while you wait idly in the dust.  I find myself
thinking that perhaps I shouldn't really be going on this mad venture
alone to Afghanistan.  One of the Russian producers tells me that
Amroullah Saleh looked her straight in the eye and told her she
shouldn't go.  She never wanted to, and now she isn't.  Results depend
on determination.  I decide I have only one more day of this in me.

At 4 p.m. the next day, with one hour of light left, Chopper Number 3
finally takes off.  It is less than two weeks after the September 11
attacks, and all my doubts evaporate as we judder up above the bare
brown mountains of the Hindu Kush.  Another stroke of luck is that we
are in a much safer chopper this was the personal helicopter of Ahmed
Shah Massoud, the military leader assassinated fifteen days ago.
Massoud was the most charismatic of the Islamic resistance heroes, the
bravest of the anti-Soviet fighters, and his death has almost destroyed
the Northern Alliance.  His picture is on the door to the pilot's
cabin, an iconic shot of the handsome Massoud kneeling in prayer,
wearing his pakul, a Tajik woollen beret, his gun by his side.  Halfway
though the flight a translator turns to me and says, Irris, did you
know you are sitting in Massoud's armchair?"

I'm on my way to Afghanistan.  AFGHANISTAN, 24 SEPTEMBER 2001 The
helicopter flies over the stunning barren mountains that mark the
border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan.  After an hour we circle
Khoja Bahauddin, a desolate village perched on a desert basin, ringed
by refugee camps.  From the air it looks biblical.  Things don't
improve when we land.

Houses are made of mud brick, surrounded by mud-brick walls.  There are
no paved roads, no running water, no sanitation and no electricity.
Camels and donkeys carry water and firewood.  Everything is
dun-coloured: the walls, the paths, the animals.  Women and children
provide the only splashes of colour, but the women are distant
presences.  Covered from head to foot in brightly coloured burqas, they
always seem to be disappearing around earthen corners just in front of
you.  They see the world through a tiny mesh screen in their veils.

I feel I have gone back in time.  Biblical names flood back to me. This
is how I imagine Ur of the Chaldees, or Tyre of the Phoenicians. If it
weren't for the Russian jeeps clattering along the sand and the
Kalashnikovs this could be an Old Testament town.  The New Testament is
too new for Khoja Bahauddin.

We throw our bags onto a pick-up truck and are driven up the hill.
There really are no roads, we just take off bouncing across a field.
Hanging on tight soon becomes a reflex in vehicles here.  We turn into
a compound which is the Northern Alliance "Foreign Ministry' - a very
grand name for a low building with six rooms where they are putting up
journalists until they find guest houses for us.  The offices are
already bulging women sleeping in one room, men in all the others. Work
is done outside in an open corridor, and I fight for a spot near a
pillar, on a step above a thousand cigarette butts.  I'm thrilled to
see my BBC friends who arrived yesterday.  A friendly face is important
when you've travelled by time machine hundreds of years into the
past.

We embrace and questions tumble out.

"Are you free to move about and cover stories here?"

"What do you do for electricity?"

And that most important journalistic enquiry:

"What are the toilets like?"

The news is bad there are no telephones, and the BBC satellite dish is
working intermittently.  They do have a beautiful 'live' spot on the
roof though.

"It's a cooking live shot," one American cameraman says slang for he
really likes it.  There is only occasional electricity because the
Northern Alliance generator is already starting to falter under the
pressure of so many users, so it's better to have your own generator.
Yes, the Northern Alliance will do interviews.  Yes, there are
translators here they know the local language, Dari, a relative of
Persian, and some English, though the best translators know Dari and
Russian.  But translators and drivers are expensive: US$100 per day
each more than they would cost in Moscow.  If you want to be out every
day you have to find US$1400 a week.  That's almost all the cash I have
with me.

And one other very important thing the BBC tells me: if you're nice to
Abdul, an eighteen-year-old who looks thirty, and has a wicked laugh,
he will bring tea.  Green tea.  Choi sahbs.  The BBC girls have also
learnt the word for sugar, but I don't bother since I don't like sweet
tea.  It seems this is the best way to drink water, which is only safe
if it's boiled.  Some people are boiling water and then filtering it
and drinking that.  Water purifying tablets make water taste putrid.

I grab a weak green tea.  My ten litres of water won't last long in
this heat.

Christoph Wanner from Deutsche Welle was on another chopper, and he
and more importantly the satellite phone we are sharing is nowhere to
be seen.  I can't believe that I have come to a place with no
communications at all without my own satellite phone.  Once again it's
the BBC to the rescue.  They have a deal under which they provide
equipment for some broadcasters I file for, such as Irish radio RTE.
This first night everyone Deutsche Welle, RTE, Voice of America wants a
piece on my impressions of Afghanistan.  I also file about the Northern
Alliance, the morale and the state of military preparedness of this
force that may yet be America's ally on the ground.

I have international telecommunications support from an unexpected
source the Northern Alliance.  They have a satellite phone that will
receive calls.  You can ring into it, but you can't call out.  They let
me give out their number.  It is true that if I'm not there to connect
things up, there is no guarantee their phone will always be on, or
charged but it is a fantastic help.  Later, when there are literally
hundreds of journalists here, no one can believe that Northern Alliance
officials would take calls and come looking for "Irris from VGA'.

The operation in Khoja Bahauddin is still small and personal and we
know all the Northern Alliance officials by name.  Zuhair runs the
compound.  The former medical student is twenty-seven years old, with
that local trait of looking at least ten years older.  He has been in
charge for just two weeks since the assassination of military leader
Ahmed Shah Massoud.  Massoud's second-in-command, Suhail, was also
killed in the same suicide bombing.

"So now I am the one," Zuhair tells me in disbelief.

Ahmed Shah Massoud was assassinated here, in this compound, two days
before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.  He
invited in journalists just like us but they turned out to be
terrorists.  They were two Tunisian Arabs, travelling under Belgian
passports.  Some around Massoud were suspicious of them from the start
because they had come in through Taliban lines.  They came as guests of
senior Northern Alliance leader Abdul Rusul Sayyaf, who had fought with
Osama bin Laden against the Soviets.  He says he was also fooled by the
two men.

Massoud had been the target of a number of assassination attempts by
bin Laden and the Taliban for more than a year, and he was often on the
move, sleeping in a different location each night.  But he let the two
suicide bombers stay here at the compound.  They were his guests,
living among his security chiefs and bodyguards.  For five weeks they
did what we do here: they went to the front lines and interviewed
soldiers.  They travelled to the Panjshir Valley to see the Kabul
front.  They hung out with the guys.  But they were waiting.

The assassination occurred about three weeks later than planned.  Three
interview times were set, but postponed for a variety of reasons,
including Massoud needing to be at a battle near Kabul.  The suicide
bombers were becoming increasingly impatient, especially as they were
in the Panjshir Valley while an important meeting was underway where
all the Northern Alliance leaders, including Massoud, were in one room
at one time.  They begged to be allowed to film.

"We just need one shot."

They were refused until finally, on 9 September, Massoud had time for
them.  His killers walked across the Foreign Ministry compound to his
home, and set up their gear.  The cameraman had Semtex strapped to his
body but Massoud's bodyguards didn't check them, or their equipment.
They would have detected it easily.

Massoud sat down for the interview, shaking hands with his assassins
first.  After one question, the terrorist ignited the Semtex, killing
himself, Massoud and Suhail.  But the second terrorist, the 'reporter',
survived.  He picked up a camera and nonchalantly walked out.  He had
reached the street outside by the time Massoud's bodyguards captured
him, running barefoot.  They had removed their shoes to sit indoors and
simply sprinted across the gravel from the blackened room, in shock.
The guards locked the surviving attacker in a room, but he escaped
through a window and stole a gun.  Before he could scramble very far,
they shot him.

Everyone here is still coming to terms with the seismic shock of
Massoud's loss.  I am watching the making of a martyr.  The feelings
are heartfelt.  Everywhere, warriors are in tears at the mention of his
name.

"I have lost my eyes," one says, looking at the ground, suddenly
bereft.

WHEN they get to know you better, some men suggest in whispers that
Ahmed Shah Massoud chose to die.  Tearful warriors tell us earnestly
that on a visit to France five months before he was assassinated,
Massoud like Martin Luther King predicted his own death.  It was
Massoud's first official visit to the West, and he was addressing the
European Court in Strasbourg, positioning himself internationally as
the alternative Afghan leader.  But in reality he knew that the Taliban
front lines were only twelve kilometres from his house, and little more
than a handful of troops, and a river, kept them from attacking Khoja
Bahauddin.  One view was that his victories were behind him.  Ousted
from Kabul in 1996, then from his regional headquarters here in the
north in 1999, perhaps he feared that the Northern Alliance was on the
verge of disintegration.  Perhaps it was easier to shake the assassins'
hands, sit down for a last interview, and choose death.  Perhaps.

But the bodyguards never satisfactorily explain the lapse in security
that led to the assassination.  They say that Massoud didn't want the
two checked.  However, the only person who could confirm that is now
dead.  Another count against this fatalistic assessment is that earlier
in 2001, it was Massoud who drew other warlords, including Rashid
Dostum and Is mail Khan, back into the fight against the Taliban. 
Until his death, the Lion of the Panjshir - Shir-e-Panjshir remained
the lynch ping of the anti-Taliban forces.  He was the true heart of
the coalition of disparate groups and warlords that make up the
Northern Alliance.

Massoud was also the Afghan leader whose reputation best survived two
decades of war, despite persistent allegations of corruption and crony
ism and the human rights abuses that occurred when he was Defence
Minister in Kabul in the early 1990s.  His Jamiat-i-Islami faction,
like the others, had rained rockets down on civilian areas of Kabul,
causing massive destruction.  Tens of thousands of people died in the
bombardments or fled the city.

But over time, Massoud came to embody the myth of the charismatic
warrior.  He was magnetic, compelling and it must be said extremely
sexy.  Photographers turned him into the poster boy of Fundamentalism,
the David Beckham of Islamic warriors.  A French photographer wearing a
local scarf and a pakul, a Tajik woollen cap, sighs, "Women always
found Massoud attractive.  I just accept it."  He's right.  Massoud was
an irresistibly romantic figure the beautiful careworn Tajik face under
its pakul, the sensitive warrior, funny and media savvy.  He had women
and men swooning.  Even hard-bitten war reporters wrote gushing pieces
about the true warrior, backed into a corner, outnumbered and
outgunned, but never outclassed.

The Northern Alliance blames Osama bin Laden for Massoud's death, an
assessment confirmed by Western intelligence sources.  They say that
before carrying out the terror attacks in the US, bin Laden neutralised
opposition within Afghanistan, perhaps to reward the Taliban leaders
for their support of al-Qaeda.  The Northern Alliance goes further,
arguing that Massoud's assassination was a signal to Mohammed Atta and
his men to carry out the World Trade Center attacks.

"Now, with Massoud dead, it was safe for them to go ahead."

For Zuhair in Khoja Bahauddin, the tragedy has personal implications.
He was in Pakistan with his new bride of three months when Massoud was
assassinated, and has had to leave her behind to run this HQ.  We
remove our shoes to sit in his office.  Unlike most Afghan rooms which
have only mats around the walls, here there is fake antique furniture,
ornate and out of place, like furniture reserved for special guests in
a rarely used English sitting room.  But one aspect of the decor is
very typically Afghan: the walls are bare.  The only decoration is
posters of the stunningly photogenic Massoud.

I ask Zuhair if this is a good life.  He looks around helplessly.

"It's a life."

What would improve it?

"Peace," he answers automatically.

Mohammed, another Northern Alliance official, chimes in: "Why didn't
journalists protest when Ahmed Shah Massoud was murdered by
journalists?  It is your job to do this.  The people here will not
understand they will be very angry with you," he says furiously.

"Massoud's assassination was a terrible event," I reply carefully,
surprised by his vehemence, 'but his murderers weren't journalists,
they were terrorists."

"Yes, but why didn't journalists all over the world protest?  You must
understand that the people here will be suspicious of you they will
blame you for the death of Massoud."  Great.  As if it's not difficult
enough to work here, people think we have murdered their national
hero.

The European Broadcasting Union, EBU, is one of the first groups to
come into Afghanistan overland, hauling more than two tonnes of gear by
road rather than waiting for the chance of a chopper and a plane both
becoming available at the same time.  Once the Northern Alliance
persuades the Russians to open the road, this is how most people will
reach Afghanistan, but Joris Wauman from EBU is one of the first
foreign journalists to present his passport at the Afghan border
crossing at the Pyang River, and he has a hard time.

He tells them his nationality, Belgian, and is thrown face first onto
the ground.  There are three Kalashnikovs in his back, the bayonet of
one in his neck.

He lies very still, with no idea what is going on.  Luckily for him,
there is a Russian journalist who speaks some Dari going through at the
same time.  It seems that the men who murdered Massoud entered
Afghanistan using Belgian passports.  The Russian journalist explains
to the Afghan border guards that not every Belgian is a terrorist, and
that Joris certainly is not one.

After some consultations, they reluctantly remove their Kalashnikovs
from Joris' back, and let him up.

When Joris tells me this story he is still shaken.  We can't afford any
misunderstandings so close to Massoud's death.

"Tomorrow there will be a memorial here for Ahmed Shah Massoud," says
Zuhair, looking overwhelmed again.

The generator splutters and dies, plunging the Foreign Ministry office
into darkness.  It feels very late, though it's only nine o'clock. It's
time to go to sleep, but where?  There is no more floor space in the
women's room.

"We will take you to another guesthouse.  It will cost only a small
amount.  Ten dollars every night," says Zuhair.

Together with eight other journalists I'm driven to an empty house
across the other side of town.  The drive is terrifying because it is
my first experience of the enveloping, crushing darkness of night here,
the night of the desert, the night of history, the night the ancients
used to fear.  I understand that fear now.  The only light making a
pathetic attempt to pierce the utter blackness is the beam of our
jeep's headlights.

The car has a poster of Massoud slap bang in the middle of its
windscreen, making it more difficult to see out; this and a black flag
that is tied to the aerial appear to be obligatory on all vehicles
here.  After fifteen minutes of driving we suddenly career to a stop in
front of a mud-brick wall.  We bang on a door in the wall but no one
comes.  Our driver doesn't speak English.  We look at him and bang
again.  A short, sleepy man finally answers, holding a lamp, and after
an exchange with our driver in Dari he motions us to come with him.
Clutching our bags, we stoop to pass through the door and follow his
flickering light across the courtyard.

As I try not to stumble and to stay within this small arc of
candlelight, I'm aware that here even finding your room at night has
the feel of an ancient ritual.  It seems absurd, unbelievable, that
only two hours ago I was filing to Berlin, Dublin and Washington, via a
satellite hovering in the night sky.  Instinctively I look up.  The
stars shine down so brightly that I feel if I look hard, I should be
able to see that satellite winking at me.  In the darkness, the stars
are your guides.  Here, I understand why they were once worshipped as
gods.

We are taken to two rooms with carpets on the floor and mats around the
walls.  We respect the Northern Alliance request that men and women
sleep separately.  In practice it means the men are squashed into one
room, while the only other female journalist and I can luxuriate on the
floor by ourselves.

I decide to check out the bathroom.  Lighting my way with a kerosene
lamp, I gingerly open the door.  The light flickers about a bare
concrete room, revealing a tin drum full of water, which I discover is
delivered daily by donkey.  There's a tin pitcher for removing water
from the drum, and a hook on the door on which you can hang your
clothes, although it doesn't really lock, which makes me nervous.  But
all in all, not too bad.

Then I go outside to the toilet.  Here, as everywhere in Afghanistan,
it becomes the bane of my life.  A mud outhouse, without a door, with a
slit in the mud floor, above a two metre drop.  It has a pungent smell
which makes you gag, tearing at your throat, acidic and goaty.

"Hold your nose and learn to squat," Jacky Rowland from the BBC
advises.  Both essentials that I never really master.  From this first
moment I learn we are all in it together.  With the helpfulness that is
to sustain us throughout our time 'in country', a Dutch journalist says
"You'll need this," and offers me his headlamp.  I feel ridiculous a
coal miner going to do her business, but he's right.  You can't squat,
aim and hold a torch and toilet paper all at once.

Food.  Water.  Medicine.  Generators.  Satellite phones.  Information.
Costs.  Toilet paper.  We will share everything in Afghanistan.  While
of course there are selfish, greedy journalists here, too, and I will
see fist fights over access to a toilet, even access to a roof where a
live broadcast is to be filmed, my essential experience of this hostile
environment is that everyone pitches in together, so that we can all
file and survive.

The next morning we're up with the light as there are no curtains on
the windows.  We're stiff from our first night on the floor, and have
to get dressed with men standing outside our windows staring at us.
Like the toilets, this never gets any easier.

The man we met briefly by candlelight last night, Qasim, is funny and
calm.  We have no common language, but communicate well.  He brings us
pots of tea and the Afghan breakfast of bread tasteless, dusty brown
'pitta' bread and UHT cream, which they pour into a bowl.  The Dutch
journalist offers me cheese "Edam, it's good' and I contribute apples
from the market in Dushanbe.

We go out into the town.  Khoja Bahauddin boasts one of the most dismal
town squares I've ever seen.  It is dominated by a huge stretch of
gravel, shining whitely under the merciless sun, surrounded on four
sides by unkempt wooden shacks which sell a very limited variety of
packaged food, string and toilet paper.  Both the shacks and the goods
are covered in the dust that swirls in the square, making your eyes
smart and your skin chafe.

A man walks by carrying a rooster.  A Russian jeep squeals past,
throwing up more dust.  A donkey defecates at my feet.  The shacks
appear to be battened down, preparing to withstand something.  When I
experience my first dust storm here I will appreciate that it's
actually a testimony to the determination of these people that the
wooden structures remain standing.  But now, cauterised by the shock of
the new, everything appears grey.

It is also relentlessly harsh.  Roads are built by crews who break
rocks with sledgehammers to make gravel.  On market days, people walk
from distant villages some even cross Taliban lines to buy livestock.
Horses, camels and donkeys are auctioned in a mud-brick enclosure
behind the main square.  Then the animals are herded home, back across
the desert and across the front lines.

On this first day, surrounded by jostling crowds of turbaned men, I
also fail to see that there are plants in the square.  They are so
small and stunted and covered in dust that it is only on later visits I
realise they are rose bushes and then only when a man throws a bucket
of dirty water over a small grey bush as I walk past, and for a moment
a pink rose emerges.  It's a tribute to the resilience of the flower
and the people that it grows here, in the desert, during the worst
drought in seventy years.

This town, which looks as old and decrepit as time, is in fact new.

"We built it three years ago, when Khoja Bahauddin was upgraded from a
village to a town," Mehibullah, a pharmacist, tells me proudly.  He
speaks to me in Russian, which he learnt studying pharmacy in Prague in
the 1980s.  I just stop myself from saying And you ended up here?
Prague boasts what is arguably the most beautiful medieval square in
Europe, grand buildings from the 1300s painted an exquisite array of
gelato colours, and maintained even during Communist times.  The
contrast to this ugly, filthy, desolate square is so painful it's
almost comical.  Afghanistan was never conquered, but its history is
directed by the swirls and eddies of Empire.  Mehibullah reaped some of
the benefits of the Soviet occupation.  Education.  Travel.  Career
Opportunities.  He sighs with me for the changes in his life.

Like many of the people here, Mehibullah is a refugee from the Taliban.
He took flight with his family when the Taliban conquered Taloqan just
over a year ago.

"We had to run away, they beat us because we were Tajiks," he says.

Refugees have swelled the population of this town, so that it is
somewhere between 3000 and 35,000.  Somewhere.  No one seems to have a
more reliable figure.  Like so many facts in Afghanistan, this appears
to be about the range of accuracy journalists can pin down.

Mehibullah possesses that other very Afghan trait overwhelming
hospitality.  He wants me to come to visit his wife and family, an
hour's drive away by motorbike.  I explain that I can't come because
today I have to cover the memorial service for Ahmed Shah Massoud.

"Another day, you must come to my home another day.  I will tell my
wife," he insists.

Everywhere, people offer me meals and clothes.  Girls take off their
headbands to give to me.  Even in refugee camps where people are
starving, they offer me their precious bread, baked with the first
flour they've seen in months.  I am overwhelmed.

This hospitality has another side, too.  The people are so innately
generous, they can't understand why we don't give them our possessions.
Give me your scarf, your camera, your shoes.

"My shoes?  I only have one pair, you can't have my shoes," I
protest.

"But I need your shoes," the girl replies with unimpeachable logic.

I notice that when my male colleagues are approached for something by
an Afghan man with a gun, they find it harder to explain why they won't
give it to him.  But keeping your sense of humour is essential
petulance won't get you anywhere, and actually the man isn't using the
gun as leverage, it's just an extension of him, like his arm, so you
can reject his request.  It's about approach.  Men approach each other
differently.  Maybe it's like asking for directions there are just some
things men can't do.

Despite the warmth of the welcome, there's no doubt that this influx of
Western journalists is confusing to the people of Khoja Bahauddin. Many
of them have never seen a Westerner before.  Tourists don't come here. 
Even people from Kabul can go their whole lives without coming here. 
Russian soldiers ten years ago and some Western aid workers are the
extent of it.  And now, here we are in droves.  We've come because of
the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  But two weeks
on, many people in Afghanistan still don't know about them.  At a
barbershop in the square, some men are waiting to have their beards
trimmed.  Out of seven men only one, twenty-eight-year-old Nasr, has
heard about the September 11 attacks, though he hasn't seen any
pictures of the two planes crashing into the tallest towers in New York
and their spectacular collapse.

"No.  We don't have television and our newspapers don't have pictures,"
he says.

Under the Taliban there has been no television broadcasting, and anyway
most people don't have electricity, so they couldn't power their
televisions even if there was anything to watch.  There are only a few
two-page newspapers such as Shariat, Heevad and Anise, produced in the
south.  They have text but no pictures.

For information, you listen to the radio, if you have one.  Many people
are pleased I file for Voice of America.  They point me out to each
other as the reporter from Sa'aday Amrika.  A stranger runs up to me in
the square to ask me the frequency for the Dari service.  I can't help
him.

But if you don't have a radio, there is always the town crier, the
jatchi.  Abdulmommen, the jatchi in Khoja Bahauddin, wears a striped
turban and carries a megaphone.

"If a donkey is lost, then the owner comes to me and I describe it
throughout the town," he says.

"Then, when with the help of God the donkey is found, the owner pays me
money."

Abdulmommen says he is not familiar with stealth bombers or cruise
missiles.  He knows more about Russian weaponry, and could easily make
announcements concerning Kalashnikovs or Katyusha rockets.  But like
the international TV networks, Abdulmommen finds there isn't much money
in news.  In the afternoons, he works as a bricklayer.

The jatchi is also the public face of justice.  When a crime is
committed, the suspect is tied to a donkey and paraded through the
town.  The town crier walks by his side, describing the man's crimes,
and asking him to repent.  Journalists standing in the square watch as
Abdulmommen accompanies one suspect, trussed backwards onto the donkey.
The man's face is dabbed with black oil, and he is bleeding where he
has been hit.  It's a busy day and there's a crowd in the square.  They
all get in on the act.  Bystanders hit the suspect, and so does
Abdulmommen.  The man is crying.  "He repented, so we did not send him
to gaol," says Abdulmommen, "He was a pickpocket, you know."  He pauses
for emphasis.

"I saw him stealing in the rice bazaar myself."  God knows what they
would dish out to someone who had committed a serious crime.

A huge group of turbaned men crowd around to listen to this interview.
It passes for entertainment in a place with no modern distractions such
as movies or computer games.  Abdulmommen does the entire interview
through his megaphone.  I think he's playing to the crowd, but an
American cameraman says this is probably how he talks to his wife as
well.  "Hi honey.  what's for dinner?"

It seems Abdulmommen enjoys being interviewed he is patient with my
questions and with the lengthy process of translation backwards and
forwards.  The crowd is certainly fascinated, and sorry when it is
over.

What do people do for entertainment when I'm not here to provide it?
They listen to a storyteller or mado.

The mado stands in front of a dusty building on the outskirts of the
bazaar at an appointed time every day.  A group of men sits around him.
He is a bearded man in his forties, and he starts by singing in a
pleasant, earthy baritone.  His song has the hypnotic quality of a
chant, and the men listen raptly, some swaying in time.  Then he
narrates the story he's been chanting, often a traditional Islamic
tale.  Today, it's a parable about love and sacrifice.

"The Prophet Esau comes upon a man crying by a fresh grave, and asks
him why he is sad," the mado begins.  '"My beautiful young wife has
died," the man replies, "and I am inconsolable."  The Prophet offers to
bring her back to life, but says there will be a price the man will
have to give up half his own life.  He agrees, and Esau brings the
beautiful young woman back from the dead.  She climbs out of her grave
and stands beside her husband.  He is overjoyed to see her and takes
her hand.  But now he is an old man."

After he tells this story, the mado collects money from his audience.
Before he does, he offers a blessing, referring to current events.

"May God bring peace to Afghanistan," he says, 'and may God kill every
terrorist."

It's only at the end that I realise there wasn't a single woman there
to listen to this parable about love or to receive the mado's blessing.
Like so much of life in northern Afghanistan, public entertainment is
for men only.

We bewilder people here, with our state-of-the-art satellite equipment,
and our hourly deadlines.  It's not just because they have only the
haziest idea of the significance of the attacks on the World Trade
Center, it's because they have an utterly different sense of time.

We try to explain to a translator why it is important to be punctual.

"In the West time is precious, it is like gold."

"Here time is like stone."

Time is like stone, and life is basic.  You shit where you stand.  You
die where you fall.

The cemeteries are a collection of mounds, like ants' nests.  None has
an identifying mark that would let you distinguish the grave of your
loved one from any other.  In fact, if you didn't know what they were,
graveyards would be almost indistinguishable from the surrounding
desert.

These are the most basic funerary markings I have seen anywhere in the
world I look out onto a large cemetery every day.  It lies behind the
Foreign Ministry, and I see it from the roof when I climb up the
rickety bamboo ladder to do my live shots.  Sometimes children play
there.  It makes me reflective as I wait my turn at the BBC's camera.
Death never feels far away in northern Afghanistan.

And it isn't.  More than ten per cent of the country's population have
died over the past two decades of war.  The chaos has meant there has
been no rigorous collection of statistics, so figures are approximate.
Afghanistan had a population of twenty million in 1992.  During the
past twenty years, including the war against the Russian occupation,
about 2.5 million Afghans have died, killed in fighting, famine, or
from lack of medical facilities.  Those who survive have shortened life
spans the average male life expectancy is only 41.5 years.

Afghanistan also has the largest refugee population in the world, with
more than six million people living in camps outside the country, in
Pakistan and India, and a huge population of internal migrants as well,
fleeing battles or moving in search of food and water.  Thousands now
live in camps here where we are.

The advent of the Taliban made life even more difficult for the
long-suffering population.  Although more than fifty per cent of people
were dependent on aid agencies for provision of food, water and medical
supplies, the Taliban had an ideological reluctance to accept
international aid.  After they came to power across the south and
centre of the country, they harassed the non-government organisations
and the United Nations until in July 1998 they forced them to leave
Kabul.

This had an immediate impact on the poor of the capital, especially
women and children.  As the city's stretched water distribution
suffered, people waved empty bottles and buckets at Taliban jeeps.
However, the Taliban remained unconcerned.

"We Muslims believe that Almighty God will feed everybody one way or
another.  If the foreign NGOs leave, then that is their decision," said
Planning Minister Qari Din Mohammed.

The Taliban clearly did not see it as their job to step in and provide
water and food for the population they had conquered at gunpoint.  More
people suffered and died, and climbed these treacherous mountains to
escape the Taliban, living in desolate refugee camps in Khoja
Bahauddin, rather than in their own homes under Taliban rule.

This backwater is an unlikely centre of government.  The Northern
Alliance retreated to Khoja Bahauddin in August 2000, when the Taliban
overran their regional headquarters in the nearby town of Taloqan. This
retreat is a sign of how gravely weakened the Northern Alliance is.  It
cannot hold onto its stronghold here in the north, and has been beaten
back into pockets of the country, covering less than ten per cent of
Afghanistan.

The Taliban front lines are about twelve kilometres from here.
President Burhanuddin Rabbani and the Alliance's new Defence Minister,
General Mohammed Fahim, come to this exposed point on 25 September for
Massoud's memorial service.  It is being held in the main mosque a low
white building, entirely without charm.  It could be an office.  There
is no minaret or any of the gracious fluid lines that characterise
mosques all over the world.  Like so much in Khoja Bahauddin, it is
utilitarian, and no more.

The mosque is close to the Foreign Ministry compound, but I don't feel
safe walking to it on my own.  I feel conspicuous despite my loose
clothes and headscarf.  It's noon on a scorching day and local feelings
are bubbling over.  The mosque is full, with thousands of mourners
spilling over into the dust outside.  Standing in the burning sun, they
listen to their leaders.

There's a call and response, with the men shouting nad -death to Osama
bin Laden, to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, to Pakistan, and to the
Pakistani security service, the ISI.  That yields the biggest shout of
nad.  There are hundreds of fighters among the mourners, here to
remember their charismatic military leader and to prepare themselves
for the war ahead.  They listen to eulogies about Ahmed Shah Massoud
from his successor, General Fahim, and from President Rabbani,
political leader of the Northern Alliance.

With one eye on the Western reporters, President Rabbani says that the
September 11 attacks are the bell waking the world to the threat of the
Taliban.  He proclaims that the death of Massoud has not weakened the
Northern Alliance that now with the prospect of international help it's
even stronger.

Stirring stuff, if you can get near it.  We are told that as women we
can't attend the ceremony in the mosque.  There are probably fifteen
female reporters at this stage and ten times as many men.  I ask
whether it might be possible to be outside in the yard, not in the
mosque itself, so that I can pick up audio for a radio report.  The
Northern Alliance officials agree, but after only a few moments in the
yard it's obvious that it is not possible.  The crowd is hot, restive
and angry.  One man points at me furiously.  Remembering that many of
these men believe that Western journalists murdered Massoud, I retreat
back outside the fence.  A crowd can turn so easily and it doesn't feel
like this one needs much prompting.  Even in this position I'm not sure
I'm safe and the quality of the sound I record from here is unusable.
But we get around it.  Female journalists watch and listen from the
fence.  A translator tells us what's being said, and our male
colleagues, who are inside the mosque, let us use the material they
record.  I file for Berlin and Dublin on President Rabbani's comments
at the memorial service, and the state of Northern Alliance
preparations for war.

Back at home, no one cares that it was hard; you're only judged by
what's on the screen and, if you're a woman, by your hair.  I have
never done a TV story no matter where from, no matter how dangerous
where people haven't commented on how I look.  You'd think you could
rely on your mother to worry about you in a war zone but even she will
say "I liked your hair' before she says "What were you doing in that
dangerous place?"  It's forced me to the conclusion that probably the
most important thing I do for any story is put on my lippy.  Another of
the surreal factors in doing this job in dusty, dirty, dangerous
Afghanistan.

The crowd in the square is ten deep, and the flames leap above their
turbans, leaking acrid black smoke.  We have to push our way forward
since we're late.  A soldier in uniform is pouring kerosene over sacks
lying on the gravel inside the square.  He sets them alight, and more
clouds of noxious smoke billow towards us.  The onlookers cover their
faces with scarves.  They should this is pure heroin burning in front
of them.

In the week of Massoud's funeral, the region's military commander,
Quazi Kobir, destroys 300 kilograms of heroin he says was captured from
the Taliban.  He exhibits stamps from the bags that contained the
heroin, saying they indicate the drugs were produced by the Taliban,
and destined for Pakistan.  It is a very hot day and the cloying,
pharmaceutical smell of the burning narcotic tears at the back of our
throats, making us dizzy and nauseous.  The only person in the square
seated to watch the proceedings, Commander Kobir answers questions from
croaky-voiced, teary reporters.  He says that the Northern Alliance is
fighting the Taliban on all fronts, and the struggle against narcotic
smuggling is part of that war.  it is part of our Islamic duty to clamp
down on narcotics."

According to CIA figures, more than seventy per cent of the world's
heroin is produced from Afghan opium.  opium.  poppies flourish in the
country's southern desert region as well as in northern provinces like
Badakshan and have done so since the time of Alexander the Great.
Unlike wheat, they require little water and are ideally suited to the
country's arid valleys.

In 2000 the Taliban said they were ending opium production, and ripped
up the poppy fields.  They took journalists along, and the pictures
went all around the world.  But even though the ban was enforced at
gunpoint in some villages, it may have been no more than a publicity
stunt.  The previous two years had been bumper crops 4600 tonnes of
heroin were produced here in 1999 alone giving the Taliban such huge
stockpiles that a temporary cessation would make little difference to
world supply.  Authorities in neighbouring Tajikistan say there has
been no decrease in opium trafficked at the border.  The opium bazaar
in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar never closed, even during the
poppy ban.

In a country with almost no industry of any type, it's estimated that
up to half of the population are involved in the narcotic trade.  For
example, even war widows, prevented by the Taliban from holding any
other jobs, work as couriers.  Smugglers often take members of the
courier's family hostage to ensure delivery and payment.

I report the burning of the heroin, although it has the feel of a
public relations exercise, and a disgruntled local later whispers to me
that we didn't ask the right questions, and that local Northern
Alliance commanders are involved in drug trafficking.  I am never able
to confirm the extent of Northern Alliance involvement in this region,
but it is clear that across the country it is not only the Taliban who
are involved in opium production.

The Islamic warriors fighting against the Soviet invaders, the
Mujaheddin, got into the business in the 1980s to fund their 'holy war'
against Russia.  That includes many of these same Mujaheddin from the
Northern Alliance who now have an Islamic duty to put a stop to it.

According to British research, the Northern Alliance has been as
closely associated with narcotics as the Taliban.  Dr.  Mark Galeotti,
the Director of the Russian & Eurasian Organised Crime Research Unit at
Keele University in England, argues, "The Taliban regime largely
confined itself to taking a ten to twenty per cent levy on opium
harvests, heroin production, and drug shipments, earning it a minimum
of US$40-45 million annually.  By contrast, the Northern Alliance or at
least key figures in it actively engaged in the production, sale and
trafficking of opium for factional and personal gain.  Unofficial
estimates from the Tajik authorities suggest that supplies this year
have been fairly evenly split between the Northern Alliance and the
Taliban, even though the Taliban controlled four times as much land
before November."

This is confirmed by UN research, which has found that most of the
opiates crossing Tajikistan have come from Northern Alliance-controlled
territory, and also that on Tajikistan's major smuggling routes,
seizures of heroin outnumber those of opium.  To European researchers,
this suggests that laboratories in Alliance-controlled areas are
successfully refining opium into the more potent, compact final
product.  A study for the International Crisis Group concludes that
"Ahmed Shah Massoud may have publicly opposed the drugs trade, just as
Taliban leader Mullah Omar did, but weapons and troops are paid for by
individual commanders.  There is no doubt drugs have funded all
factions."

Even an active front line does not prevent the trade from continuing.
An aid worker says that last year, when he was helping distribute wheat
to refugees near the front line on the Kokcha River, close to Khoja
Bahauddin, he saw donkeys ferrying opium between the Taliban and
Northern Alliance sides.  He tells an American writer that the
commanders arranged the exchanges by radio.

"Some of them had friendly contacts, even though they were fighting one
another."

The Northern Alliance city of Faizabad, nine hours' drive from here, is
reportedly a centre for opium production and smuggling.  German TV
journalists who are in Faizabad try to buy some heroin from a local
chemist.  They go in, cameras rolling.

"Heroin?  Yes.  How much do you want?"  the chemist asks.

"Oh, two or three kilos," the journalist replies, for laughs, playing
to the camera.  The chemist brings up a box from under his counter,
filled with white powder.  Using a plastic scoop he starts to measure
out two kilos of heroin into a bag.  The journalist can't believe his
eyes.

In Dushanbe, Afghan officials told us we should bring water to
Afghanistan, but that we didn't have to bring food.  However, if you're
a vegetarian like me, that was not entirely accurate advice.  After a
breakfast of dusty bread and UHT cream, lunch and dinner are the same:
rice cooked in goat fat, and beans stewed with potatoes in goat fat,
and goat shashlik on skewers (I don't eat that bit).  There's also more
of the dusty bread.  And so it goes every day.  In fact, it doesn't
matter who you are, even meat eaters quickly get bored.  And plenty of
people get sick.

I have a cast-iron stomach, and don't usually get sick anywhere I
travel, no matter how remote the location or how dodgy the food or how
many of the rest of the crew are felled.  But finally the bugs in that
goat fat wear me down, and I get diarrhoea think it's that and not
something floating in the water, because after I've suffered for two
days and dosed myself with Gastrolyte and antibiotics, and emerged
pleasingly thinner, I can never eat that rice again.  Just the thought
of it makes me want to vomit.  Even now.

So I find myself eating meat for the first time in twenty years.  Goat,
of course.  What else is there?  Shashliked on skewers, it's somehow
more bearable than the goat fat, oozing all over the rice and potatoes.
Mostly, I eat chocolate and apples.  Swiss chocolate (a box of
Toblerone left behind by a departing journalist) and local apples, once
I've carefully rinsed off all the dust.  For breakfast I often have
Russian instant porridge, which the Canadians from the Moscow bureau of
CBC have brought.  It comes in sachets and you add boiling water.  I
ask CBC's Russian producer, Tanya, if she wants me to wash my plastic
plate, and she looks horrified.

"Things aren't that bad yet."  Recycling hasn't permeated the Russian
consciousness.  But when Tanya finally leaves she tells her friends
that Afghanistan was 'worse than Chechnya'.

Another Just Add Boiling Water staple here is instant noodles, and
sometimes the NBC boys share their MREs 'meals ready to eat' which they
have shipped in from the United States.  But they are soon sick of
these, too.  There are five vacuum-packed alternatives, and even the
tastiest soon become boring.

"Oh no, not cheese tortellini.  I've had this for three days in a row.
It's almost inedible, you know."  I hear the cheese tortellini wail
over and over.

Those same five meals quickly become as predictable as the rice, beans
and goat.  But at least they won't make you sick.

The dust is becoming more pervasive.  It is as fine as cake flour but
gritty, and it is in our eyes and ears and throats.  We are only ever
clean for approximately five minutes a day straight after washing.
After that it's as if we hadn't washed in a week.  Most worryingly, the
dust is clogging up our equipment.  Some people's cameras and laptops
seize up, and radio gear simply dies.

Today the air seems to be opaque, and is swirling in stinging gusts in
the square.  I look at the two English reporters with whom I am out
doing interviews.  Their hair is stiff with dust, their faces grey with
dust, and they are wearing their local scarves wrapped around their
mouths, so that they don't breathe too much dust down into their lungs.
I'm glad I can't see myself.  After less than ten days, we look like
locals.

I don't recognise the beginnings of a dust storm because I've never
experienced anything like it before.  After a twenty-four-hour
build-up, in which the sky turns a sulphurous yellow and you feel that
the end of the world is near, a colossal wind begins to howl.  It seems
to pick up half the desert, which has nothing to hold it down after
years of drought, and blows it back in the faces of the long-suffering
population.  People walk along bowed against the wind, their scarves
wound around their faces, women carrying children.  Soon the town is
empty, sand swirling through it in hot gusts.

The storm's force is frightening.  Heavy satellite dishes worth
thousands of dollars and rated for 150 kilo metre per hour winds are
knocked over.  Journalists living in tents come indoors and take refuge
in our rooms.

We secure the satellite equipment as best we can, and then just lock
the doors, break out the contraband vodka, and drink.  You can't work,
you can hardly breathe, even indoors.

"Dust stopped play," says Jacky Rowland from the BBC.  The next
morning everything inside is covered in a thick coating of fine powder,
including our sleeping bags.  Waking up I feel like I'm gazing at a
collection of mummies in the British Museum, until one of the mummies
sits up, taps a pool of sand off his glasses, and puts them on his
nose.

"Do you think it's over?"  he croaks.

We go out to assess the damage.  The European Broadcasting Union guys
are there, covered in dust, dismantling their gear.  They closed down
their operation for twenty-four hours because their set-up was in a
tent outside.  They are planning to move to a safer location.
Indoors.

"Not making that mistake again!"  While they're packing, Joris from EBU
finds something in the sand.  He is certain it is a piece from the
camera wired with Semtex that killed Ahmed Shah Massoud.  But he
doesn't keep this gruesome memento because he is Belgian and if he is
found with it he'd be killed, no questions asked.  He still remembers
the feel of those Kalashnikovs in his back at the border coming in.

I look around.  The air is no longer yellow.  It is grey and heavy, but
quiet.  Locals say this phase lasts for another two days.

"Wear your scarf like this it's safer for your breathing," they say,
gesturing to me to wrap my scarf around my face.

I wonder if there's any point in washing, or if the water is also full
of sand.

After the dust storm I decide I need new clothes.  I'm ready to become
an Afghan fashion victim.  I can't keep up with all the washing and I'm
inspired by Jacky Rowland from the BBC, who's had an Afghan man's
pyjama suit made up and looks fab.

"Their clothes are much better for this weather, they're very cool,"
she says.

You can buy them 'off the rack', which the boys do after Jacky leads
the way, wearing her local clobber on camera.  But Jacky advises me to
have the full Khoja Bahauddin experience and go to the tailor, the
chayati, to have a suit made.

"Here's what you do, you buy fabric you need metres and metres of it,
because of the way they make the pants then you go across to the
tailor.  I'll take you to both."

I trot behind her across the square.  There is something magnificent
about Jacky, striding ahead in her blue Afghan pyjama suit with
designer sunglasses and a white scarf wrapped around her blonde hair.
Watching her sweep in and out of these dusty shacks, choosing between
bolts of blue cloth, specifying amounts of fabric and frowning over the
cost, puts me in mind of the British Raj.

Under her direction, I buy enough fabric for one suit and one shirt
three metres for US$4 and we walk back across the blisteringly hot
white gravel to the tailors' shacks.  There are five or six in this
Savile Row, and Jacky looks for the one with a hand-painted sign of a
sewing machine above it.

"Here.  This is it."  Jacky strides in.

"Nasr from the Foreign Ministry came with me and I just pointed to what
he was wearing and said I wanted one exactly the same.  They were a bit
scandalised that it was men's clothes, but I was firm and they did
it."

The tailor is by now used to crazy Western women wanting to wear men's
suits, and he measures me up through my clothes placing his tape
measure across my shoulders, down my arms, and from my shoulders down
to my knees.  The shack is open on two sides and a crowd gathers,
fascinated.  I point to a friend's shirt, and say I want one just the
same.  The delighted crowd settles in for the next instalment.  After
he measures me again, the tailor sets a price at US$2, labour costs
less than the fabric.  He can have them ready in three days.

When I come back, the shirt isn't anything like my friend's, which the
tailor was meant to be copying, but the pantaloon suit is perfect.  It
is in two pieces a long over shirt which reaches to the knees, and
pyjama pants, which look large enough for an elephant.  One size fits
all, twice.  They give you a white cotton belt to thread through a seam
at the waist.  It's the only way to hold up such gargantuan pants.

Jacky does the threading for me as it's very fiddly and she is better
at it.  While she does it she tells me what it was like freelancing
from Belgrade during the NATO bombing, which was more dangerous than
here because it was a built-up environment.  After explaining that she
likes 'roughty toughty' stories like this one, she says, "Here, make a
knot in it straight away, or you'll have to do it again.  "Once it's
all fixed, and I can wear it, I'm a convert.  The pyjama suit is
absolutely the best thing in this environment -loose-fitting, modest
and cool. The Afghan translators and drivers beam when they see me.

"Irris!  You are wearing Afghan clothes!  Now you look beautiful."

The BBC sends in correspondent Caroline Wyatt, a dear friend from
Moscow.  When she sees us in our Afghan gear she says despairingly,
"You've all gone native!"  She is the first person to be impressed with
Khoja Bahauddin.

"I just remember what it was like in Buj in India after the earthquake
where there was absolutely nothing and we had to sleep outside on the
ground without even a blanket..  . this isn't that bad."

It's official Afghanistan is one step above the epic entre of an
earthquake ... The house where Massoud was assassinated is here in
another section of the Foreign Ministry.

He designed it himself and had it built on the spot with the best view
in Khoja Bahauddin over the river and across to the fields that provide
the only greenery in the area.  At night, particularly, when the stars
seem to tumble down brightly to this vista, gleaming above the river,
it is very peaceful.  You can almost forget that just down the road in
front of you, twelve kilometres away, is the Taliban front line.

As the number of journalists grows, Zuhair decides to open up Massoud's
house.  Khoja Bahauddin is bursting at the seams.  Every available room
in every available house has been turned over to journalists, and more
and more are arriving every day, with new arrivals forced to sleep
outside in corridors.  It had to reach crisis point before the Northern
Alliance would consider handing over Massoud's house to the foreigners.
Not all of the house will be open, however.  The room where he was
assassinated will remain closed.  All eight windows in the room thirty
metres square are blown out and blackened.  I am stunned by the force
of the explosion, feeling some echo of it whenever I walk by or sit on
the balcony, overlooking the river below.

Zuhair sets one room aside for women because it has an indoor toilet,
and because the Northern Alliance doesn't want men and women to live
together.  I like the idea.  I feel a bond with Massoud since I flew
into Afghanistan in his helicopter, sitting in his armchair.  But it is
strange to live in the shadow of a legend.  His personal bodyguards,
some nine soldiers from the Panjshir Valley, also live in the house.
Some of them come up to us as we are moving our bags in.

"We are the bodyguard of Massoud," they announce.  They don't yet use
the past tense.

"Well, you didn't do a very good job, did you?"  Jacky Rowland and I
say to each other.  Most of the women in the women's room are from the
BBC.  When the BBC finds its own house, further up the hill, they move
out, leaving only me and two European journalists, one from Holland and
one from Finland.  American network NBC does a deal with Zuhair and
takes over Massoud's house, which becomes the main base for its
operations in northern Afghanistan.

NBC has an all-male crew, but they invite the 'left-over' women to
stay.  In addition, they seem to have inherited Massoud's bodyguards
with the house.  The guards relate better to the NBC boys than to us
chess becomes their primary shared sport.  NBC employs the nephew of
one of the soldiers to clean up for them.  Though he is earning
unimaginable sums of US dollars, he is surly and doesn't do much work.
He thinks it's enough to be the nephew of the clan chief.  And maybe it
is, like with other important clans the world over.  Maybe a young
Kennedy wouldn't make a great waiter, either.  He doesn't last in the
end NBC fires him.

After two weeks, the number of journalists increases dramatically
again.  Journalists are now sleeping on concrete balconies, and even on
gravel.  There is still only one bathroom and one toilet in the Foreign
Ministry compound, and as conditions deteriorate so do people's
tempers.  Fights over access to the shower are becoming more common.
The Foreign Ministry compound is becoming like a journalist refugee
camp and just like with the refugees, new journalists keep pouring
in.

We suggest to Zuhair that he should put Massoud's bodyguards to work
and dig a second toilet to prevent the outbreak of disease.  He agrees,
but nothing is ever done.  There is one other bathroom, of course,
inside Massoud's house, but since NBC are paying to supply it with
water, they don't want everyone else using it.  Particularly since some
of the others who do use it leave it so filthy it is truly disgusting,
even for here.  Life in shared houses is never easy, but trust me, you
don't want to clean up after someone else with diarrhoea.

This leads to so much acrimony that I think that CBS have missed a
trick by not setting an episode of Survivor here.  It would have
everything: war, reality TV, plus you'd be able to evict people from
the compound with a clear conscience.  Many journalists are behaving so
appallingly the audience wouldn't care that they have nowhere else to
sleep, and that once they're out, there's a real chance they'd be
attacked by the wild dogs who roam in packs.

An exasperated Iranian producer warns anyone who wants to go out
walking at night: "Man, you can't go outside, the dogs will eat you."

Despite the daily battle to survive, and to produce good work in such
conditions, our lives are telescoped and becoming simpler.  Strangely,
the dust storm acts like rain, and after it finally passes, the air
feels clearer.

One morning I am sitting on a wooden chair in a patch of gravel near
Massoud's house.  My laptop is plugged into NBC's power supply and I am
writing a story.  The sun is warm on my back, it's not too dusty, and
the boys are playing Jimi Hendrix.  As the sounds of the 1960s float
out over the valley, I'm aware I am happy.  It takes so little to make
me happy now.  Just the absence of dust, a sunny day, and a power
source.

Producer Tom Baer interrupts this reverie.

"You should do your washing," he booms enthusiastically.  You always
know when Tom Baer's around because he starts impromptu addresses in
his deep voice: Men, Men, not since the dark days of Pearl Harbor ..
."

We usually send our laundry out to local families, but Tom has decided
to do his own washing this morning, and persuades me to stop writing,
hop up and do mine, too.

"Look, we've got Persil..."  he says temptingly, showing me where he
has set up three tin buckets, one for washing, one for rinsing and one
with fresh water.  In Dushanbe the washing powder was called Barf, so
Persil is irresistible.

Tom is a legendary NBC figure, a huge bear of a man and a fabulous
raconteur, of the type who thrive in television, one of the reasons I
love this medium.  Tom leaves every war zone in a helicopter, yelling
"NBC is leaving the building."  The stories of where the insanity of
war meets the insanity of TV news gathering are unsurpassable.

And I love how we sit around and tell these stories, on the floor in
one of the bedrooms, passing around a water bottle in which someone has
hidden gin, so that the Northern Alliance won't see it on their
spot-check visits.  They must be getting suspicious as they've started
turning up "Just to see what you're up to' almost every night.  We are
in one of the bedrooms, talking and laughing, when they poke their
heads in, looking disapproving.  It's like being at boarding school.
The laughter stops and everybody looks uncomfortable, as East meets
West, and we wait to face war.  Together.

The Northern Alliance also keeps tabs on how we portray them to their
Western allies by presenting us with a pool of translators to use when
working here.  Not only do they set a very high fee twenty per cent of
which goes to the Foreign Ministry they also have our translators write
a daily report on what we do.  The Foreign Ministry doesn't like it
when we use translators that they don't supply, but soon the sheer
number of journalists makes their attempts at control unmanageable.

However, there are two sets of people the Foreign Ministry can monitor
and that's the BBC and me, because they can hear our reports on the
foreign-language services of Voice of America and the BBC on their
short-wave radios.  The first time Zuhair comes to shout at me about a
mistake in a report I'm shocked well, actually I think he's joking,
he's so stern: "In that report about the burning of the heroin, you
made two mistakes, two very serious mistakes."

"What mistakes did I make?"

"The first is that you referred to the local commander as Qasim Kobir,
and his name is Quazi Kobir."

I apologise and explain that I must have misheard the translator since
I asked him twice if I had the pronunciation right.  But Zuhair is not
mollified.  In fact, he works himself up into a magnificent rage.

"And you also didn't say it was heroin.  That's bad, it's very bad."

The other Foreign Ministry staff stand around Zuhair nodding angrily.

"Yes I did, Zuhair, that was in the lead you weren't listening to the
whole thing, were you?"

He stalks off and I realise that the whole point of this exercise is to
let me know that he is listening.  Another kind of theatre of war.

Rummaging through the NBC food store later, I find two gleaming cooking
pots, hidden under cartons of instant noodles, and tins of pressed
meat, grey, wobbly and vile smelling, imported from Russia, which only
Russians will ever eat.

"You've got pots!"  I say triumphantly to Nate, the cockney sound
recordist.  Nate is already auditioning for "Apocalypse Now, the Afghan
Generation', wearing a bandana and listening to The Doors while he lies
outside working on his tan.

"Wanna cook for me, darling'?"  he calls out as Jim Morrison sings
about being down so goddam long that it looks like up to him.

"Maybe .. ."  I start rummaging in earnest and find olive oil, pasta,
tomato paste and tinned soups that don't look too disgusting.  I am so
starved of vegetables that I fantasise about cooking every fresh
vegetable I can find in the market.  Not that there are many.

It's a slow news day, and I walk up to the bazaar.  The vendors are
sitting on sacks in the dirt, with their vegetables heaped in front of
them.  By this time in the afternoon everything is covered in the dust
of the day.  There are onions, garlic, chillies, potatoes, tomatoes,
some yellowish carrots, and turnips.  Not a great range and all the
vegetables are scrawny and stunted with the strain of trying to grow in
this drought-stricken earth.  It won't be the best stew in the world,
but I won't let anything deter me.

I point to the onions and ask how much they cost.  The veggie man tells
me and I write the amount down in my book just to make sure I have
understood.  I show him, he nods and measures the onions out on a flat
tin plate linked with a piece of twine to another similar plate: a very
rudimentary set of scales.  Do I want one small rock's worth?

I gesture that I want more.  A large rock's worth?

I look, and decide I might need more again.  The crowd of about forty
men and children that has gathered draws its breath.

"She wants more."  The children fight to get in closer and see what I
am buying, almost pushing me over.  'stop!"  I say loudly in Dari,
'chalas!"  The adults pull the children back, laughing
good-naturedly.

"She said "Chalas"," they say to each other.

I turn back to the veggie man.  We agree an amount one large rock and
one small rock's worth and four small children fight to provide me with
a plastic bag, almost knocking me over again.  They make their living
selling bags here in the dirt.  The veggie man takes a bag from one
filthy child, and chases them away.

Then we start all over again for the other vegetables.  After this
lengthy process, watched attentively by the crowd, there comes the
difficult moment of paying the bill.  I ask the total, but I am not
sure I understand what I am told.  Sometimes these stall holders can
write and sometimes they can't, and I don't want to embarrass him by
asking.  I know from previous experience that I won't have to, because
always at this exact moment a man emerges from the crowd with a
calculator and shows me the amount on that.  Sometimes he even knows
some English, enough to say the numbers.

The man materialises, on cue.  I pull out the agreed sum, and as I pay
the crowd murmurs its pleasure that the transaction went so well.  I
walk off carrying my purchases and they all come with me, prepared to
enjoy my next fascinating adventure.  It takes five minutes for them to
disperse when they realise that I am only walking back to the Foreign
Ministry compound.

I carry my bags full of vegetables into Massoud's house and discuss
with the NBC producer whether I can use their two-ringed hot plate to
cook.  He is thrilled and, it turns out, so is everyone else.  From the
second I sit down to chop onions, every person who passes takes a keen
interest in the proceedings.I am almost defeated when I realise that
despite all my planning I hadn't thought of a knife.  There isn't a
usable cooking knife anywhere.  Three men whip out their pocket-knives.
While the knife on a Leatherman is not an ideal kitchen tool, it is so
familiar and pleasant to be peeling and chopping onions that I don't
mind.  But one of the locals hired by NBC to do their 'housework' is
affronted.  Am I trying to show him up?  This is his job.  He indicates
that he will do it.  I say that no, I am happy.  He takes my knife and
begins to chop, I take it back, and so it goes until I can't bear his
baleful looks, and relent.  I find him a pocketknife and let him chop,
too, but he soon forgets that he is only the kitchen hand.  He calls a
translator over to tell me that I don't need so much garlic.

"I only use so much garlic with ten kilos of meat."

"Well, I use this much garlic with two kilos of vegetables.  If you
insist on helping, shut up and chop."

It's wonderful how direct you can be with someone who doesn't
understand English.

The aroma of onions, garlic and chilli frying in olive oil is so
delicious and homely that it brings every man in NBC to my side.  They
stand by me, inhaling.

"I'm so happy you're doing this," says the cameraman.  Nate, the sound
recordist, can't let him get away with that.

"I don't know, I think it could do with some goat."

Zuhair from the Northern Alliance comes by.  Even he seems happy that
I'm cooking.

"You should invite me," he says smiling.  I tell him I will be happy to
bring him a dish, if it turns out to be edible.

Suddenly it becomes everyone's meal, and I have to cook up more pasta
when I realise how many hungry people are here tonight.  Everyone makes
a contribution to this magical thing, a home-cooked meal.  They come to
stand by the pot, to stir and to find more ingredients that should be
added to the sauce.  What began as a whim five hours earlier is now a
communal enterprise, much grander and lovelier than anything I
envisaged.  And tasting quite different by the end, too.  I'd never
have put in salami if one new arrival hadn't brought his secret stash
and begged me to use it.  It's not a bad addition.

Someone sets the table, gaffer-taping white paper onto the wooden
workbench to make a tablecloth.  Someone finds wine.  Someone else
finds candles.  The satellite engineer rigs up his laptop and some
speakers so we have music.  When the table is set on Massoud's balcony,
it is simply beautiful.  The meal is lovely and funny and convivial, my
own dusty Afghan version of Babette's Feast.

As we smile for a photo, "Dateline' reporter Dennis Murphy leans in and
says, "You see, women civilise men."

Perhaps that's part of the problem in Afghanistan, where men isolate
themselves from women.

In the end I don't invite Zuhair because I know there will be alcohol
at the table.  The next day he calls in the NBC producers and carpets
them.  He tells them this is an Islamic state, bound by Islamic rules,
and that if there is ever a repeat of this performance including women,
but especially alcohol the entire NBC contingent will be deported from
Afghanistan and will never be allowed to return.  When I was first
here, Russian crews living in the Foreign Ministry compound were drunk
every night, leaving their empty vodka bottles right next door to
Zuhair's office without any complaints.  Maybe we should have invited
Zuhair after all.  You a woman.  On your own.  In Afghanistan. That's
strange.  I mean it's magical, but strange," says a friend from NBC,
smiling, as he walks with me across the square and past the
slaughterhouse in Khoja Bahauddin.  Freshly skinned sheep and goats are
loaded for delivery onto the backs of small boys.  They heave the warm,
raw carcasses, almost the same size as they are, onto their shoulders,
and run past us into town.

"It's strange because what happens if something bad happens to you?  If
something bad happens to me then NBC will look after me, but if
something happens to you who's going to medivac you out of here?"

Well, the answer is of course that no one is going to medivac me out of
here.  That's part of the freelance equation you get yourself in, you
get yourself out, and you file for more than one organisation to help
pay your way.  Some of them help you to defray expenses, but basically
you are on your own.  Suddenly I find myself carrying thousands of
dollars in cash, when in my ordinary life I don't like to keep more
than fifty dollars in my wallet.  And it's one thing walking around
with ten thousand dollars of your employer's cash on you it is quite
another level of vulnerability when it's your own money.

"It's not magical it's mad," I say frankly, 'but it's not as if I
planned all this.  It's my first big story as a freelance journalist.
I'm used to working within a large news organisation with its equipment
and facilities available to me, and I find being out here on my own
strange, too."

The other aspect that I find unusual is something more fundamental to
me, and that is being a woman.  There are very few of us here, as
reporters or aid workers.  Men outnumber women by a factor of ten to
one, as the blokes have calculated despairingly.  The BBC is one
organisation that has sent a large number of women to Afghanistan.  But
most haven't.  NBC, for example, has sent none and won't send any until
after the fall of Kabul.

And local women are almost invisible, hidden beneath burqas.  Even
places where you usually see women like the market are closed to women
here, by order of the local military commander Quazi Kobir, who has his
own strict interpretation of Islam.  In Afghanistan, women are notable
by their absence.

When I can't bear this strange excision any more and decide I must
interview some of them, it proves by far the most difficult story I do
much harder than covering the war, or the politics.  This absence also
has a strange impact on me as journalist.  Like all Western women here,
I'm followed by a crowd of men wherever I go.  Until they come with me,
none of my male colleagues can believe what it is like for me just to
go shopping.

"It's like travelling with Madonna," says one NBC producer.  Another
colleague, who can't bear the crowds that turn out to watch me buy
apples, grabs my camera and snaps five shots along the assembled men,
for a panoramic view -as if they were a vista or a beauty spot.  At the
time I'm so inured to being followed that I think he's crazy.  Now,
joining up the five photographs, I can't believe it myself.

I am modestly dressed in loose-fitting clothes, with my hair covered by
a scarf, and dark sunglasses obscuring my eyes.  But some of my face is
visible and this is so astonishing that men gather simply to stare, as
if I were a creature from outer space.  In the market, leaning over to
look at a rug, I look over my shoulder and find 100 turbaned men
leaning over with me.  When I decide to buy the rug, and realise that I
don't have enough local money, I go to the moneychangers.I walk across
the square and my troops walk with me.  Someone who sees me from a
distance says it looks as if I've started a small cult.  When I reach
the moneychangers, they haul me inside and bolt the door so I can take
US bills out of my money belt without being watched.  I lean against
the door.  After a calming cup of green tea with the moneychangers, who
are playing chess on the floor and happy to chat, I take the brick of
'up-money' that my dollars have bought and I brave the square again. By
now the old crowd has mostly dispersed, but a new one gathers in the
time it takes me to walk back across to the market, and they gravely
observe the purchase of the rug.  After all that, I hope my sister
likes it.

Perhaps I shouldn't go out on my own, and in the beginning I didn't.
But I have been here for so long now that I can't always be with a male
Afghan chaperon.  First of all they're very expensive, and the downside
to being freelance is that I simply can't afford one fulltime.  But the
other more practical point is it makes no difference.  The men stare
and follow no matter whom you are with and in which language he tells
them to go away.

An English print journalist has the same translator for two months.  He
even picks up some of her expressions.

"I told them, "Don't stare at her, it's not a show, she's not a
monkey," he recounts to her proudly.  For all the difference it
makes.

So although my male colleagues look after me far more than I have ever
experienced in any other environment, I feel isolated.  Whenever I meet
another female reporter I'm thrilled.  And I'm yearning to meet the
local women, even more isolated under their burqas.

"They don't want to meet you," the Northern Alliance officials tell me.
But when I am out walking on my own, the women often stop and hold out
their hands, as if to greet me, making their burqas balloon out around
them.  I sense that they want to make contact with me and feel they can
because I am on my own as they often are.  It's hard to tell exactly,
though, with someone you can't see.

Then the Northern Alliance nominates one woman who is willing to talk
to us Farahnaz Nazir, an Afghan health worker employed by international
aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).  She received a university
education during

II

Soviet times and speaks Russian and English, as well as four local
languages.

She is the only woman in Khoja Bahauddin who chooses not to wear the
burqa, though she does cover her hair with a scarf at all times.

"I was not brought up with it, I don't think it is a part of Islam,"
she says.

Farahnaz has an attractive habit of adjusting her scarf each time it
slips back, to modestly cover her hair while she speaks.  She is a
beautiful woman in her late thirties, and so elegant that it is
difficult to believe that she has spent the day in this hot, dusty
village and the refugee camp where she works.

Her life story is a typically Afghan one of relocation and flight,
moving her family over and over again, often just ahead of Taliban
troops.  She spent five years in Pakistan, returning to Afghanistan in
1999 after the Taliban conquered most of the country.

"Yes, everyone is asking, why would you leave a peaceful life to come
back into Afghanistan at such a time?  But when I studied the impact of
Taliban policies on women, I thought that this was the time to return,
to protest against the violence against women and children, to help
women have some voice, someone who could explain her plight to the
outside world.  Because no one was talking on behalf of women."

Farahnaz's friends in the Afghan community in Pakistan tried to
dissuade her but she was determined.

"My only thought was to help, I didn't think about the personal
cost."

This is the second time that Farahnaz has returned to Afghanistan when
others were fleeing.  The first was in 1989, as the fighting was
becoming more bitter and Russia was about to pull out of Afghanistan.
Farahnaz and her husband were studying in the Ukraine, and had just
graduated.  Many of their Afghan classmates were worried about the
political instability and did not return.

"They said "It will be more wars" and they stayed behind.  But I was
thinking, we are engineers, Afghanistan needs us."

This time, Farahnaz persuaded her husband to return so that she could
campaign for women's rights, by promising that they would stay out of
Kabul and the south of the country where the Taliban were strongest.

Your husband sounds like a remarkable man, I tell her.

"You don't know how remarkable," Farahnaz says.  He travelled ahead
with her two children.  She had to travel alone through
Taliban-controlled areas to reach the north.

"Kabul was like a city of the dead.  There were no people in the
streets.  It was terrible."

Farahnaz found a driver who would take her even though she was a woman
on her own.

"I asked him "Are you Talib?"  and he said "No".  And he said he would
let me travel without a burqa, but he told me when I had to put it on
and when I had to lie down on the back seat because it wasn't safe."

She and her family settled in the northern town of Taloqan, and when it
fell thirteen months ago, they went further north, eventually arriving
in Khoja Bahauddin.  She is an engineer by training, but now works in
the area of female health.

"It's where the greatest challenges are- the statistics in our country
are so bad, so depressing."  Afghan women have high rates of anaemia,
seventeen women in every thousand die in childbirth, and those that
survive giving birth have much shorter life spans than women in the
West.  One in four of their children will die before their fifth
birthday.

Farahnaz says that problems of women's health emanate from their
position in society.

"Our society has a very small mind for women.  They think woman is like
material.  They can sell, they can buy, they can beat, they can hit
them," she says.

Six months ago when she arrived in Khoja Bahauddin, Farahnaz tried to
establish a Women's Association, to teach local women English and
hygiene.  At the start five women came the only women she knew in the
region.

"After four months we have 150 women, because every woman knows the
necessity of freedom for living."

The group received no funding of any kind.

"I teach English in the centre without any money, and chalk and such
things we buy."  She catches my pained expression.

"Yes, it's very basic, I know, for us it's very difficult, nobody cares
for us, but we try to care for ourselves."

Farahnaz counts as one of her group's successes a campaign to reopen
the local girls' school.  They launched their school campaign on 8
March 2001, International Women's Day,when they also put forward a
charter of women's rights.  They condemned the destruction of the
statues of Buddha at Bamian, and ended: "We are courageous women living
in extreme poverty facing a hard winter.  Some of us are without
shelter, adequate clothing, food or medicine.  However, we take this
small opportunity to celebrate International Women's Day and ask for
all humanitarian souls to support the innocent women of this world."

Farahnaz's success has led to trouble.  She has received death threats,
which made her redefine the group's aims.

"Because of that we become careful, we don't want to push women to die,
because of that we become slowly by slowly," she says.

I ask her if she takes those threats seriously.

"Yes, I take those threats seriously because I have children and a
husband, and for them I'm afraid always."

Farahnaz applied to the local authorities in Takhar province for
permission to conduct more formal classes, teaching illiterate local
women to read and write, as well as holding some baby health classes.
Regional commander Quazi Kobir refused.  He said he did not approve
because in his view it was not appropriate or necessary for women to
undertake further studies instead of their duties at home.

"We have an English centre, health education and we want to make a new
school, but it was not permitted.  The local authorities do not allow
me.  I explain that this is health education, it is not other things,
and that it's good for women to know health education and to look after
their babies, but nobody listened to me and they did not allow it."

The Women's Association was limited to infrequent meetings in which the
women could at least discuss their lives and any problems they might be
experiencing.

"We see if we can solve these problems.  This helps them always," says
Farahnaz.  I know some intelligent, educated women who lose hope.  They
can't see any future for Afghan women, but I try to work with them so
that we can have faith in our good future, and make a good future.  We
may have to take some risks, but we can hope for a good future for
Afghan women."

"Society is like a bird," she explains poetically.

"It has two wings.  And a bird cannot fly if one wing is broken."

Farahnaz applied to the Northern Alliance, asking them to step in and
try to influence local commander Quazi Kobir.  Instead, they shut down
the Women's Association.  At their final meeting, Farahnaz read this
statement to Suhail, Ahmed Shah Massoud's second-in-command.

"Should women forget the ideals of independence and freedom?  Should we
leave the determination of women's basic rights to cruel people? Should
we give up leading Afghan women to freedom?  Shall we silence the voice
of Afghan women seeking freedom?  .. . We women know that whenever
fanatics face such questions, they feel shame, and react with hatred. 
They try to turn the page without answering.  But deep down they know
that closing their eyes will not solve problems but amplify them.  You
must know that Afghan women will sacrifice themselves for freedom;
eventually our demands for freedom will get you by the throat."

Suhail just smiled in response and said, "You have become steel but I
can't do anything for you now."

Instead Farahnaz established classes under the umbrella of MSF, as part
of the clinics she runs for women in the refugee camps that ring Khoja
Bahauddin.

"We start from the Koran, and now they're reading very well.  We also
give health education, and in this group no one is sick and nobody has
thin babies.  The babies are all fat and healthy, and the mothers take
care very well."

That must make them happy?

Farahnaz laughs.

"Yes, they all pray for us."

For two hours each morning, in a tent at the refugee camp, women learn
to read Arabic from a copy of the Koran.  They write the intricate Arab
characters in a large, battered book that the teacher keeps, as there
are not enough exercise books to go around.  In the afternoons they
learn health and hygiene, mainly using pictures drawn on a cotton
cloth.  The teacher, a local woman whom Farahnaz has trained, shows the
women how to keep food clean and free of flies and how to diagnose
childhood illnesses.

But these achievements don't influence the regional commander. Farahnaz
is still not permitted to hold similar classes for women in the town
even though it is plain there is desire for such help.  Some women
subvert the commander's edict by going to the refugee camp to take part
in the classes there.

I tell Farahnaz that to do this story properly, I need to meet and
interview some women from the group, at the very least to see and hear
them doing some activities.  She looks dubious.  I ask about a women's
sewing centre that she mentioned could I perhaps go there?

"Cameras will be very threatening.  It could be dangerous," she
replies.

Perhaps just a radio story then?  A mini-disc is so much more
unobtrusive.  Farahnaz will have to ask.  She explains how dangerous it
is for her to meet me.

"So that some mullah will not be asking questions I came here today and
did not invite you to my home.  They could make difficulty for me.

"Why did you have journalists in your home, why did you do interview
without your husband being present?"  It's too dangerous for me to
conduct interview in my home.  Maybe you can feel now how difficult it
is for us, for women talking to journalists and others."

Farahnaz says that she will check with the other women and come back in
twenty-four hours to let me know.

But Farahnaz does not come back again the next day.  A Northern
Alliance official tells me she has reconsidered and any further
interviews with her or any other women would be too dangerous.  I try
to contact Farahnaz myself, which is difficult in a place with no
telephones.  You have to turn up in person, during daylight hours, and
hope the person you want to meet is there.  I leave messages for her at
the MSF office.

In the meantime, I try for a lateral solution.  I plan to try the local
girls' school for some audio for my report.  Unlike in
Taliban-controlled areas of the country, here girls are allowed to
study until the age of fourteen.  That is Northern Alliance policy.
There are three state-funded schools in Khoja Bahauddin, one only ten
minutes' walk from the Foreign Ministry office.  After receiving
permission to visit the school from the Foreign Ministry and the head
teacher, I arrive in the dusty schoolyard as the bell is ringing.

Facilities are simple.  The schoolyard has six mud-brick classrooms
built around it.  Each classroom has a blackboard and chalk, and rush
mats on the floor.  Girls aged from five to fifteen sit on the mats,
doing their lessons.  There are few books, not enough to go around.
The younger girls are boisterous while the older girls are shy and
won't meet my eyes.  All are wearing head scarves  But these girls are
the lucky ones they're receiving an education.  They study the Koran
and Islamic religion, history, mathematics and geography.  Some of the
older children learn English.  It's estimated that no more than fifteen
per cent of women in Afghanistan can read and write.  Since the Taliban
came to power and closed girls' schools in the vast majority of the
country they control, that low level of literacy is falling further.

The girls learn their tables the old-fashioned way, chanting and
singing them out loud.  Layers of sound mingle in the schoolyard, the
chanting of the tables from one classroom, the singing of the alphabet
from another.  I remember vaguely doing a similar call and response in
my maths classes, but it was already out of fashion by the time my
younger sisters went to school.

The girls at this school know they are fortunate, and they have
aspirations.  Fourteen-year-old Nachitsa says she wants to continue her
education.

"I want to study literature and maths," she says, pulling her white
scarf more tightly around her face, but speaking confidently.

"I want the war to come to an end and then I want more rights for women
to study."

Many of the other girls are too shy to speak, hiding their faces in
their scarves.

This is the last year Nachitsa can study at this village school.  To
further her education she will have to be sent away to another city. It
is a rare rural family that would have the commitment to their
daughter's education, or the money, to do this, especially during
wartime.  They would need funds to send her away, and extended family
with whom she could live, who would support her while she studied. They
would also have to turn down offers of marriage, which start pouring in
once a girl turns fourteen, the age of adulthood here.  For some
families the 'bride price' is the only income they have, and they sell
their daughters into marriage at ever-earlier ages, before they have
matured physically.  In the south, desperate families sell young girls
to wealthy foreign men who are in Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban
and al-Qaeda.

The teachers at this school are women, which is an inspiration to the
pupils.  Most of the girls, when asked about possible careers, say
'teacher' or 'doctor' the only two jobs they see women do.  An English
reporter who visits the school says he hopes one of the girls will say
she wants to be an astronaut.  Does he think these girls, sitting in
the dust, learning without books, know what a space station is?

The school's head teacher is male.  He is an old man with a white beard
and kind eyes, and the contentment that comes from years in a job you
love.

"I have been a teacher for thirty-two years.  I am the father of these
children, I want them to study their lessons and go to university."

He gathers the girls at the end of the school day.

"Hurry home, children, don't take too long to get there, don't be too
noisy along the way.  Be kind and helpful to your mothers when you
return to them."

They listen attentively.

Despite all the constraints, he is proud of his pupils.

"Oh, these girls are very clever!"  he says, then sighs as he concedes
most will not be able to continue their education.  Kabul University
has been closed since 1992, the start of the Mujaheddin's fratricidal
infighting.

"This is part of the price we pay for war," he says.

"America should bomb the camps of the terrorists and destroy them
taking care not to harm the civilians, of course.  Then there will be
good grounds for the children to go to university and prepare for their
education."

The other main problem is resources.

"There is not much here," he says, waving his hand at the small school.
Staff salaries are low.  He earns less than US$50 a year.  Life is
hard.

As I prepare to leave, I ask one of the teachers who stays behind to
chat if I could visit her home.  She hangs her head.  In this most
hospitable part of the world, that would not be appropriate.

"They are embarrassed," my translator Mahmoud tells me as we leave.

"Their homes are so poor."

I like this translator.  He does not charge hundreds of dollars like
the others, cognisant of the fact his English is actually quite poor.
He also 'understands' the process.  He lets people talk into the tape
and then translates without talking over them.  He tries to translate
what is said a fundamental part of the job, which many never master.
Some turn to you after an impassioned three-minute answer, full of hand
waving, and foot stamping, and say, "He says "yes"."  Or worse, they
start translating before the person has finished their answer.

"But he hasn't finished, he's still speaking," I remonstrate.

"I know what he's going to say."

Mahmoud is clever and fun to be with.  As we leave the school I see a
donkey delivering water.  I want to record the distinctive sounds of
its hoofs tapping on the gravel, as the water laps in the canisters on
its back.

"You want interview with donkey?"  he asks, indicating he is prepared
to translate.

When I realise he is developing a bit of a crush on me, I dust off my
trusty "Moscow fiance' and press him into action.  A jealous fiance is
a boon for a woman on her own.  As we trudge back from the school,
Mahmoud tells me he will walk all the way across Russia to attend my
marriage party.  He pronounces it 'marr-i-age', which somehow makes it
more touching.  I promise I'll let him know when it is.

My British friends from the Mirror newspaper have a wonderful
translator.  Wahab is an older man, a former engineer who speaks
excellent English.  His English is so good he understands us when we
speak quickly to each other.  Not even our American colleagues can
always do that.  Wahab has a high-pitched laugh, which explodes out of
him often, especially when the boys ask him how to translate their rude
jokes -usually about penis size into Dari.

Wahab is sensitive and intelligent and I like him straight away.  And
since the boys talk about sex a lot they are from the British tabloid
press after all Wahab feels he can ask them about Western sexual
habits.

"In your culture, do boys, you know, do it with donkeys?"

"No, we tend to stick to our own species," one of the hacks shoots
back, trying to disguise his distaste.

Then Wahab reveals that he has done it with a donkey, and the boys lose
all control, unable to disguise their reactions.

"Oh, Wahab!  Not with a donkey .. ."

Tabloid journalists shocked: shock!

He realises he's gone too far, and says quickly, defensively, "I was
fifteen at the time."

Now that Wahab has four wives, he no longer needs donkeys, of course.

When we're away from Wahab it's all we talk about.  I'd never believed
the donkey stories before, even though I can see a lot of sexual energy
is being sublimated into other pursuits in this strange, separated
society, from which women have been virtually removed.

I joke to one of the boys that he can't fool me, I saw him eyeing up
that sweet donkey we passed earlier, the one carrying firewood.

Completely deadpan, he replies in his broad Manchester accent, "What,
you mean Edith?"

That line cheers me up in several dark times.

But I look at donkeys and the small boys who tend them differently from
now on.

We tell Wahab the story of Princess Diana, whom he has never heard of,
and her marriage to Prince Charles.  He follows the sad fairy tale of
the young girl married to an older man who didn't love her, with great
interest.  When we reach the part about Diana's infidelity, Wahab has
one question about Charles.

"Did he kill her?"

No, we say.

"Why not?"

Wahab watches one of the Mirror journalists talking with me, and after
taking it in with his keen, kindly eye, he comes to have a private
word.

"Have you heard of Mut'a?  he asks.

Mut'a is a Sunni Muslim practice that allows a man to take a temporary
wife when he is travelling.  The marriage is legal, and any offspring
of such a marriage are legal.  I am touched that Wahab is so concerned
for me, particularly in this place where there is no opportunity for
privacy, as we all sleep six to a room in sleeping bags.  I pursue his
suggestion.

"Wahab, can a woman do this while she travels take a temporary
husband?"

Wahab laughs.

"No, of course not."  "And would a woman who did this find it easy to
make another marriage after her temporary husband returned home to his
proper wife?"

He laughs again.

"No, of course not."

"So, Wahab, why are you telling me this?  It seems to me that this
Mut'a is designed to suit only the men."

Later, I hear about a very glamorous magazine journalist who is
propositioned by a warlord she is interviewing.  He is bewitched by her
her face, her hair, the opportunity to sit and talk to her everything
about her is alluring.  He asks her to marry him.

She declines.

"But I have 1500 Kalashnikovs."

"Yes, but I am in a long-term relationship, I have a fiance at home."

"And how many Kalashnikovs does he have?"  thunders the warlord.

The male journalists discuss how strange the absence of women is for
them.

English journalist John Sweeney says he misses the smell of a woman.

One of his colleagues retorts, "Yes, but does any woman miss the smell
of John Sweeney?"

This excision of women from society is no easier for local men to bear.
There are only so many donkeys you can chase.  One of the translators,
Safi, explains the rules of courtship to us.  He has to decide if a
woman interests him by looking at the only parts of her he can see: her
hands, her wrists, and her ankles.  If they are attractive and he has
become a careful judge he asks his mother and sisters to go and visit
the girl on his behalf.  This places so much power in the hands of the
women in his family!  Perhaps this is where women exercise authority in
this society.

If they come back and tell him that the girl is attractive, he will
begin a correspondence, writing to the girl.  Love letters?  Not right
away it depends on what kind of response he gets.  Of course, the
invisible girl can see him, so if she likes him maybe she will write a
steamy letter back.

By the time a chaperoned meeting is set up inside the girl's house, he
has to be pretty sure that he wants to get married, otherwise there
could be dishonour to the family, which could have lethal consequences.
Safi has so far not seen the faces of any of the girls he has courted.
Kind of like meeting in an Internet chat room, I find myself joking
lamely, to overcome my sadness for him.  Safi looks at me blankly.

Some men marry never having seen the faces of their brides.  In the
markets I notice that blocks of a white substance that looks like lard
are on sale everywhere.  Local women use it as hand cream.  Hands have
to stand in for a woman's face and hair.  These blocks of fat are face
cream, make-up, shampoo and hair gel all rolled into one.  These blocks
of fat make women beautiful.

"Owl"  A BBC producer is leaving the Foreign Ministry compound when one
of the guards at the gate pinches her bottom.  She is cross.  They
wouldn't dare do it to their own women, so they shouldn't do it to her.
She turns around, marches back into the Foreign Ministry office, and
complains.

This is unacceptable.  You've invited women to work here, and if we are
to be working here we have to be respected, and we have to feel safe.
We especially have to feel safe walking in and out of this compound."

The Northern Alliance officials agree with the feisty BBC producer.
They implement the rough justice the region is famous for.  The guard
is taken and immediately thrashed.  Then he is made to stand all night
with his hands above his head, holding heavy stones.  At this point the
BBC intercedes to plead for mercy.  In this story, everyone is true to
their national stereotypes.

The Northern Alliance officials are incensed.

"Mercy?  Certainly not.

"We must be allowed to deal with this matter in our own way."

In the morning, they sack the guard.

I suppose he was lucky they didn't kill him.

I'm back to square one for my radio story.  In a piece about women, I
still have no women's voices.  I have girls at school and a hasty
interview with Farahnaz, but I need more material.  I go back to the
Northern Alliance to make one more request for their help.  I know
that if they wanted me to do this story, it would happen in a flash.  I
find these Northern Alliance men, whom I actually like, very
frustrating.  They are polite, pleasant and often funny and cheeky.
They are hospitable and helpful.  But as with most men here, there is a
double standard.  I know that while they are cocooning their women and
closing them out of society, they are also not averse to a little
non-Islamic stimulation.  How do I know this?  Because I know the guy
who hooked up their satellite TV.

A man can't have any secrets from his valet or his satellite
engineer.

The Foreign Ministry here has a TV, but when I first arrived it wasn't
connected to any satellite dish.  They could pick up only patchy local
coverage turgid Tajik television with its endless shots of President
Rakhmonov, and scratchy Russian television with its endless Brazilian
soaps ("How Maria cries!"), with a Russian male dubbing all the voices.
Occasionally they also caught some broadcasts from Pakistan, which they
hated because they hate Pakistan.  And that's about it.

The Northern Alliance officials couldn't watch the major cable news
channels and nor could they monitor the output of all the journalists
they had on the ground here, which was clearly not satisfactory.  Then
they twigged that the people who could connect their TVs to the
satellite and probably wouldn't even charge them were right under their
noses.  They asked NBC if Julian, their satellite engineer, could help.
Julian was happy to.  He hopped onto their roof and linked them up, and
then asked them which channels they wanted him to program.  It seems
the Islamic warriors desired some adult entertainment for the long,
lonely nights with only a generator for warmth.  Yep, porn.  The
Northern Alliance's porn channel of choice is Ultra Blue TV, a small
European outfit, which leaves little to the imagination, in distinct
contrast to the ultra blue burqas the Mujaheddin bury their women
under.

The Foreign Ministry were so pleased with Julian's work that they
insisted he connect up their other office, the Defence Ministry.  He
went there, climbed onto the roof, and looked down when he'd finished
to find a forest of guns pointing at him.  No one had informed General
Fahim's personal guards that the satellite was being fixed, and they
thought Julian was just another Western assassin.  Once this little
misunderstanding was cleared up, a slightly shaken Julian hopped down
and programed in some channels for the Defence Ministry, including of
course Ultra Blue.

A room full of mullahs, watching as he did this, gasped and covered
their faces.  Julian realised he'd made a mistake, blocked the porn
channel and beat a hasty retreat.  As he was leaving, the Defence
Ministry boys took him aside, and just when he thought he was in real
trouble, they asked him for the code for unblocking Ultra Blue.

That's the trouble with modern life.  You can't even rely on your
religious fundamentalists for consistency.

As is often the way with journalism, the best things happen by
chance.

I unlock my piece on women accidentally while visiting the local office
of ACTED, a French aid agency.  ACTED has stayed in Afghanistan since
September 11, unlike other major aid agencies and the United Nations,
who evacuated their staff following the attacks in the US.  The
Director of ACTED here in Khoja Bahauddin, Sebastian Miller, says he
pulled his staff out for a couple of days, to the town of Faizabad.

"We did that just to see if there would be riots up here in the north,
and then it became apparent that it was all unchanged, so we came
back."  ACTED has been here ever since and will remain throughout the
air strikes.

"Would you like to see our women's centre?"  he asks.  I almost fall
off my chair.

He makes a call and Manesha walks into my life.  Manesha is the
director of the ACTED women's sewing centre the only women's centre in
the region, and the only place in town where women are allowed to work
outside the home.  An attractive, lively woman in her thirties with an
infectious laugh, Manesha trained as an economist during Soviet times
and speaks Russian, so she is thrilled to find that I understand
Russian too, and bypassing the ACTED translator she gabbles away to
me.

"Yes, of course you must come to see us.  Come now."

When I explain that I don't have a translator with me she insists that
I don't need one.

"No, you don't have to wait for a translator since we have a common
language."  I wince.  I'm not confident enough of my Russian to
conduct interviews.  I am at that stage in learning a language where I
understand an enormous amount, but can barely speak.  I can see though
that Manesha will be more comfortable talking to me directly than
through a male translator, and it will therefore be a different
dynamic.  I have to do it.

We set out and Manesha disappears under her burqa.  I feel as if I'm
accompanying a blue ghost.  The centre is in a compound five minutes
away, across some pitted ground stinking of human excrement, just off
the main square.  Once we enter, Manesha shakes off her covering and
walks into a crowded, noisy room where thirty women are sitting on the
floor around a low table, working on old Singer sewing machines.  The
clack-clack of the ancient machines is loud and comforting.  The women
are wearing head scarves but their faces are visible and their hands
move fast.  Almost all are widows, their husbands killed by the Taliban
during the past five years.

They are working under an ACTED-funded 'work for food' program,
receiving a kilo of wheat for every garment sewn.  There is a long-term
benefit, too, of teaching the women skills they can use when peace
returns.  The wall is festooned with dresses and children's clothes, as
if this were a showroom.

"We'll make you something," says Manesha's deputy, Aruzu, as she feels
my locally made cotton shirt.

"This is a man's shirt and not very good," she says sniffily.

"We'll sew you one for free.  Better than this."

I take out my mini-disc.  Having had the sensitivities of women here
drummed into me so often, I wonder whether they will be reluctant to
talk.  It turns out to be the opposite, a deluge of opinion.  The women
interrupt each other to speak, barely waiting till I get my microphone
to them before launching into their stories.  They speak in Dari, and
Manesha translates for me into Russian.

"My husband was killed by the Taliban, they came and destroyed our
homes and killed our men.  Now I am left with eight children.  I must
support them all."

"The Taliban killed my husband.  They beat him with cables for no
reason, and he died in front of me.  One month later I had my last
child, my tenth child.  Now life is very difficult for me.  We want to
return to live and work in our own homes, we do not like it here."

I came here when the Taliban conquered Taloqan.  My husband was already
dead, killed fighting the Taliban.  Now we live in tents and we have no
food.  It is a difficult life.  Can you help me?"

"If the Americans come here, we will have peace and a better life, and
we will have schools and our children will learn, and it will be better
for them."

Then they all start pointing at one woman, and my Russian runs out for
a moment while they are trying to explain her plight.  Manesha says the
word in Russian, but I don't know it.  Then the woman pulls up her
skirt to show me that she has lost a leg.

"This was caused during a Taliban bombing."

She has a prosthetic, but it is still a shock and I find myself
gulping.

I ask them about the burqa.  This is a Northern Alliance village, why
do they wear it?  Some say tradition, some say security in a war zone,
anonymity is a help.  Some don't like it and, in fact, in the refugee
camps most women don't wear them simply because it is not practical to
do so.  It is difficult to put one on every time you leave a tent. This
is one of the complaints about life in the camps, that men can see the
faces of other men's wives.

Manesha wants to have her say about the burqa, too.

"It is hot, it is claustrophobic, and it is inconvenient.  It is also
dangerous, because you can't see out of it almost at all.  I don't like
it."

Manesha's fourteen-year-old daughter, Sima, has been beside her
throughout the interview.  She has shining eyes and Manesha hugs her
close, telling me proudly that she is a very good student.  This year
Sima officially becomes an adult and must wear the full veil.  She has
already had several offers of marriage from local families, but she is
not yet resigned to the loss of her childhood freedom.  Manesha wants
her daughter to wait.  She hopes that she, too, can have a university
education.  But that all depends on what happens next.  Women can only
be educated again if the Taliban are defeated.

I ask them about the markets do they mind not being able to choose
their own purchases?  I joke that you can never II trust men to go
shopping.  They agree vehemently.

"Yes, that's right, you can't.  Men always bring back the wrong
things."  It seems this is a universal truth.

Perhaps that explains why in defiance of the ban on women in the
markets, you will see some, late on a Saturday afternoon as the bazaar
is winding down, at the stalls selling materials.  Food is one thing,
but you definitely can't trust men to buy your clothes.

Manesha invites me to her home.  She wants me to meet her husband,
Nuraddin, and the rest of her brood of seven children.  Manesha and
Nuraddin are refugees, but they are not living in any of the camps here
as both these enterprising university graduates have found jobs.  They
live in two mud-brick rooms, up narrow stairs, carved into the exterior
wall of a house they share with three other families.  The cooking fire
downstairs is communal.  In their rooms there is no furniture at all.
They sit around the walls on mats by day, sleeping on the same mats at
night.

But Manesha has brought her photographs with her to this new bare
existence as a refugee.  The fading albums contain evidence of another
life.  During Soviet times, Manesha studied economics in Moldova, near
Poland.  Her class photograph, in the stern Russian style, has small
photos of every face separately, students at the bottom, the Professor
and teachers at the top.  '1983, economics faculty' it says in Cyrillic
script.  There are also more casual photos of Manesha with her friends.
They are wearing tight jeans and T-shirts, their hair is out, there's
not a headscarf in sight.

That is Tataiana," says Manesha pointing to a blonde girl.

"I loved her.  She was my best friend.  I have lost contact with her
since, since .. ."  Manesha sighs, her ebullience crushed for a
moment.

"I miss her."

It seems the untold story of Afghanistan is that the best time here was
during the Soviet era for women certainly, and perhaps for men, too.
There was education, travel, and more opportunities.  Manesha lived in
Moldova, Farahnaz in the Ukraine, the pharmacist I met in the market
had studied in Czechoslovakia.  They had experienced other peoples and
cultures.  Today most people only leave Afghanistan for a refugee camp
on the country's borders.

We are having tea, served with sweets, as we look through the
photographs.  Manesha's children sit around us, all well behaved,
including the youngest who is eighteen months old.  Manesha says she
does not want more children, but it's not entirely possible to predict
as there is no contraception available.

Manesha's deputy at the sewing centre, Aruzu, drops by with her
daughter.  We sit in a circle on the floor and Aruzu sings bittersweet
songs of love lost and betrayed.  The girls join in.  Then Manesha
sings a Russian love song, investing all her longing for her former
life into this sad Russian ballad.  I record the haunting moment.
Aruzu's eight-year-old daughter recites a poem about her life.

There is a house, but it is not my house.  There are people, but they
are not my people.  There is weather, but it is not my country's
weather.  There are things, but they do not belong to me.  I am a
refugee.

Entertainment is simpler here stories and song, nothing more, yet none
of the children complain they are bored and have nothing to do.

I ask Manesha about her marriage.  After sixteen years she is very
happy.  Her family was liberal enough to allow her to marry the man of
her choice, an Afghan student studying with her in Moldova.

"He was so handsome I fell in love with him the moment I met him," she
says.

"And do you know, I feel the same way about him now that I did the
first time I saw him all those years ago."  Manesha smiles at me, her
eyes alight.  I'm the happiest woman in Afghanistan."

Darkness is closing in, there's no electricity, and in this context
that cheesy phrase stops me in my tracks she's 'the happiest girl in
the whole USA', only she's living in a makeshift house, without light
or heat or running water or sanitation.

"Would he take a second wife?"  I ask.

"No," says Manesha emphatically.

"I wouldn't let him.  His parents pressured him to, but he resisted, so
they gave up.  He couldn't do it, he feels too much for me.  It's
love."  She is smiling as she repeats this in Russian, Eta lubov,
lubov.  She breaks into her girlish laugh and I have tears in my
eyes.

Saint Paul was right when he said "There is Faith, Hope and Love, and
the greatest of these is Love."

Manesha confirms that the simple truths about women's lives are
constant the world over.  A good marriage is a good marriage, wherever
you are.  If you are married to someone who doesn't value you or worse,
beats you black and blue, as is sanctioned in Afghanistan you are
miserable and powerless.  If you find a man who loves you and is kind
to you, you're happy and powerful.  Even here.

When Manesha introduces me to Her husband, Nuraddin, I like him
immediately.  His eyes crease easily into lovely laughter lines, and he
is a handsome, strong, reassuring man.  I can see why she is happy. She
is lucky, too, that her parents were willing to let her follow her
heart.  That is still extremely rare here.

Nuraddin walks me back to EBU in the dark.  The compound is five
minutes away, through a maze of mud walls, and although it is not late,
it is pitch black here by 6 p.m. and I could never find the way on my
own.  After I've filed to Berlin, I am chatting to EBU manager Joris
when we hear music floating out over the mud-brick walls.  It is a rare
sound so we follow it, and it leads us to an open door.  We look in to
see wild leaping and dancing, lit by shining lights that appear at
first to be TV cameras, but turn out to be paraffin lamps, held high
and flat, like torches, by some of the revellers.

Fifty men surround two singers and three drummers.  They play wide,
shallow drums, animal skins stretched tight across a wooden hemisphere.
There is a space in the centre of the group where two men dance,
whirling and banging sticks in time to the music as they leap.  They
provide the third component of the sound.  The beat is fast and the
tune hypnotic.  This dark, wild festivity turns out to be a wedding
party, though only men are celebrating, of course.

We walk into the light and I record the sound on my mini-disc.  The
excitement in the air is magnified by the feelings directed to the only
woman present, and with her face visible me.  Other female journalists
here agree that generally for Afghan men we are not really women, we
are more like Martians.  But on some elemental level, they know we are
women, and tonight that knowledge is floating out towards me on the
waves of wild music.

Drinking all this in, Joris turns and says with the force of a
prediction, "Tonight, you will be married, too."

"Right, payechali time to leave," I say in Russian.  I switch off my
mini-disc, and Joris and I beat a hasty retreat.  I finally track down
Farahnaz Nazir at the Medecins Sans Frontieres office.  She is happy to
see me, and smiles warmly.

"Yes, yes, I will do an interview with you," she says.

She explains that Northern Alliance officials did ask her to stop
talking to journalists, but so many reporters want to interview her
that she can't put them all off.

"I told the Northern Alliance that I would be talking.  Why shouldn't
I?"  She clasps my hand.

We agree that I should come to see her in the mother and baby clinic at
the refugee camp the following day.

It's hot and oppressive as I go down the hill to visit Farahnaz at the
camp.  Another dust storm is on its way.  The heavy air blows gusts of
grit and dust, and the sky is turning that strange yellow colour I
recognise from before.  I hope it won't be as severe as the last one.
The MSF clinic is in a large tent at the bottom of the hill.  Its sides
are billowing out in the wind, like a sailing boat in a stormy sea,
only we're in the desert.

This morning underweight children are being treated.  Hot, unhappy
babies are being weighed and deposited squealing in a sling attached to
a hook, as if they were sides of lamb.  Mothers sit on the floor
feeding their thin babies high-protein biscuits, diluted with clean
water.  MSF supplies both free of charge.  Flies crawl all over the
babies and the bowls of food.  Their weak cries are drowned out by the
sound of the tent flapping.

Farahnaz is shimmering.  She looks fresh, neat and beautiful in the
overpowering heat.  I tell her so.

"No.  This is nothing.  It climbed to fifty degrees here this
summer."

Other mothers whose babies no longer need treatment come by the clinic
just to say hello, and to show Farahnaz their happy, healthy
children.

"You know I am not doing my job for my salary, I am doing it for these
children.  They need help and it's necessary to take care," says
Farahnaz.

"I am also like a mother, the people at the camp call me mother,
younger than me and older, and a mother must take care of her children.
I take care of everyone."  Many baby girls in this camp are named after
Farahnaz.

The thinnest baby I've ever seen is being carried in the arms of a
woman dressed in black, with black diamond-shaped stencils on her
cheeks.  She is a nomad, a kuchi.  Farahnaz says she is prepared to
help everyone, it doesn't matter that this woman is not a refugee, she
should also have the opportunity to feed her baby properly and to learn
how to look after him so that he won't die simply from diarrhoea.  The
child looks like a skeleton, his eyes sunken, his cheekbones wide and
protruding.  When his mother unwraps his emaciated body, I can't bear
to look.

Instead, I find myself watching a small boy called Juma.  Friday.  Baby
Friday.  He is small and sweet, and reminds me of my nephew at the same
age.  He is creamy-skinned, with beautiful dark eyes and curling
lashes.  Though he is almost a year old, he is the size of a
three-month-old baby.  His legs are spindly, long, but squashed up like
a grasshopper's.  If he held them out straight, he would actually be
taller than a three-month-old, but he is not strong enough to stand.
Juma's father died before he was born, and his mother remarried.  She
has fled to a refugee camp in Iran, leaving Juma with family here.  But
he is a burden to them and they do not look after him properly.  He
breaks my heart.

"I stand like a beggar woman, begging them to love him," says
Farahnaz.

Juma's chart shows that without love, food is not enough.  He weighed
less than four kilograms when he was admitted, and he began to improve
on the high-protein biscuit diet.  But then his weight dipped
dangerously again, until he was thinner than when he was first being
treated.

"His family do not always feed him, even though we give them the
biscuits," says Farahnaz.

I watch the sixteen-year-old girl feeding Juma.  She is a cousin of his
absent mother's.  It is apparent that despite all Farahnaz's begging,
she does not love him.  She handles Juma roughly and he is listless in
her arms.  His eyes light up when he sees Farahnaz and he smiles but
only at her.

"I want to change his name to Azim, it means Great Achievement," says
Farahnaz.

"Maybe it will mean a change in his fortunes.

"Friday" is a stupid name."

I sit there concocting wild plans to adopt Juma and take him back to
Moscow where at least I will care for him.  It can't be worse than life
in this sweltering fly-infested refugee camp where disease is rife and
his life expectancy is low.

Would I really be prepared to adopt him?  I surprise myself with the
strength of my feelings.  Perhaps it's because I so miss my nephew.  I
would take Juma if I could, just to give him a better chance at life,
but the practical barriers are enormous.  I discuss it with Farahnaz,
and I realise the bureaucracy would defeat me.  The bribes I would have
to pay to three sets of corrupt officials here, in Tajikistan, and in
Russia would bankrupt me, and there would be no guarantee of success.

My heart aches when Juma's teenage cousin wraps his cotton diaper
around him, pulls him roughly onto her hip, and disappears back into
the camp.

I wonder if he will still be alive when I come back next time.

When I fall asleep, his little face is the last thing I see.

Ahmed is working at the front of his metal workshop in one of the
tumbledown shacks in the market.  He is short and dark and looks much
older than his thirty-two years.  He has a gruff manner and is not
wearing a turban.  Ahmed can make you a chair from an old ammunition
case or fashion you a drum for water, a wood-burning stove, or pitchers
and buckets and other kitchen utensils, all from tin.  All the
journalists troop off to Ahmed for household necessities.  His business
is booming and as a result he can afford to take a new wife his
fourth.

Bill from Canadian broadcaster CBC wants to interview him about this
and his fifteen children.  I enjoy working with Bill so I go along,
too.  Ahmed stops work to answer Bill's questions, and a crowd quickly
gathers, laughing at his answers to such personal questions.

"Yes, I earn more than twenty dollars a week quite enough to support a
new wife.  I am a wealthy man," says Ahmed leaning on his lathe.

"No, my three wives don't fight, in fact my first wife helped me choose
the second one.  And if they do disagree, well, I can sort them out.  I
am the man of the house after all."  There is ill-concealed menace in
the jovial answer.

"Yes, fifteen children is a lot, it's true, but I think I know all
their names.  I am raising an anti-Taliban army all by myself."  He
laughs.

"I will try to remember the names of any new children, too."

He tells us he hasn't selected a new wife yet, but has already built
her a room, which is almost complete, so all he has to do now is find
the right one.

"You might think about my colleague," Bill suggests, pointing at me, to
a big laugh from the crowd.

"She's quite sweet once you get to know her."

Ahmed's reply gets a bigger laugh, but our translator, Dr.  Aini, is
suddenly shy, and won't tell us what Ahmed said.  Later, he tells Bill
that Ahmed said if he could have one 'like her' he would be married
already.

"You see, he's a charmer that's how he does it," Bill says.

Of course, charm has nothing to do with how Ahmed does it.  He does it
because the society allows him to, if he can afford it, and it doesn't
matter what the women think or feel about it.  Islam allows a man to
take up to four wives for specific reasons, such as if the first wife
is sick or cannot conceive.  But over time that has come to mean a man
takes four wives if he can support them, no matter how good the health
of his previous wives.  Old men give away teenage girls from their
brood of children, and with the marriage price they garner they marry
other teenage girls themselves.  In this way limited capital is
exchanged from one hand to another, to shift girls from one house to
another.  All to the benefit of the men, first and foremost.  Any
benefit that may flow to the girls is coincidental.  The other bleak
truth is that we journalists are funding a wave of marriages here.  All
the men who work for us drivers, translators, cooks are earning so much
that they can afford new young wives.  And they are invariably young
usually no more than fifteen years old, even if the men are fifty.

At the sewing centre, I ask Manesha if she thinks the later wives are
ever happy.

"I think their lives are not good, they are over.  Because if the man
is a good man he loves his first wife and the children of his first
wife the most, and not the later wives and children.  There are some
good men who also love their second and third wives, but this is rare.
And the women fight, they try to avoid each other, there is always war
in the house."  She sighs.

"This is the difficulty of life here with us, power resides with the
man.  The women have no say."

Seventy years after a reforming Afghan monarch aimed to impose monogamy
on Afghan men, for most the perception of family remains the harem. Men
take new wives even in the refugee camps.

At my second visit to the sewing centre, the woman who helps Manesha
run it reveals her greatest sorrow.  We are having lunch when Aruzu
tells me about her marriage.  Her husband is a highly respected local
surgeon and he has recently taken a second wife.  Aruzu says it is the
hardest thing that has happened to her.  Harder than being a refugee
and leaving her home in Taloqan for Khoja Bahauddin, which she freely
describes as 'horrible'.  It tears out her heart.

"I am tired of this, and am always saying to him, "Why did you do this?
Why is she here?  I don't want this."  He did not want it either, it
was arranged by his family, but he agreed to it and now my life has
been spoilt."  Time has not reconciled Aruzu to the experience.

"If I had the means, I would leave my husband and take my children away
from here, and it would be better for me and for them never to see this
life again."

Her friends Farahnaz and Manesha remind her to hold herself together
for the sake of her children.

"We take care of Aruzu, and sometimes we force her to be quiet, for her
children's sake," says Farahnaz.

"Because if a second mother comes into the home and the first mother
goes away, no one will take care of these children.  Aruzu's children
are so cute, they are wonderful children and they need to be loved."

Aruzu has two children, a girl and a boy, and it is true they are
remarkable.  I particularly like her ten-year-old son, Kombis, who has
adopted me.  He is a great kid, helpful, clever and cheeky.  Whenever I
am in the markets he appears as if by magic to help me communicate with
the stall holders though he speaks no English.  It is uncanny how he
does it, and they all respect me more because I have a 'man' to
intercede for me, even though that man is ten years old.

"Ah, she's with the doctor's son," they say to each other.

So when Aruzu invites me to her home for dinner, I'm happy to accept
for many reasons.  I like her children, she is reputed to be a
fantastic cook 'the best cook in Khoja Bahauddin' and I want to see the
second wife.  Aruzu takes me there after work at the sewing centre. The
mud-brick house is large and they don't share it with any other
families.  We sit on mattresses on the floor, on a new silk rug that
has just been smuggled out of Mazar-i-Sharif, the centre of
Afghanistan's rug production.  It has to be smuggled out because Mazar
is currently in Taliban hands.  The softness of the rug and the depth
and beauty of its colours make the whole evening worthwhile, for this
sensual experience alone.  Like so many things in Afghanistan it's for
sale, but the price is steep: US$3000.  It's probably worth more than
ten times that, but no one I know here has enough cash to buy it.  Some
of us can barely afford to pay our translators.

"Doctor', as Aruzu calls her husband, is a warm man in his forties who
speaks some English.  He studied in Kabul and has been a surgeon for
twelve years.  His mother lives with them, and she is there when I
visit, as are Kombis and his eight-year-old sister, all sitting on
mattresses around the wall.  And there, like a spider in the web, is a
beautiful girl, no more than twenty years old, who looks like their
teenage daughter.  Aruzu is a careworn woman in her late thirties.  She
wears a plain, drab dress and her hair is hidden under a scarf.  The
beautiful girl's hair is uncovered and she is wearing a stunning silk
outfit with a patterned silver motif, repeated at her wrists and ankles
(you notice ankles here where everyone sits on the floor).  I'm
surprised to see that she is wearing earrings and bangles, and is also
the first woman I have seen in northern Afghanistan wearing make-up,
carefully applied.

As if she really were the teenage daughter, instead of the new wife,
the beautiful girl doesn't help prepare the dinner.  Aruzu does that
alone, working in the dark because we came home as the sun was setting,
and of course there is no electricity.  She won't allow me to help.  On
a waxed tablecloth placed on the sumptuous carpet, Aruzu serves a
series of dishes, including a salad with bite, made with tomato,
coriander, onions and chilli, and the local specialty called mantua
kind of ravioli with tomato sauce, topped with goat's milk yoghurt.
Both are simply delicious.  She tells me that out of consideration for
me she has not prepared the regional staple of rice cooked in goat's
fat.  She has watched me eating lunch at the sewing centre and could
tell I didn't like it.  This is a big sacrifice, since every meal in
Afghanistan is served with rice.

There are more meat dishes, including a boiled sheep's head, which I am
forced to decline.  The family is a little disappointed, as it is
traditional for the guest to partake of it before the other diners can
eat.  But I explain that I don't eat much meat, and they are soon all
enjoying this local delicacy.  For dessert there are local grapes,
green and very sweet.  This is without doubt the best meal I have had
in Afghanistan.  Aruzu beams with pleasure when I tell her this.  All
the family immediately beg me to stay the night or to promise to return
for another meal.

But there is such tension around that dinner table well, the tablecloth
on the floor that I feel uncomfortable.  You get good at recognising
repressed sexual feelings here.  It is apparent that the beautiful girl
obviously wants to touch her husband, but feels she cannot, so she
flirts instead with his ten-year-old son.  She holds the boy and hugs
and pummels him.  She is like his older sister, and yet not.  Aruzu is
patently hurt.  And although our Doctor should be happy, reaping the
rewards of a new young wife, he looks uncomfortable.  No, he's
definitely not a happy man.

When Aruzu is clearing up, which I am also not permitted to help with,
I ask the Doctor why he's taken a second wife.  He looks embarrassed
and lies to me.  In front of his non English speaking second wife he
says, "But I haven't.  I have only one wife."

If either woman had understood him, he'd have been lynched.  I think I
might have helped.

The next day I ask Farahnaz, who is a friend of Aruzu's, why the Doctor
denied his second wife.  She says it was because he was ashamed.  He
sent Aruzu and the children away to his father's house for safety's
sake during a period of bombing.  While they were there he took up with
this young girl from a poor family who helped clean the house.  When
Aruzu returned it was already too late to prevent the marriage.

"He is not a peasant or an uneducated man who does not know any better.
He knows it hurts her and he still did it.  Because of that, he is
hiding from you, from the Western journalist."

Farahnaz says she does not think that she would stay with her husband
if he took a second wife.

"It is very hurtful for the woman.  I couldn't live with a second
woman, when I know she is not better than me."  But Farahnaz explains
it is harder here, because if you leave your husband you will usually
lose your children.

"All people think she is a bad woman, she is not living with her
husband, everyone is disappointed in this woman.  Because of that women
are staying with a man who takes second, third and fourth wives.  And
also here we worry about our children, because if the mother goes, they
will not be safe, there is no one to take care of them.  Maybe in the
West, the government will take care of the baby, but here there is no
chance for that."

Having said all this, Farahnaz admits she would leave her marriage if
her husband took a second wife.  Her children are older.  Her
seventeen-year-old son works with her at Medecins Sans Frontieres, she
is a hard worker, and they would get by somehow.  Then her face softens
because she loves her husband and she doesn't think he would take
another wife.

"We have a partnership.  We make decisions together, we discuss
everything together, and there is consultation.  No one gives orders.
We have studied or worked together since we first met at university
more than twenty years ago.  When I was a student he was in the year
above me, and he took a year off and looked after our newborn baby so
that I could study, and then we were together always after that.  We
even graduated together on the same day.  And since then, for eighteen
years we have lived and worked together, often in the same office!"

Farahnaz says that her husband helps her with everything with the
Women's Association and with the housework, and of course here he has
to do all the shopping because of local rules forbidding women to go to
the bazaar.

"I am successful because of my husband."  Farahnaz repeats a sentiment
that successful women all around the world have told me, reversing the
old saying that behind every great man there's a woman.  Behind every
great woman there's a man who's prepared to share the child care.  But
Farahnaz's relationship is about to be tested, due to an interview that
she does.  With me.

I am by no means the only journalist to interview Farahnaz Nazir.  At
this time when it feels like half the world's press has converged on
Khoja Bahauddin, waiting for the US air strikes to begin, an interview
with Farahnaz about women's issues is standard.  Sometimes she's quite
forthright, openly criticising the local administration for its
treatment of women, although this is personally dangerous for her.

"We too much miss Ahmed Shah Massoud, he cared about the women.  These
men, these leaders, I do not know if they care about the women."

With each interview she grows bolder, holding a press conference
petitioning American President George W. Bush and UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan to take a stand about the plight of women in Afghanistan,
including in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance.

These stories go out all over the world, but most are unseen and
unheard by the local administration.  The story I do with Farahnaz is
much more low key, a general look at the position of women in northern
Afghanistan, starting with the girls' school and including an interview
with Farahnaz about the fate of her women's group.  But it is broadcast
on Voice of America's Persian service and so is heard locally.  The
story includes reference to how local military commander Quazi Kobir
refused to permit Farahnaz to hold baby hygiene classes for women.
Although this is true, when Quazi Kobir hears it he doesn't like it.
And in Khoja Bahauddin, his word is law.  If Quazi Kobir doesn't like
something, he can exact whatever revenge he likes.  He threatens to
have Farahnaz killed.  She is of course terrified, and I am devastated
that she should be in this position due to a broadcast of mine.  I know
this is a risk which activists take in a society without a rule of law,
and Farahnaz knows this, too, because we've discussed it.  In an
interview for CBS TV, Farahnaz said she knew her outspoken stand could
have terrible implications for her personally, but sometimes you just
had to do what was right.  Nevertheless, I am appalled that her life
has been threatened, a threat she takes seriously.

Her husband is devastated, and so is Farahnaz.  When we meet she is
nervous, rattled, and unsure of herself.  I half fear that she will
blame me, but she hugs me close to let me know she understands it is
not my fault.  When we sit down at CBS to discuss what steps the family
should take next, she falls apart.  She is very different from the
woman who was everyone's 'mother' at the refugee camp.

She tells me that Quazi Kobir sent his son-in-law to her home to tell
her that he is so angry that he could easily kill her, but that he
might become less angry if she did a second interview for an
international broadcaster he listened to the BBC Persian service or the
VOA Persian service retracting everything she had said about him.

The CBS journalists and I advise her not to do any more interviews with
anyone at the moment, but just to lie low.  Sometimes even murderous
rages can blow over when the local leader is distracted by his next PR
disaster.

"He will not forget," Farahnaz says.

CBS comes to her aid, devoting time and resources to help rescue
Farahnaz and her family, organising to take them on the next CBS convoy
back to Tajikistan.

"Done it before once in Iraq," veteran CBS producer Larry Doyle says
gruffly.

"You hope you won't have to, and you hope it'll work if you do have to.
Sometimes you bite the bear and sometimes the bear bites you."  The
plan is that once Farahnaz reaches Dushanbe she should apply for
refugee status to a Western government.  But Farahnaz is uneasy about
leaving.

"Is this the time to leave Afghanistan?  This is when Afghanistan needs
me the most," she says, sitting in the cramped CBS office in the house
they share with rival network ABC.  News reports are being compiled all
around us.

"And if we go to Tajikistan, how long would we be stuck there?"
continues Farahnaz.

"There is a big Afghan community there, you know.  He could have me
killed there, too.  I don't think I would feel safe, and my husband
does not want to go."

It seems to me that while Quazi Kobir's reach might extend to
Tajikistan, as Farahnaz fears, there is no doubt he has power here.  I
hold her hand and tell her, "If you are frightened, you should go."

Simple bureaucratic tasks become obstacles though.  Farahnaz is
surprised when we tell her each member of her family will need travel
documents.

"But we only have one passport.  It belongs to my husband."

We explain that in the "West, each of them will require a passport, and
they should acquire them before they leave Afghanistan.  This news
seems to overwhelm her.

"Does Quazi Kobir issue passports?"  she asks.

I don't know, but say I don't think so surely that would be a function
of the Foreign Ministry?  I tell her that regardless of who issues
passports she will need a photograph first.

"We have some in an album at home," she says.

I explain to her that she will need proper passport photos, not family
snaps cut out of an album.  Having watched another man obtain a
passport, I know there's a photographer in the market, and with the
right photo even illegal documents can be paid for and obtained.

Farahnaz looks dismayed.

"But I'm a woman, I can't go to the market."

She pauses, on the verge of tears and then says bitterly, with a flash
of her former self, "This is a stupid country."

Farahnaz seems like a woman in shock, veering between fear and the
desire to have things 'as they were before'.  After she leaves, I
discuss the situation with the CBS crew.  They will continue with their
massive effort to help her, including having their Dushanbe producer
try to obtain passports for the family there a complicated process
since there is no postal service.

The forms have to be brought in by a person coming into Afghanistan
overland from Dushanbe, filled in by Farahnaz here and then returned
with photos and cash by another person travelling out to Dushanbe.  We
have begun this process, but Farahnaz has to be committed to following
it through.

I hope that we can save Farahnaz and her family1 hope she will let us.
I know that we will give it our best shot.  But nothing is predictable
in this fierce land, and it adds to my burden of guilt and worry.  The
next day we go to the front line to monitor the preparations for war.
The drive to the front line takes almost two hours, even though it is
little more than ten kilometres distance.  A gravel path leading from
Khoja Bahauddin out into the desert is soon pitted with craters, gouged
into the earth by other vehicles.  It's difficult driving if you're at
the wheel, and little better if you're the passenger being bounced
around.  At some spots there are men dressed in rags, trying to fill
holes and craters in the roads with gravel.  A job that a bulldozer
would do in a few hours takes these men who have nothing more than
shovels and hoes weeks.  I begin to wonder if we'll still be here when
they finish this stretch.

A beggar woman is always waiting at the same spot in the road, running
up and almost throwing herself in front of the cars.  Most drivers stop
to give her money, or to be more accurate, slow down to fling money at
her.  I wonder why she is always there, and if it is lucrative, why no
one else muscles in on this spot.  Her blue burqa is torn and filthy,
and when she lifts it back to receive money from drivers at their
windows, she has a vacant, damaged gaze.  I fantasise that the drivers
support her because they fear that otherwise she will put a curse on
them.  Maybe they just want to see a woman's face.

As we draw nearer to the front line, there are checkpoints manned by
sixteen-year-olds whose Kalashnikovs are almost as big as they are.  I
am edgy with fear.  In volatile situations, checkpoints are dangerous
in themselves in the South African townships, in the Middle East or
here, there are no guarantees.  Negotiating checkpoints is just that a
negotiation.  This is the first time we are going to the front line
here, and I am nervous.  After talking to our translator, and looking
at a permission that they plainly cannot read, the boys smile, drop
their rope and let us through.

We drive up to Ai Khanoum hill.  Its summit is honeycombed with
trenches and bunkers.  Russian T-55 tanks are covered with straw
matting, their cannons pointing towards the mountains opposite where
the Taliban are equally burrowed in.

There is not much action.  Standing on top of the escarpment, which it
seems is safe to do on this sleepy front line, you see an alluvial
plain crisscrossed with streams.  Between us and the enemy lie farms
and villages, and the remains of the ancient Greek city of Ai Khanoum,
which flourished here from 400 BE.  British journalist Tim Judah tells
me that Ai Khanoum was a fabulous, wealthy walled city, with a palace,
temple, theatre, gymnasium and mansions.  Archaeologists suggest it was
sacked and burned at the end of the second century BE.

"It's once again in the middle of a war," he explains.

The remains of Ai Khanoum were discovered in the 1960s and many of its
treasures were displayed in the Kabul Museum.  But the museum was
vandalised, and its collections stolen and scattered.  You can even buy
Greek treasures from Ai Khanoum in the bazaar in Khoja Bahauddin.
Authorities removed Ionic columns from Ai Khanoum, one step ahead of
the looters, and put them into a restaurant in the town square to save
them for the local area.  We are told that the plain beneath us was
bulldozed to facilitate looting, dredging up the buried treasures for
locals to scavenge and sell.

A local aid worker says bitterly, "During this two decades of war we
have destroyed everything, we have even destroyed our own culture."

When the front line is quiet like this, the soldiers 'turn it on' for
the journalists, and we film them.  Gotta get your 'bang bang' for the
bulletin.  On this visit to Ai Khanoum hill a crew from Russian state
television is also here.  They ask the soldiers to fire their weapons
so that they can film them.  The soldiers oblige and the crew ask them
to stop so that they can reposition the camera and film them from a
second angle.  I've never seen anything like it a TV crew directing
action while there is live fire!  I can only think this must be how
they do all their reporting with the Russian forces in Chechnya.

The front line is strung along a series of hilltops, and the commander
explains to us how a battle would unfold.  But it appears that nothing
much is happening today well, nothing that hasn't been orchestrated by
other journalists so we move on.

There are three front lines facing the enemy, one behind the other. The
soldiers will only take the journalists they like or trust up to the
first front line, closest to the Taliban, which they say is the most
dangerous.  They decide they like us.  We drive through villages on the
plain.  Irrigated by the Kokcha River, this is the greenest area I have
seen.  There are actually fields and grasses, a break in the seemingly
endless desert.  A boy leading his emaciated cattle through the trees
plays a tune on a handmade reed flute.  The music is sweet and
haunting.

Crops grow here, including thirsty crops such as wheat, rice and
cotton, but many of the villagers have not been able to harvest any
grain because of Taliban sniper fire.  One village has a mill where
water turns a huge smooth stone to grind wheat into flour.  Because of
the drought and the fighting, however, the mill has sat idle for
years.

We drive on but the road ends at the Kokcha River and there is no
bridge.  The Northern Alliance says that our jeeps risk getting stuck
in the river.  If we don't have access to a Russian military truck, we
will have to cross on horseback.  Afghan boys with horses materialise,
and so does a flourishing trade in front-line rides.  Rides cost US$20
per person, but for half that amount you can cross the river by
'ferry', a raft made of two inflated tractor-tyre tubes, attached to a
wooden frame.  One correspondent says he's made the crossing on the
carcass of a cow but I don't believe this engaging traveller's tale.

In fact, very few brave the river on the makeshift rafts.  Even now,
reduced by the drought, the Kokcha is fast flowing and in parts as wide
as a football field.  Every year, dozens of people drown crossing here,
especially those who are too poor to afford any type of transport. They
try to cross on foot, and die because they can't swim.

We climb onto the horses, which have no stirrups or saddles, only a
blanket on their backs.  Afghan boys sit in front of us as we ford the
river.  A rush of adrenaline hits me, the kind that only danger can
provide.  The current here is strong, will the horse make it across?
Are those Taliban guns pointing at us?  The front line is so sleepy
that I half suspect the soldiers are putting all of this on as
adventure tourism for bored journalists.  This first taste of fear is
turning into something not dissimilar to fun.

The opposite bank is crowded with people waiting to cross back.  The
river, a green belt in the endless desert, teems with life.  We ride up
through an Afghan village to the front line at Puze Polihomri.  Here,
the Northern Alliance has cut deep, narrow trenches into the side of
the mountain, opposite the Taliban positions at Qala Qata.  At the top
of the hill, just above the Northern Alliance forward positions, there
is a cemetery.

The commander at Puze Polihomri is Major General Yusuf Muhammad, a
fifty-year-old career soldier whose life encapsulates the
contradictions and tragedies of Afghanistan.  He was trained in Russia,
rising through the ranks in the Communist army of Afghanistan, which
fought against the Mujaheddin.  However, since the defeat of the
Soviets in 1989, he swapped sides to fight with the Mujaheddin in their
factional wars.  Now he is fighting with them against another sect of
Islamic warriors, the Taliban.

The Uzbek general has no illusions about his chances of victory.  He is
one of the best-trained soldiers remaining in Afghanistan, and for him
the war has been an endless series of retreats.  In 1996 he fled from
Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif, when the Taliban took the capital.  Then in
1998, when Mazar-i-Sharif also fell to the Taliban, he retreated to
Taloqan.  Last year Taloqan, too, fell.

Now, Muhammad is literally cornered in north-eastern Afghanistan.  With
his back to the Tajik border, he has the chance for one last
offensive.A disgruntled reporter from Moscow is losing patience,
however.  She says that nothing is real not the front line and not the
war.  This is a Potemkin war," she says.

"Next they'll be showing us cardboard cut-outs of soldiers on the
hills."

Everybody deals with the waiting differently.

This conflict is largely tribal, not religious.  The Northern Alliance
and the Taliban are both Muslims and both from the same sect: Sunnis.
The Taliban soldiers also wear mascara in their trenches.  But the
Taliban are mainly Pashtuns from the south of Afghanistan, and the
Northern Alliance is a coalition of Tajiks and Uzbeks from the north.

Very roughly the divide goes like this: the Pashtuns are Afghanistan's
largest tribe, with a population of about six million, living mostly in
the south, descended from the Persians who conquered the region more
than 300 years ago.  The Tajiks are the second largest tribe, with
about four million people living in the north.  The Hazaras live in the
centre of the country.  They are Shia Muslims a different sect to the
rest of the country.  These four million people are the most
Asiatic-looking Afghans, reputedly the descendants of Genghis Khan,
whose Mongol hordes swept through Afghanistan 800 years ago.  The
mountains isolated the Hazaras and kept the strain pure they still look
like their Mongol ancestors.  Two million Uzbeks live in the north-west
of the country.  The rest are a collection of smaller tribes, with even
more exotic names.  Imagh.  Balouch.  Turkmen.  Qezelbash.

One of the reasons for Afghanistan's perpetual tribalism is its
geography.  Mountains cover three-quarters of the country.  Each tribe
is trapped in a valley by its geographical walls.

"This is the first post-modern conflict, because we are definitely at
war but we don't know who the enemy is," says English journalist Chris
Stephen.  Everybody likes this quip.  One of his friends even inserts
it into a story.  The forces of world terrorism are hard to identify
and pin down.  Even solely in the context of Afghanistan, is the
international coalition fighting Osama bin Laden or the Taliban?

At this time, the Taliban make that question easier to answer by
refusing to give up Osama bin Laden to be tried by Washington or the
United Nations for his part in the September 11 attacks.  In late
September the 600 clerics of the Grand Islamic Council convene in Kabul
to debate the issue only the second time the council has gathered since
the Taliban came to power in 1996.

Religious leaders from distant provinces leave their mosques and trek
along mountain paths to the capital.  Others cross from the refugee
camps in Pakistan, home to around two million Afghans.  Hundreds of
poor, ill-educated clerics gather in Kabul to decide whether their
country should go to war with the world's sole superpower.

In a world first, we are able to watch their deliberations.  The
Taliban usually forbid filming under their strict interpretation of
Islam, but they allow cameras in to record part of this historic
meeting.  They reveal that at least some of the Taliban leadership
understands the dire position its regime is in.  But they fail to sway
the conservatives.  The Taliban refuse to give up Osama bin Laden,
repeating that he is a guest in their country, though they compromise
by asking him to leave voluntarily and expressing grief over the
September 11 attacks.  The Council also hedges its bets, declaring a
Holy War against the United States if it attacks Afghanistan.

When this concession fails to mollify Washington, or to dampen down
talk of war, the Taliban leadership attempts to avert US air strikes by
announcing Osama bin Laden has gone into hiding and cannot be found. In
a sign of their increasing desperation, they then claim Osama bin Laden
is no longer in Afghanistan.  As they celebrate the fifth anniversary
of their rule on 25 September, the Taliban leaders are twisting and
turning like fish on a line.

The Northern Alliance is quick to deny Osama bin Laden has left
Afghanistan.  Its Foreign Minister, Dr.  Abdullah, tells us he has
received intelligence that Osama bin Laden remains in the south, in the
Taliban-controlled section of the country.

"Osama bin Laden is in hiding in the Uruzgan province in the centre of
Afghanistan, and his men have also been sighted in the city of
Jalalabad, near the border with Pakistan.  This indicates that bin
Laden is likely to be constantly on the move," says Dr.  Abdullah. But
"Bin Laden is not in Afghanistan' stories run and run, long after the
Taliban have fled.  Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf
becomes the chief peddler of these speculations and gives us
contradictory opinions on a weekly basis: Osama bin Laden is no longer
in Afghanistan, he long ago departed; Osama bin Laden is in
Afghanistan, but he has died.  First he was killed, later his death is
from kidney failure.  Only his corpse is there.  And if all that is
wrong, Osama bin Laden is in Yemen or in Saudi Arabia, but nowhere near
Pakistan.

American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is more honest when he
says, "We do not know where he is."  But a journalist colleague perhaps
sums it up best during an interview with a small Cincinnati radio
station.  They ask him, live on air, "So, have you run into that bin
Laden?"  A true professional, he responds, "No, he's a pretty elusive
kind of guy ..."

We are off to the front line again.  I haven't been there for a week
and I want to see if there are any developments.  I go with two English
journalists in a white Toyota Hilux.  This is the first time I have
been in a car that is not a Russian military jeep or pick-up.  The boys
agree the Toyota is more comfortable but not as effective in these
dusty conditions.  The Russian jeep's great strength is that it is so
basic it can function anywhere and, perhaps more importantly, can be
repaired anywhere.  The driver says his Toyota was captured from a
Taliban commander in an important battle a year ago.

"Now you are in Taliban car," he chortles.

Osama bin Laden bought 5000 white Toyotas like this one for Taliban
commanders.  This was not simply generosity; he was functioning as de
facto Defence Minister for the Taliban, financing the defence
requirements of the nearly bankrupt 'failed state'.

So it is not just hospitality that precludes the Taliban from asking
Osama bin Laden to leave Afghanistan.  They have thrown in their lot
with him, and they stand or fall with him.  Bin Laden, one of
fifty-seven children of a billionaire construction magnate, took refuge
in Afghanistan in 1996, after Saudi Arabia froze his assets and forced
him to leave the country.

Opposed to Saudi Arabia's co-operation with the United States, bin
Laden strongly resisted the presence of US troop son Saudi soil during
the Gulf War.  More than 500,000 American troops were stationed there
during the war, and some 20,000 soldiers remained afterwards.  Bin
Laden declared it was the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of
the Gulf States, and Saudi Arabia responded by stripping him of his
citizenship and expelling him.

Bin Laden went first to Sudan and then to Afghanistan, where he had
been off and on for fifteen years.  He first arrived in Afghanistan to
join the jihad, the Holy War against the Russians in 1980.  An austere
religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden speciali sed in
recruiting, financing and training the estimated 35,000 non-Afghan
fighters who joined the Mujaheddin.

When he returned in 1996, bin Laden refurbished the camps he had helped
build a decade earlier, during the Afghan war.  He offered the
facilities and access to thousands of his foreign fighters to the
Taliban, who took power that September.  Bin Laden's private army of
Islamic warriors, which he trained and funded, became a key prop of the
Taliban regime.

The Taliban owe bin Laden too much to push him out now.  But driving
along the dusty, bumpy track back to the front line, I wonder whether a
master tactician and traitor like Joseph Stalin would have let such
loyalty hamper him?  If it came to a choice between saving an ally and
saving himself, Stalin would always save himself.  As an Australian
friend observes later: "On 10 September the Taliban were in control of
Afghanistan.  They've played a shocking hand."

Driving in our Taliban Toyota, we pass the beggar woman.  Our driver
slows down to give her money before we reach the refugee camp on the
flat by the river.  A new military training camp has sprung up here so
we stop and investigate.  There are two lines of men training in the
sand.  A sergeant calls out orders to his men, sing-song commands that
end with a rolling sound that he spits out from the back of his throat,
like a Zulu war cry.  His raggedy army marches out of step.  Their
uniforms are ill fitting and mismatched.  Their weaponry is old.

We interview their commander, General Taj Mohammed.  He relays the same
message we consistently hear from Northern Alliance generals at
different front-line camps: "We are preparing for an offensive, but we
need air support, and more weapons and equipment.  I am awaiting
instructions from the Defence Ministry, and my understanding is that
the offensive will begin soon."

We become spotters for Russian military equipment, telling each other
when we see trucks carrying ammunition on the roads.  Some Russian
weaponry is being delivered over the mountains on horses and donkeys.
This must be how Alexander the Great supplied his conquests here,
too.

A Russian helicopter, a new part of the Northern Alliance air fleet,
starts making low flights over Khoja Bahauddin.

"You see, its weapons bracket is empty the pilot is obviously being
trained," says Andrei, a Russian journalist who has reported
extensively from Chechnya, as we watch the helicopter swoop over us
again and again.  Thank God for the Russian contingent.  Most of the
arms used by both sides here are Russian, or in fact Soviet, and under
the patient coaching of my Russian colleagues, I am learning to
distinguish one piece of weaponry from another.

Andrei, a former dissident who spent two years in a Soviet labour camp,
is the cleverest and most modest of the Russian journalists.  I enjoy
learning about arms and Russian writers from him.  English is his third
language, but he has a remarkable turn of phrase and great breadth of
knowledge.  He tells me about the descendants of Alexander the Great
living here in the Pamir Mountains, the lick of Afghanistan that
stretches out into China.  They have profiles that could come from
ancient Greek coins, they are blond, and they live here now, in
Afghanistan.  Instead of this silly war, let us go to the Pamirs and do
a story there.  Now that would be interesting."

Journalists 'adopt' different generals, forging relationships so they
can learn about the progress of preparations for war and so that the
generals will let them accompany their troops once the fighting starts.
My favourite is General Attiqilah Bariolai, the Northern Alliance's
Deputy Defence Minister.  He is one of the new breed of Afghan military
leaders.  Young, charming and clever, the softly spoken general has
done some training in the West.  He is a snappy dresser, with mod suits
in both local and Western styles.  I have seen him wearing corduroy,
but never a turban.  When he invites journalists to dinner, there is a
table, unusual enough here, set with crystal bowls.

General Bariolai reiterates the complaint we have heard in Dushanbe:
the Northern Alliance wants America's respect as much as its
weaponry.

"We want to be treated as equals.  If Americans want to deal with us,
they have to speak with us as a government with another government."

He tells reporters the Northern Alliance, which has been fighting the
Taliban for almost seven years, is the only force capable of defeating
the Taliban on the ground.

"The bombing alone will never win this war.  You have to follow up with
ground forces and we are the ground force."

Some journalists even go to live as guests of another general, Mamur
Hassan.  His compound is fifteen kilometres from Khoja Bahauddin, at
Dashti Qala.  It is a short distance, but significant here, where there
are no proper roads.  Depending on the weather, it can take more than
two hours to reach Dashti Qala.

The Foreign Ministry is not pleased because it has no control over
journalists living there.  General Hassan collects an unusual group
around him.  There is the unforgettable Volker Handloik, a tall German
with blond curly hair reaching past his shoulders, which he sometimes
puts up in a bun.  He wears blue glasses and a long quilted coat, a
local chap an but a multicoloured version no one else seems to have
found.  I never see anything like it in the market.  He rides the
General's horses, with his long blond hair flying behind him.  Combat
cameraman Andy Driver also lives here.  He is a cockney, ex-SAS, and
like so many of the real tough guys, a darling.  Andy obtains the first
footage of American Special Forces in the region, at a time when the
Northern Alliance is denying they are present.

Northern Alliance officials order Andy Driver to move out of General
Hassan's compound because his visa is not in order, but Andy hunkers
down and General Hassan lets him stay on, prepared to defy the Alliance
officials because he likes him.  Andy is an Afghan man's kind of man.
He's a good shot and, most importantly, a good rider.  He and General
Hassan sit poring over maps and discussing strategy till the early
hours of the morning.

Mamur Hassan's compound is green and fertile and pleasantly relaxed,
especially after the Foreign Ministry office.  It's built around a
garden and, while it has necessities like a radio room and an
anti-aircraft battery, there are also orchards that geese wander
through, and a large plane tree under which Mamur Hassan sits for
interviews.  With articles in international newspapers, and a long
profile in the New Yorker, Hassan is becoming a celebrity warlord.  He
seems to me to be enjoying it.

General Hassan is charming, and we take tea.  He has a round Uzbek face
and wears an embroidered cap, which sets off his white whiskers and
warm smile.  I can't help thinking in other circumstances he would make
a natural Santa Claus.  But every time I interview him, he gives me a
different assessment of the war aims, of the timetable, of the number
of his troops, of their readiness.  Often he flatly contradicts what he
said last time, only days before.  It is hard to rely on his dates,
figures or predictions.  A three-year-old child who I presume is his
grandson climbs up onto his lap, and Hassan seems more interested in
playing with him than speaking to us.  Afterwards I learn little Babur
Shah is his son.  He looks up from the boy and says he can call on more
than 5000 soldiers.  One thousand men live here with him in Dashti
Qala.

"They are ready to fight for me whenever I order them to."

It is very difficult to verify these numbers.  I have not seen 1000 men
here though there could be 5000 men on call in the region for all I
know.  He says that the Northern Alliance feeds 600 of his soldiers,
but that he makes up the shortfall out of his own pocket, providing
everything else they need, such as clothing and medicine.

The Taliban say they have 20,000 to 30,000 men in this region. Northern
Alliance intelligence supports this, but it is another unverifiable
figure.  However, it appears certain the Taliban forces do far
outnumber those of the Northern Alliance.  In the circumstances, how
sure is Mamur Hassan of victory?

"We want to win more strongly.  Victory is about will and our spirit is
indomitable," he says.

On another day, Hassan says that if the American air strikes are
successful and Russia supplies the weapons it has promised, then it
will be possible to defeat the Taliban but it will take two months.
This contradicts what he tells Jon Lee Anderson from the New Yorker. He
complains to him that General Fahim has told him to collect all his
soldiers and be at the ready, but he doesn't have sufficient resources.
He only has food for 600 men and he has 1000 to feed.  He argues that
the conditions are not right for a sustained attack in fact, in these
conditions it's impossible.

In the first week of October we are frequently asking each other, will
this offensive ever begin?  What can we reliably report about it?

Thirty men from Dashti Qala set out to fight the Russians in 1979.
Mamur Hassan says he is one of only two still alive.  the They started
out fighting locally, on their own, but once the US, Pakistan, and
Saudi Arabia began covertly funding various Afghan factions, Hassan
threw in his lot with the powerful Pashtun leader Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar.

Hekmatyar is a notorious figure, reviled for his ferocious cruelty,
particularly here among the Tajiks.  In the 1970s, while at university,
he and his supporters are alleged to have thrown acid in the faces of
women who refused to wear the veil, and to have shot at the legs of
women who wore no stockings.  Though Hekmatyar later denied this, it
has become part of Afghan political folklore.

Hekmatyar was also virulently anti-American, but in the 1980s when the
US was supporting seven main factions in the Afghan war against the
Soviets, Hekmatyar's received the largest amount of weapons and
training.  It was funnelled via Pakistan, and many said his greatest
talent was that he knew how to schmooze the Pakistanis, positioning
himself as their major ally inside Afghanistan.

Hekmatyar was Ahmed Shah Massoud's rival, and his Northern Alliance
critics say that he killed more Mujaheddin than Russians, undermining
the unity of the anti-Soviet forces.  They argue that Hekmatyar spent
the decade of the Soviet war safely in Pakistan stockpiling
CIA-supplied weapons and money, while Massoud was fighting in the
mountains with weapons stolen from dead Russian soldiers.  Hekmatyar
once boasted that he could keep fighting for twenty-five years without
ever needing supplies.

In the 1990s Hekmatyar used his American-funded weaponry to lay waste
to Kabul in one of the bloodiest sieges in modern warfare.  Unwilling
to share power with the other Mujaheddin factions, Hekmatyar pounded
Kabul with hundreds of heavy rockets and mortars on a daily basis.  He
kept this up for three years, killing some 20,000 civilians, and
wounding many more.

Unless he can make a dramatic comeback, this is what he will most
likely be remembered for.  He became Prime Minister in 1993 and then
again in 1996 for a short period until the Taliban took over.  Very
much the forerunner of the Taliban, Hekmatyar envisaged an Islamic
state where women would be banned from work and education, and a
puritanical brand of extremist Islam would be enforced.

"If you liked Khomeini," the Russians said as they were pulling out of
Kabul in 1989, 'you'll love Hekmatyar."

Hekmatyar's supporters included many of Osama bin Laden's foreign
volunteers who later found their way into the Taliban.  The creation of
the Taliban weakened the cunning erratic Hekmatyar as Pakistan shifted
its support to the new group of Pashtun warriors.

When the Taliban took over they condemned Hekmatyar to death and he
fled to Iran.  I am told by drivers, translators and aid workers that
if he returned to Afghanistan, he would be torn limb from limb.

"At first I was a member of Hekmatyar's party, and I fought against the
Soviets but also against other Afghans," says Mamur Hassan.

"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."  So Mamur Hassan tells the New Yorker, when the Northern
Alliance is cosying up to the United States.  Who knows what he really
thinks?

In classic Afghan fashion, in the mid-1980s Hassan switched sides,
breaking with Hekmatyar and joining Massoud until the defeat of the
Soviets in 1989.  After the Russians left, Hassan rejected any further
political involvement and returned to Dashti Qala.  He works with the
Northern Alliance but maintains his independence.  His men, he says,
owe their allegiance to him.  Personally.

This is a plausible claim.  Mamur Hassan is a clan leader in Dashti
Qala, as was his father before him.  This society is essentially
feudal.  Poor men owe their loyalty to the local leader who pays their
way.  They will follow him when he changes sides for whatever reasons
he deems compelling, such as a change in the overall temperature of a
war, or the offer of a large amount of cash.  They will do this even
mid-battle.  If Mamur Hassan decides to switch sides and join the
Taliban tomorrow, all his men will unquestioningly fight with him, for
the Taliban, and against their present allies in the Northern Alliance.
This is part of the mystery of Afghanistan.

While it is not an outcome I think likely, it is by no means
impossible, and it is something I always bear in mind when coming to
Hassan's leafy complex at Dashti Qala.  The loyalties are old and
complex, and pre-date Western, involvement in this conflict.  You never
know when art Afghan warlord will turn or, as the British observed
during their abortive campaigns here during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, you may be able to rent an Afghan, but you can
never buy one.

If you follow the money, you see that plenty of people on both sides
have tried to buy the Afghans over the past twenty-five years.  During
the decade of the Soviet war, it's estimated Russia spent more than
US$40 billion fighting here, losing 15,000 of its own troops in a war
that cost more than one million Afghan lives.

America also spent huge amounts here over the same period, in its
largest covert action program since World War II, funnelling more than
US$3.2 billion in guns and money to the Mujaheddin, and co-ordinating
an equivalent amount from other countries, including Saudi Arabia.

It started in the summer of 1979, when Washington signed a secret
directive to support the fledgling Mujaheddin movement, to the tune of
US$30 million.  That was six months before Soviet tanks rolled into
Kabul.

This was the initiative of President Jimmy Carter's national security
advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose aim and he was quite open about
this was to de stabilise the Soviet Union by fostering the spread of
Islamic militancy in Central Asia.  In 1980, Brzezinski was filmed
standing on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border, wearing the wrong
type of turban and rallying the Mujaheddin to 'wage a jihad!"  against
the Communists.

American journalist Bob Fitrakis wrote bitterly about this following
September 11: "The Mujaheddin took the message to heart.  They're now
waging a jihad against us."  Brzezinski played a critical role in
shaping Washington's policy in Afghanistan, which was continued by
successive Republican administrations.  In 2001, as the US returns here
to the last great battlefield of the Cold War, dragging the world's
press behind it, this issue underpins our reporting.

We discuss whether September 11 is in any way 'payback' for America's
policies in Central Asia, and specifically for the conduct of its
foreign policy in Afghanistan in the 1980s.  Is it simply bad luck or
coincidence that Osama bin Laden based his al-Qaeda network here?  Is
America now 'reaping the whirlwind', or as some US officials put it
bluntly has America helped create its own Frankenstein's monster?

We learn the term 'blowback' security service talk for supporting an
unsavoury local leader because it suits your short-term ends, only to
have him turn around and bite you later.  Saddam Hussein is one
striking example of blowback.  Is Osama bin Laden another?

Three years ago, as the nature of the Taliban regime was becoming
apparent, Zbigniew Brzezinski stood firm, denying to a French newspaper
that he had any regrets.

"Regret what?  That secret operation was an excellent idea.  It had the
effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to
regret it?"

Asked specifically whether he regretted supporting the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism and giving arms and advice to future terrorists,
Brzezinski replied, "What is most important to the history of the
world?  The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?  Some
stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of
the Cold War?"

Brzezinski still holds to this view today, maintaining he has no
regrets, even post-September 11.  He tells American journalist David
Corn that the Carter administration funded the moderates, not the
fundamentalists.  His defence is robust, putting the blame squarely on
the Soviet Union, which he says continued to support world terrorism
during the 1980s while it was fighting in Afghanistan.  He argues this
was what set the stage for the Afghan civil war of the 1990s and the
subsequent rise of the Taliban, not Pakistani machinations and the
rockets and missiles the US supplied to the Mujaheddin.

Brzezinski does not seem to have heard of blowback, though he does
concede one fault with US policy the rapid exit of US forces once the
Soviets had departed: "That was immoral."

But that immorality, of course, was down to later Republican
administrations.

Once the last battle of the Cold War was won, there was nothing holding
the West in Afghanistan no oil, for example.  Not enough natural gas to
stick around for.  In fact, the West appeared confused and even
repulsed by the bloodthirsty Mujaheddin it had armed.

It left, it seemed, without a backward glance.

On the ground, US desertion rankles.  The distinction between the
policies pursued by different administrations in Washington is lost on
people here.  Afghans want to know why the United States funded ten
years of war here, and then, having supplied enough arms for the
Mujaheddin to keep fighting for the following decade, too, just upped
and left.

"Why has the world forgotten us?"  is the most common question I am
asked by ordinary people in the bazaars and refugee camps.  I feel a
stab of guilt.

In her clinic at the refugee camp, Farahnaz Nazir put it succinctly the
first time I visited her there.  She looked up from tending
malnourished babies and said, "The September 11 attacks were terrible,
simply terrible.  But the US is paying the price for its belief that
Communism was more dangerous than Islamic fundamentalism.  The US armed
the fundamentalists and then when the Communists were defeated, the US
just left the fundamentalists here to ferment.  They washed their hands
of us, and they left us to live with the fundamentalists.  For years we
have suffered under them, and now the US is suffering under them,
too."

For the Republican administration in Washington, 1985 was a turning
point.  President Reagan's government increased covert military aid to
the Mujaheddin to US$250 million a year double the amount spent in
1984.  Under National Security Decision Directive 166, Washington
secretly agreed to take US high-tech and military expertise to the
Afghan battlefield.  The possibility of trapping the Soviet Union in
its own version of Vietnam was irresistible and that's just what
happened.

In 1985 the CIA started supplying the Mujaheddin with satellite
reconnaissance data of Soviet targets, plans for military operations
and intercepts of Soviet communications.  But that was just the
beginning.  In 1986 the US provided the Mujaheddin with sophisticated
Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.  There is grainy NBC news footage of
the brave anti-Communist forces receiving their weapons.  It is
hilarious anyone can be cast as an ally in the war against Communism,
including turbaned Islamic militants on mules.

The US program was that the CIA would provide funds, weapons and
supervision for the Mujaheddin, but direct contact would be left to
Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI.  With the Stinger missiles,
for example, it worked like this: In June 1986 Pakistani intelligence
officers received training on the missiles in the United States, and
then returned to Pakistan, taking with them a new US invention an
electronic simulator to teach the fifth-century warriors how to use the
state-of-the-art missiles.

By 1987, 65,000 tonnes of arms were being supplied, and CIA and
Pentagon specialists were constantly travelling to the new ISI
headquarters at Rawalpindi.

It's worth noting that over the decade of the Afghan war, the ISI grew
from a small outfit of a few thousand operatives to an organisation of
more than 150,000, with a US$2 billion budget.  In many ways this war
cemented Pakistan's role as America's ally in the sub-continent.  In
the Cold War context of the time, 'socialist' India was Russia's
partner, and an alliance with Pakistan redressed that balance.

By 1988, the annual amount being pumped to the Mujaheddin reached a
massive US$700 million.  The US was even shipping Tennessee mules to
Afghanistan to carry all the weapons over the mountains.  A decade
later, Afghanistan was still littered with rusted American shipping
containers, some refashioned by scavenging locals to serve as doors,
workshops, stores and even gaols.

Recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the Mujaheddin
factions by an organisation based in Pakistan called Office of
Services, Maktab al Khidamat, known by its acronym MAK.  One of three
people who ran MAK was Osama bin Laden.

In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi
Arabia to Afghanistan.  Using his degree in civil engineering, his
business expertise and family funds, he built training camps, and roads
to reach them.  Some were dug deep into the mountains.  These are the
camps now dubbed 'terrorist universities' by Washington.  They were
built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA.  Bin Laden
established al-Qaeda (the Base) between 1987 and 1988 to run these
camps and other business enterprises.  It is a tightly run holding
company, integrating the operations of his armed forces with other
'legitimate' businesses.

In 1989, bin Laden took overall charge of MAK.

This history was known throughout the 1990s, reported on in detail in
American newspapers, but it appeared irrelevant in light of the
collapse of Communism.  Debate over many issues, including the wisdom
of arming Islamic militants and the policy of spawning a huge increase
in opium production, was swept under the carpet.

But following September 11, the kaleidoscope has shifted, refracting
these events in a new and more damaging light.  It now seems incredible
that in 1986 CIA chief William Casey supported an ISI proposal to
recruit young Muslims from around the world to join the Afghan jihad.
American investigative journalist John Cooley has revealed that Muslims
were recruited within the US for the Mujaheddin, and were trained at
Camp Peary, a CIA training camp in Virginia.

Surely this is blowback with a capital B?  It seems that as in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq, America has helped train and arm its worst enemy.

The CIA is scrambling for cover, claiming that though it supported
Afghan fighters, including international Muslim brigades, it did not
have any direct dealings with Osama bin Laden.  He was not one of
'ours', they argue.  But the web is so tangled that it doesn't make
much difference.  Bin Laden was, if not 'ours', then on 'our' side.  He
was linked to ISI, and ISI was 'ours', taking CIA money and spending it
for 'us' in Afghanistan.

The left-wing analysis is that bin Laden has simply continued to do the
job he was doing in Afghanistan in the 1980s -funding, feeding and
training mercenaries.  First it was for the ISI and, behind the scenes,
the CIA.  Later it became for the Taliban.

After a decade of fighting, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in
February 1989.  The country fell to the heavily armed Mujaheddin, who
turned on each other, plunging Afghanistan into seven more years of
bitter warfare.  This conflict swallowed up the Western dollars that
had flowed here, and claimed tens of thousands more civilian lives.

By 1994 the country was in chaos, close to disintegration.  Small-time
commanders controlled huge arsenals and large numbers of mercenaries.
They took control of trade and smuggling routes.  On the road between
Quetta in Pakistan and Kandahar, a distance of only 130 kilometres,
twenty different groups put up chains and demanded twenty separate
tolls.  It didn't matter that you'd just paid ten kilometres back if
you didn't pay here, too, you'd be shot.  Looting, theft and rape were
commonplace.  Afghanistan was utterly lawless.

When religious students from the south of the country, calling
themselves the Taliban, stepped in offering peace and order, a grateful
war-weary nation accepted.  The tiny doctrinaire group conquered more
than half the country without firing a shot.  Town after town acceded
to their tough brand of Islam in order to obtain relief from the chaos
and bloodshed around them.  However, most people never saw their new
leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.  This is perhaps the strangest feature of
the takeover.  In a scenario unimaginable almost anywhere else in the
world, in either a dictatorship or a democracy, there were no
appearances and no photo opportunities.  Mullah Omar was a name only.
People were utterly oppressed by an invisible autocrat, his edicts
enforced by brutal religious police.

One of the few people to have actually seen Mullah Omar is the
Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid.  His book is the one all
the journalists in Afghanistan are reading.  Everyone has a copy of
Taliban except me, since I came in such a hurry, without any Afghan
reference books.  I read my friends' copies, whenever one is free,
dipping into Taliban history in Khoja Bahauddin until someone wants
their book back.  Rashid says there is an 'entire factory of myths' to
explain how a group of ill-equipped religious students took on and
subdued the rapacious Kandahar warlords.  Sex, in fact sexual
perversion, features in all of them.

The most frequently told story concerns events in Kandahar in 1994,
when a warlord abducted two teenage girls, shaved their heads, and
allowed his men to repeatedly gang rape them.  The Taliban took action.
Mullah Omar gathered some thirty Talibs who had only sixteen rifles
between them not even one per man in Afghanistan, a sign of their
poverty and desperation.  But they attacked the base, freed the girls
and hanged the warlord from the barrel of a tank.  Crucially, they
captured a huge quantity of arms and ammunition.

Some months later two Kandahar commanders were involved in a dispute
over a young boy they both wanted to sodomise.  Once again the Taliban
took on the sexually perverse evil-doers and won, punishing the
paedophiles and freeing the boy.  As their reputation for heroism
spread, the public began to appeal to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed
Omar to sort out other local disputes.  Rashid describes Mullah Omar
emerging as a "Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the
rapacious commanders.  His prestige grew because he asked for no reward
or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to
create a just Islamic system."

But once Afghanistan was under the control of the idealistic Taliban,
the people found their yoke of repression and suffering had only
tightened.  And despite the vigilant presence of the Taliban's
religious police, as well as public amputations and executions, the war
did not end.

After all this, the country is now suffering its worst drought in
seventy years, bringing with it the real threat of famine.  I am here
at this time as a guest of the Mujaheddin who helped bring Afghanistan
to its knees.  It feels as if all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are
riding in, and it's difficult to know how people keep going.  The truth
is, the effort of endurance kills many, or shortens their lives.

Increasingly, I feel my job is irrelevant to the real needs of this
country.  What is the point in covering the long, slow lead-up to a
conflict when people are starving?  By early October, I am reporting
more and more about the struggle to feed people.

A truck drives into the centre of a clearing marked out with a string
fence in the desert near Khoja Bahauddin.  It contains a precious
cargo.  Not weapons but food.  French aid agency ACTED is distributing
fifty tonnes of wheat, the first food aid here in three months.

Hundreds of people line up outside the string fence on this flat piece
of stony desert near the Qumkishlak refugee camp.

The people are hungry, but there is no fighting.  Guards with switches
keep the children in line.  Inside the clearing, men wait by the truck.
Sacks of grain are loaded onto their shoulders.  They carry them a
short distance to a blue tarpaulin laid on the ground.  The sacks are
split, their contents falling in a white river on the dusty surface,
making a satisfying, sibilant sound.

The refugees stand patiently, covering their noses because the dust is
ferocious.  Women are also in the queue, bright absences in their
burqas.

When enough grain has been poured out, the aid workers signal to them
to begin coming forward.  One by one, they run up to a table inside the
string fence.  They smear an inky thumbprint on a file, to show they
have collected their family's quota, and then go to the tarpaulin where
they receive three kilos of wheat flour It's poured into their clothing
with a big plastic scoop.  They make a well in the long pyjama tails of
their suits to receive it.  A woman in a blue burqa carries her flour
in a red scarf.  One small child, coming to collect the precious grain,
suddenly freezes in panic.  It is too heavy.  She is terrified she will
drop it.  Her father comes forward to help her carry her load.

ACTED logistician Eric Le Guin tells me, "This amount will support 2000
families for a month, and 150 tonnes more is on its way, along with oil
and sugar, which are cooking staples here."

The people receiving this food aid are some of the 10,000 refugees who
arrived in this region just over a year ago, after the Taliban
conquered the nearby town of Taloqan.  As Afghanistan's crippling
drought continued, they soon became utterly reliant on food aid. During
this period there was also a decline in relations between the Taliban
and the outside world, leading to delays and sporadic food delivery by
international aid agencies, just when it was needed most. This left
some of these refugees at the point of starvation.  Many survived by
eating boiled grass.

"Yes, we boiled grass, and we ate it, there was nothing else.  The
children were hungry, we were all hungry," says Nasr, the head of a
large family living in the Qumkishlak camp.  He is standing on a hill
above the camp.  Leaning on a stick, with a grey beard and a grey
turban, he looks like an Old Testament prophet.  His face is weathered
and lined.  I am shocked when he says he is only fifty years old.

The children gather around him, including his grandchildren, most of
them with skin lesions and the bleached hair consistent with
malnutrition.  One small girl is startlingly beautiful, with perfect
features and huge, glowing eyes.  In the West she would become a super
model.  But when she smiles her face is also lined, like that of a
woman in her thirties.  She is nine years old.  She follows me all day
at the refugee camp, smiling often, tearing at my heartstrings with her
luminous beauty and her dismal future.

"We have to live here, what else can we do?"  Nasr asks.

"The Taliban persecuted us, beating us with sticks.  They would have
killed us, just because we were Tajiks.  We ran away, taking nothing
but the clothes we stood in."

The translator I am working with at the camp is Dr.  Ashraf Aini.  He
fled Taloqan at the same time as Nasr and his family.  I can see that
he is edgy here.  Dr.  Aini, who speaks flawless Russian and English,
is an urbane, witty man in his early forties.  He works at the local
hospital at night, but earns ten times his monthly salary working as a
translator for Canadian CBC during the day.

"I left everything behind, absolutely everything.  I had only two
hours, so I gathered up my wife and children and we fled," he says.

The sun is setting.  I can hardly see Dr.  Aini for the stinging dust
and smoke from the fires in the camp.  The refugees are winter-proofing
their dwellings.  What this amounts to is building mud-brick walls
around their tents, in the hope that they will then withstand sub-zero
temperatures.  We are surrounded by swarming crowds of curious people
and children.  The beautiful nine-year-old stays close as I ask Dr.
Aini why he decided on this precipitate flight.

"We heard about the conditions for people living in Taliban-controlled
areas, the massive killings of people in the north, the burning of
villages, and we fled in fear."  He adds vehemently, "There must be no
compromise with such people.  The Taliban cannot be included in any
broad-based government in the future."

Not all his leaders agree.  This controversial issue consumes much of
our attention as alternatives to all-out war are canvassed.  When
journalists ask General Bariolai whether a compromise allowing the
Taliban to participate in government could be reached, he says no
compromise deal could ever include the Taliban leadership.  Men like
Mullah Omar, he says, can have no say in the future of the country.
They are nothing but agents of Pakistan.  They brought foreigners here
to kill Afghans.  They educated boys of thirteen or fifteen in Pakistan
to destroy our history, our museums and our archives."

But General Bariolai would be willing to co-operate with lower-ranked
Taliban.  If they defected now, he would be willing to see them
participate in decisions on how the country should be run.  General
Mamur Hassan tells me that he agrees.

"After the fighting, when we succeed, compromise is possible.  Yes, I
can even foresee the possibility of co-operation with the Taliban.  I
could sit in government with a former Talib, yes."

In the late 1990s Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf was filming near
the refugee camp at Zabol on the Iranian border.  He was making his
searing movie Kandahar, about a woman returning from the West to see
the sister she had left behind in Afghanistan.

"I never forget those nights of filming Kandahar.  While our team
searched the deserts with flashlights, we would see dying refugees like
herds of sheep left in the desert.  When we took those that we thought
were dying of cholera to hospitals in Zabol, we realised that they were
dying of hunger.  Since those days and nights of seeing so many people
starving to death, I haven't been able to forgive myself for eating any
meals."

Makhmalbaf was there to choose extras for his film.  The Iranian
authorities explained there had been an influx of illegal refugees, and
the camp could not afford to feed so many people, although they hadn't
eaten for a week.  When the film crew offered to provide meals, the
Iranian authorities were very welcoming, aware they could not cope.
Makhmalbaf fed some 400 people.  Most were children who had fainted of
hunger in their mothers' arms.

"For an hour we were crying and distributing bread and fruits.  The
authorities expressed grief and regret and said that it took a long
time for budget approvals, and kept saying that the flow of hungry
refugees was far greater than what they could manage.  This is the
story of a country that's been ravaged by its own nature, history,
economy, politics and the unkindness of its neighbours."

As people in the south anticipate American air strikes, more refugees
are beginning to arrive in Khoja Bahauddin, clambering up the
inhospitable mountains in a journey that can take days or even weeks on
foot.

The ACTED aid agency is pre-positioning food and assistance so that it
is able to respond quickly if the need arises, and this trickle of
refugees turns into a flood.  The agency is concerned that the onset of
winter will make its job much more difficult.  In northern Afghanistan
most of the population lives in remote regions.  In winter many
villages cannot be reached by cars and trucks instead camels and
donkeys have to be loaded with supplies, to cross the mountain paths.
In some areas, the aid agencies have to send messengers to ask people
to walk for two or three days to a lower village to collect the donated
food.

I file a report on the situation for every channel I broadcast to.  As
I'm waiting for my feed at EBU, or hunched over a satellite phone on
the dusty balcony at Massoud's house, in my mind's eye I see the
beautiful nine-year-old in the refugee camp.  She was born after the
defeat of Communism and has known nothing but war and suffering.  What
will her future hold?

It's early October and Khoja Bahauddin continues to be hot, dusty and
unrelenting.  I find myself besieged by self-doubt, lacerating myself
with the thought that other people are better journalists, and achieve
more.  Some redoubtable women even manage to do this job and to have
children.  In my current negative mood, I am certain that they have
better contacts than I do, and file better stories, not to mention
manage their finances better.

I find myself in tears on the bleached grass at the ACTED compound.  I
can't understand why I am so upset, until I realise I have lost all
track of time here, in this timeless place, and on top of everything it
is my birthday, which I thought was still two days away.  This prompts
more tears.

Sitting in the dust crying, I look up and realise that to make matters
worse, I am in the direct line of sight of nine satellite phones, which
is expressly forbidden because of the dangerous rays they emit.  If I
don't stop soon, even my tears will be radioactive.

I try to talk myself round.  Covering this story is a feat of
endurance.  It's about getting through the low patches and keeping
going.  Then I call home.  Sometimes you just need the reassurance of
hearing familiar voices.  My sister tells me my nephew's well, and
they've been watching my reports.  I perk up.  Her considered
opinion?

"I liked your hair."  I should have known.  Perhaps I shouldn't worry
so much.  It seems no one is paying attention to anything I file in any
event.

I spend the rest of my birthday on a hot dusty plain, seven kilometres
from the Taliban front line, watching the Northern Alliance put on a
show of military might.  Looking for a lift, I ask the Greek reporter
if he is going out there and he replies, "No.  I'm here for the war,
not a training exercise."

I catch a ride with a colleague from APTN instead.

Four thousand troops parade in the sand at Bydengak.  Their uniforms
and boots are Iranian and new, but their weapons are Russian and old,
including ten rocket launchers, two dozen armoured personnel carriers
and eighteen tanks.  Some of the tanks, Soviet T-55s, date from the
1960s, a few from the 1950s.  The men are here to swear allegiance to
their new military commander, General Mohammed Fahim.

Ahmed Shah Massoud's successor is squat and stocky, with a squashed
prize-fighter's face.  He has none of Massoud's elegance or charisma.
Standing in an open Russian jeep and speaking through a megaphone, he
tells his men the Northern Alliance welcomes proposed Western support
in fighting the Taliban.  But he stresses that the Northern Alliance
will continue to fight against the Taliban whether or not it receives
Western help.

All the vehicles and tanks are plastered with posters of Massoud, and
General Fahim pays tribute to his predecessor, the Lion of the
Panjshir.

"We have been fighting against terrorism for more than two decades.  We
sacrificed our greatest leader Ahmed Shah Massoud in this fight, and we
will continue to fight the Taliban, even if we fight alone."

The sentiments are stirring but the performance is wooden.  Perhaps the
comparison with Massoud highlights General Fahim's colourless ness  He
may be very able, but the strongest impression here in the bleak desert
of northern Afghanistan is that the Northern Alliance is still reeling
from Massoud's loss.

After the exercise is over, I ask Commander Mohammed Daoud about the
Northern Alliance's weapon supplies.

"We have been promised new weapons from Iran and Russia, but we haven't
received them here yet.  Don't worry, we are also asking," he
replies.

Russia has made a commitment to supply the Northern Alliance with arms
but it seems the weaponry has yet to be distributed to the troops.

I spot the Greek reporter out here and can't resist saying, "Oh, you
made it even though it's only a military exercise, not a war."

"Sometimes the war starts from a military exercise," he swaggers.  Hide
of a rhinoceros.

I decide to give Washington until Monday 8 October, and if nothing
happens I'm going to return to Moscow, to replenish my stocks of food,
water, money and equipment.  We calculate a week here is equivalent to
a month anywhere else, and by Monday I will have been here for two
weeks.

"Yes, you must stay till the weekend," a CBS journalist says, 'our
Washington reporter says that something will happen soon."

An ABC journalist agrees.

"Our Washington correspondent is very well connected and he never
leaves Washington unless the sky is falling in, and he's preparing to
accompany the Secretary of State on a visit to this region.  That means
something's up."

So on the basis of rumours and gossip I stay to see the start of the
conflict in Afghanistan.  American air strikes begin on Sunday 7
October, one day before I'm thinking of leaving.  We are alerted not by
Washington, but by Dr.  Abdullah, the Foreign Minister of the Northern
Alliance.  He announces at a press conference that air strikes are only
a matter of hours away, and says Northern Alliance front-line units
have been ordered to cease shelling, so they won't be mistaken for
Taliban positions.

We tend to take Dr.  Abdullah's pronouncements with a pinch of salt
because he has alerted us to 'imminent' US air strikes before.  But
usually when we press him, 'imminent' is a matter of days away.

"Hours' is more dramatic, and my news desk is interested.  So is every
other news desk.  The European Broadcasting Union, EBU, can't process
all its bookings.  As their satellite phone goes into meltdown, there
is excitementin the air, but still no facts.  Journalists are queuing
up for ten-minute slots of satellite time, booked back to back all
night.  I do an interview for Deutsche Welle, explaining the
circumstances and saying that American air strikes are no more than
speculation at this stage.  As I say goodbye to Berlin, take out my
earpiece and give up my spot in front of the camera to the next
journalist, Bruno from EBU comes up to whisper that air strikes have
begun.  Thank God my report wasn't live and we have time to retape
it.

The air strikes are terrifying for the people of Kabul who have no
air-raid shelters to go to and have to sit out the attacks in their
homes, clutching frightened children close to them.  However, to us
it's just a job.  Journalists are often accused of being vultures and
feeding on other people's misery.  If it bleeds, it leads.  You
certainly can't let yourself experience every painful thing you see, or
you couldn't survive.  I meet an Irish reporter who says she just got
in tonight, wasn't that lucky, and I understand her completely.  She
was lucky.  And since she files for Irish broadcaster RTE, which I also
do, she lets me use her satellite phone.  So I'm lucky, too.

We work around the clock reporting on the air strikes, though Kabul is
actually hundreds of kilometres from here.  There are few Western
journalists in Kabul.  The closest teams are in the Panjshir Valley,
some fifty kilometres north of the city, but I know of one
correspondent who describes himself as being 'just north of Kabul',
when he is in fact north of the Panjshir Valley, a good two or three
days' journey from Kabul.  For most of us, though, it seems
"Afghanistan' is a specific enough location at this stage.  No matter
where you are in the country, even if you are nowhere near the bombing,
news organisations will take stories from you.

When you are not on the spot, only as close as you can get to the spot,
your access to information is limited, making it extremely frustrating
when Berlin or Washington or Sydney is crossing to you live for an
'update'.  I am trying to glean what information I can, and it is a
tense night.

I am filing for three news broadcasters on three different continents,
which involves juggling time zones, bulletins, extra live inserts, and
then extra bulletins as Deutsche Welle responds to the air strikes by
extending to a rolling twenty four-hour news service.  To do this I
have to borrow satellite phones, which are in heavy use.  But the
tension affects the men around me differently I start receiving
declarations of love.

I'm stunned.  I've been doing live shots from this exact same spot for
two weeks, attracting no one, and tonight of all nights, when I don't
have time to listen to men emboldened by bombs into thinking about sex,
they are everywhere.  One makes his proposal in Russian, which makes me
even more grumpy, since I have to concentrate to listen to Russian and
I don't have time to concentrate on anything but the news.

The locals are equally affected.  They stand wrapped in their woollen
blankets at the edge of the pool of light cast by the camera, listening
intently as I do pieces to camera in a language they don't understand.
They've never gathered to watch before, and one hits his head with his
hands, telling an EBU technician that he is 'sick with love'.

He's not sick with love, he's just sick with bombs.

I file around the clock for thirty-six hours, on the air strikes, where
they are targeted, how many bombs are being dropped, how much damage is
being caused, and speculating on the efficacy of such strikes in a
country like Afghanistan, where there is no real infrastructure to
damage.  In bombing Belgrade, NATO could destroy electricity stations,
plunge cities into darkness, and punish the government of Slobodan
Milosevic.  It is not clear whether the same is true here, where there
is almost no electricity anywhere in the country.

The most difficult question to answer tonight, and over the next few
weeks, is the extent of the civilian casualties resulting from the
bombings.  Those figures will only become clear when we can verify them
independently after the Taliban leave Kabul.  This lack of information
doesn't stop the news programs asking us now though.  My biggest
nightmare is being asked questions live on air I don't know the answer
to.

"So, Irris Makler in northern Afghanistan, what impact are the air
strikes having in terms of the loss of civilian life?"  Takes some
fancy footwork to get out of that one.

I catch some sleep on the cold concrete floor at EBU in between live
shots.  EBU staff are putting in long hours, too, and a strange
sleep-deprived hysteria grips us all.  At 4 a.m. Maxim, a cameraman
from Moscow, makes me 'special coffee for women' it sounds better in
Russian, and it tastes great.  He laces coffee with brandy and sugar to
wake me up and make me lively enough to talk to an international
audience about a war I can't see and don't yet understand.

This is one of the biggest changes wrought by twenty-four-hour rolling
news.  It has transformed journalists from reporters into 'experts'
which we are not, by definition.  Now instead of going out to discover
what is happening, and report on it, we stand at a feed point and tell
the audience what someone else has told us.

The following day Bruno brings out his CD player.  The strains of very
slinky jazz greet people arriving at EBU's outdoor office to file.
Reverting to the DJ he once was, he plays tracks for different
journalists.

"And a special track for my favourite team the guys from China, who are
going home today," Bruno says in a smooth voice.  They are actually
from Taiwan, but today who cares?

"Here it is gentlemen, this one's for you, "The Green, Green Grass of
Home"."

They look expectant.  Their English is not fluent, so they don't really
know what's coming, but when they hear the song they have tears in
their eyes.  They sing along, until Bruno reminds them why they're
here.

"Your feed is in two minutes, when the song is finished," he croons in
his syrupy DJ voice.

They listen till the end and scamper off to do their live shot.

Suddenly I'm laughing.  It's surreal, karaoke in the middle of a war,
then rushing off to tell your home audience in a serious voice all
about the latest developments 'live from northern Afghanistan'.

He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had
never known, to humble and to test you so that in the end it might go
well with you.  (Deuteronomy 8:16) It falls like manna from heaven over
the desert of Afghanistan.  Yellow, plastic manna, in a carpet over the
stony ground.

Within a week of the air strikes, the US is dropping food from the sky
for those starving in northern Afghanistan, and people are soon
fighting over it.

Each package contains a ready-to-eat vegetarian meal, sufficient for a
day's rations, of the type issued to American troops.  Each is marked
'humanitarian aid a gift from the people of the United States', but
this is written only in English, which almost none of the recipients
can read.

Hundreds of people from the nearby refugee camps run up to collect the
donated food, carrying the yellow packets on their heads and wrapped in
scarves or the material of their clothes.

But once they snatch their booty, many people are clearly confused. The
food includes items unfamiliar to Afghans, such as peanut butter,
strawberry jam and pop tarts, as well as layers and layers of
packaging.A child squeezes peanut butter out of its vacuum-sealed
packaging into the dust, in front of American TV cameras.

"You can't film that," says an American journalist.

"Why not?"  asks his Russian cameraman.  Some people feed the food aid
to their donkeys.  They have to be shown how to eat and prepare such
unusual food.  But the US government has not put any advisers on the
ground to do this part of the job.

The instructions on the packets are quite complex some confuse me, and
English is my first language.  Fortunately, exposure to the "Meals
Ready to Eat' the NBC crews have brought means I can explain to people
what to do from personal experience.  Once we show them how to eat the
prepackaged food, they politely declare it is quite tasty.

The food packages land over a wide area.  In some places, people fight
over them.  In other places, further away from the refugee camps, men
with jeeps and trucks appear and collect huge quantities of the
packages, loading them into their vehicles, and guarding them with
guns.  They say they are planning to distribute this food aid.  But
there's no way of knowing whether that's true.  An American TV crew
follows one truck full of contraband packages and after half an hour of
changing stories and directions, the drivers are shamed into giving the
food out to the poor.

"I feel like I did my good deed for the day," says the cameraman.

This experience encapsulates the problems with this method of
delivering food aid, for when there is no news crew who happen to be in
the right place at the right time, what then?

Local aid agencies are critical.  They confirm that with humanitarian
aid dropped in this way by plane, it's difficult to police the
distribution and to ensure the food reaches the right people.

"It's not targeted, so it's wasteful, too much gets lost, some people
get ten packages, some get none.  This is a bad method of delivering
aid, especially when resources are so scarce," Eric Le Guen from ACTED
explains at an interview in a refugee camp.

I tell him the story of the news crew and the trucks collecting the
packages.

"Exactly.  That's why we think it's a bad idea."  He humbled you,
causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither
you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on
bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
(Deuteronomy 8:3) This is a controversial project, even within the US.
Criticism also comes from an unusual American source, an aid agency
descended from the Knights of Malta, who were last in these parts
during the Crusades, putting Muslims to the sword.  Now the modern-day
Knights working under the trade name "Knightsbridge' are here to
deliver food and tents to refugees in northern Afghanistan.  Despite
persistent rumours of links to the CIA, American Knight of Malta Ed
Artis is scathing about the US food drop.

"Whoever came up with this concept had bad information.  The colour of
the packets, the method of delivery, the contents of the packets, that
person should be fired.  The people don't eat these things.  The
Russians when they were here dropped yellow cluster bombs on these
people.  They have been oppressed, they are starving, but they have a
little dignity left.  Don't throw food at them.  They're not
animals."

In addition, says Artis, no humanitarian drops have been made in the
Mazar-i-Sharif and Bamian regions, which are cut off from the rest of
the world by a Taliban blockade and where arguably the need is greater.
He says the unavoidable conclusion is that the US has dropped the food
aid here because this is where the journalists are.

Artis is a character.  A decorated Vietnam veteran and retired combat
medic, he calls himself "Sir Edward' on his card they are knights,
remember?  He is a red-faced Californian in his fifties, surviving
mostly on sugar cubes.  I'll lose forty pounds on this trip, just like
the last," he says with a twinkle, grabbing another cube from the NBC
stash.

Then he adds more seriously, "I was a warrior but I came back from
multiple tours of Vietnam and thought that I could wage peace as
well."

Much of the Knights' aid work is self-funded, and he boasts that not
one cent of money received in donations goes on administration.

"I got a beat-up old car, my house is paid for, what else do people
usually spend their money on?"In a delicious American touch, he says
part of the funding of his aid work comes from a book deal and the
possibility of a Hollywood movie.  One of the major studios has taken
out an option on his life story.

"So that's two hundred thousand dollars in the kitty."

Then he turns serious.

"This is not a business, it's an avocation that turned into a vocation.
Walking around refugee camps you cannot but feel impelled to do
something.  Cast-offs in the rest of the world can save a life here.
I'm just an agent for the child, for the widow, for the elderly, I'm
just glad I can do it."

On his modern-day crusade, for Ed Artis, almost anything goes.

"We go to the front line ahead of the NGOs [nongovernment
organisations] at the threshold of the migration of refugees, providing
care and comfort.  We draw in some of the other NGOs who might not
think it's safe.  When we've been here for a while, they see that we're
not dead, and they might bring in their larger operations."

He says he's delivered food to front lines as the bombs drop in Albania
and Chechnya.  He brings clippings with him, to show us that he is who
he says he is interesting that he feels this necessary.  The articles
from small-time US papers recount that he smuggled tonnes of medicines
into Cambodian refugee camps and defied Taliban fighter jets to fly
medical help to the Hazara people in the interior of Afghanistan, when
no other humanitarian organisation could go there.  He also says he
managed to persuade the Albanian mafia to guard medical supplies for
Kosovo refugees through his connections with the New York underworld.

"But that's a long story .. ."  He denies point blank he is gun running
or that his exploits are a cover for intelligence gathering.

In Khoja Bahauddin, Ed Artis is sometimes in the company of "Bob', a
strange American in a dark jacket and dark glasses.

"Bob' is pleased that I file for Voice of America, and is always
sympathetic to me about the amount of money the US government is
'ripping out' of the broadcasting service.  His job is never explained,
and we suspect him of being a Special Forces officer.  His plans are
shadowy, and he says he may be accompanying Ed when he goes to Choyab -
a town four hours west to deliver aid to starving refugees.

"Bob' may not be serious about this, but Ed is.

"You don't know anyone who wants to donate half a million dollars for
tents?  I know where I could get them right away, if you did," he
says.

Ed Artis tells reporters that instead of dropping food on people, the
humanitarian aid should be given to nongovernment organisations that
can go and distribute it on a one-on-one basis.

"You have to give the aid to the NGOs that have the balls to go on the
ground."

We soon see the yellow US food packages on sale in the bazaar.  Someone
is making a profit out of US largesse.  But at least the packaging
doesn't go to waste.  Kids use the yellow plastic bags to carry their
school things.  You see them from a distance, walking beside donkeys,
with their small US-issue yellow plastic bags.  They are the perfect
size for children who don't have schoolbooks.

Two weeks later, the US broadcasts messages on radio in local
languages, warning Afghans not to confuse the food aid it is dropping
with the cluster bombs it is also dropping, as both come in yellow
packages.

I find the War Against Terror is becoming more and more surreal.

I go out to gauge local reaction to the US bombing.  In the Qumkishlak
refugee camp, I find Nasr again, the patriarch who was eating boiled
rice and looked ninety even though he was only fifty.  His family has
received a second donation of oil and sugar, and he welcomes the air
strikes.

"It is good that America helps us," says Nasr.

"For a long time America abandoned us.  Afghanistan needs help."

At my favourite moneychanger's, a small shack facing the main square in
Khoja Bahauddin, the men sit cross-legged on rugs discussing the air
strikes.  The American dollar has lost half of its value against the
Afghan currency, the afghani, in the space of a week, instantly making
goods twice as expensive.  The moneychangers say that the effective
increase in the value of the afghani is a vote of confidence in the
American military action, and indicates faith the economy will
improve. If the war is going badly then the afghani will plummet again.
 But they are also making a tidy profit, as they gleefully admit.

"It's good.  It's good for business.  Of course we profit if the dollar
falls," says Shaqib, the chief moneychanger, looking up from his game
of chess.  He joins the drivers, translators and owners of generators
as the new rich in Khoja Bahauddin.

"But it's also good for Afghanistan, if it means the Taliban are
defeated.  The Taliban are very bad and Afghanistan needs peace."

But even those who welcome the air strikes are worried about their
relatives in the south.  In the square I meet Mahmudullah, a man in his
forties who left Kabul three months ago with his teenage son, fearing
the boy risked being conscripted into the Taliban army.  Mahmudullah's
three daughters and their families remained behind in Kabul.  He does
not know if they have suffered during the air strikes.

"It is difficult to contact them, they have no telephone."

A man squats on his haunches on the floor of a dark shop across from
the moneychanger's.  Salahuddin is one of a group of men waiting to be
called to the pedal-operated CB radio, plugged into a car battery,
which allows them to contact Kabul.  This is how they check on their
families' safety.  They use a method of communication originally
devised by the military in a country without communications, now
adapted again for civilian use.  They call a similar shop in Kabul,
give a name and address, and a runner there goes to alert the family to
the call from the north.  Then they come with him to the shop, and call
again to speak to their relatives.

"Hello, hello, yes, please go to the following address and ask for
Amonallah," Salahuddin tells the operator.

This cumbersome method of communication can sometimes take the best
part of a day.  But here that seems not to matter.

"Yes, I spoke to my brother-in-law.  My sister and the children are all
well.  My mother, too.  We can't say too much because we know the
Taliban are listening in, and we don't want them to punish the family.
So we only discuss matters very generally, but they say everyone is
well, Allah be praised."

Salahuddin can also tell me that the Kabul telephone exchange has been
hit during the air strikes, because he usually leaves a message asking
his family to call him by phone at a number here, but they are no
longer able to do that as all the phones in their region have gone
down.

On Wednesday 10 October, the US bombs its first targets here in the
north, in the nearby town of Taloqan.  War is coming closer.  By Friday
people fleeing Taloqan begin to trickle into Khoja Bahauddin.  I'm with
two friends buying supplies in the town square cartons of juice, cans
of Pepsi, sultanas when the stall holder says that his friend has just
arrived from Taloqan.

Gul Ahmad stands in the back of the shack, behind dusty rows of goods.
He is a twenty-eight-year-old merchant, as dusty as the produce.  He
describes how he watched the American bombs dropping on Taloqan.  He
was awake all night, and saw American bombers strike airfields and
destroy the Taliban's military helicopters.  He says the fire at the
airfield burned until the following morning.

"It terrified me.  I could see that war was coming," he says.

Fearful of war and the impact it would have on his business, Gul Ahmad
loaded his possessions onto forty donkeys.  Every image here is
biblical even the numbers resonate from the Old Testament.  He didn't
load his goods onto twenty-three donkeys.  It had to be forty.  The
next night, he and a group of ten others walked out with their
possessions, to escape Taloqan.  They hiked for twenty-four hours over
the mountains to reach Khoja Bahauddin.

Gul Ahmad says some Taliban commanders have run away from Taloqan,
taking their families with them.  He saw them packing their belongings
and families into their jeeps before they fled.  This is more than Gul
Ahmad did.  He left his family behind to face the Taliban and the
bombings.  He says those fleeing Taloqan were mostly 'foreign' Taliban
commanders, from Pakistan and Arab countries.  Later, however, we hear
it is the foreign Taliban who are the more determined fighters, staying
on until after the local Afghans have given up or switched sides.

I want to ask Gul Ahmad more, including why he left his family behind
while saving his goods, but he is reluctant to keep talking.  "No
more," he shakes his head and moves further back inside the shop.

We walk away, talking about this interview.  If Gul Ahmad is right, the
American bombing in the north of Afghanistan is weakening the
Taliban.

It seems that the air strikes have not changed much militarily here.
The Northern Alliance is waiting for the US to smash the Taliban before
it begins its offensive, and it is still waiting on large-scale weapons
delivery from Russia.

Officially, Military Commander General Fahim welcomes the US
intervention against the Taliban, and the promised support for the
Northern Alliance.  But he is not revealing his tactics, on or off the
record, including the timing and direction of any military push.  It's
understood that he wishes to secure the north of Afghanistan first,
recapturing the town of Mazar-i-Sharif before heading south to attack
the capital, Kabul.

This strategy of starting the ground war here in the north is
understood to be less popular with Washington, which wants a quick
victory, easy to explain to the American people.

"Everyone understands the concept of capturing the capital city.  The
name Mazar-i-Sharif doesn't mean anything to Mom and Pop sitting at
home watching TV in the US," an American journalist explains.

But what the Northern Alliance leaders are hoping for is that after a
couple of military defeats, Taliban commanders will begin to defect,
either because they want to be on the winning side or because they
would be paid.  It's a domino theory the hope is that once one or two
commanders defect, others will follow.  In this scenario, the northern
territories, where we are, will fall first, and the rest of the country
will follow without major fighting.

That's why every account of a defection is seized upon by Northern
Alliance leaders and gloatingly reported and then so hotly denied by
the Taliban.

The man the Northern Alliance is pinning its hopes on at Mazar-i-Sharif
is Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum.  He is a larger than life figure, an
ex-Communist who recreated himself as an Islamic warrior, while
remaining a lover of wine, women and song.  He famously said of the
Taliban, "We will not submit to a government where there's no whiskey
and no music."  A giant of a man, he has a reputation for brutality,
with allegations that his troops committed atrocities against civilians
in Kabul in the early 1990s and then in the north near Mazar-i-Sharif
towards the end of the decade.  Dostum is once again outside
Mazar-i-Sharif, his men in a pocket surrounded on three sides by
Taliban troops who have taken and retaken the city twice since
expelling Dostum in 1997.

On 13 October General Dostum tells British journalist Tim Judah by
satellite phone that within the last twenty-four hours a Taliban
commander called Kazi Abdul Hai has defected, bringing 4000 men with
him.  But within days, General Dostum is forced to admit Kazi Abdul Hai
has switched back to the Taliban.  He claims some of the Taliban
leader's 4000 troops have remained with the Northern Alliance.

The problem with this story is that we can't verify any of it: whether
Kazi Abdul Hai actually has 4000 men, whether he ever really defected,
or whether once he defected back some of his men chose to stay with the
Northern Alliance.  There are Taliban forces between us in Khoja
Bahauddin and General Dostum south of Mazar-i-Sharif.  He can't get to
us and, more importantly, we can't get to him.

The significance of these defections so incomprehensible to a Western
observer is that they indicate which way the wind of victory will blow.
At this point in mid-October it seems that the wind is still
changeable, and that you couldn't chart a reliable course on it.

The French aid agency ACTED has opened its doors as a guesthouse,
providing lovely rooms before it, too, is overrun by journalists, as
happened at the Foreign Ministry.  My Deutsche Welle colleague
Christoph Wanner has a room there, and I am sitting outside writing
when I hear his satellite phone ring.  I run in to answer it, and am
asked for a journalist I've never heard of.

I explain that he's not here, and that I don't know him.  The caller
says he is from Neue Ziircher Zeitung newspaper in Switzerland, and
that he needs to find a freelance journalist.  Do I know any?I tell
him that I am freelance, but that unfortunately I don't speak German.
The man from the NZZ is not deterred.

"That doesn't matter you can write the article in English, and we can
translate it.  But I need 800 words on the most recent events, in a
hurry, and can you wind in some local reaction to the bombings,
especially from the refugees?"

Before I know it I am agreeing, and the efficient Swiss newspaper is
taking my bank account details so that they can pay me directly.  So
this is how I come to be shouting my copy down a poor sat phone line to
a German woman who can't really speak English.

"Bitte to repeat that last sentence."

"It's the first sentence, and it reads as follows ..."

I have to repeat each sentence twice to Frau Brunner, after which she
says, "Ja, now I am content, please go on."

At this snail's pace, Frau Brunner records my copy, which is beginning
to sound lame even to my own ears, until she objects, "But vy have you
called him a town crier?"

"It's his job he is a town crier."

"Oh vot it is?"

"It's .. . it's a town crier.  He walks through villages making
announcements."

"Oh."  She does not sound convinced.

"It's a word, in English, it's a word."

We struggle on through three more sentences, until Frau Brunner
exclaims, discouragingly from my point of view, "But vy haf you written
ze sentence like zat?"

Chris Stephen, listening in and laughing, says I should have replied,
"Because, madam, in English it scans!"

I am not so bold, and repeat the sentence for the third time.

"Ja, I think I understand vot you are trying to say," Frau Brunner says
doubtfully.

"I am content, please go on."

I shudder to think what that piece looked like translated into
German.

Later in the week, I file at EBU until 2 a.m. for "The Today Show', a
morning television program for Channel Nine Australia.  They want to
know about the effect of the continuous US air strikes in terms of
morale on both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.  They are also
interested in the military preparedness of Northern Alliance troops for
a ground offensive and whether the Russian weapons that have been
promised are getting through.  I drive along the dark, bumpy road to
the Foreign Ministry, exhausted.  I have been putting in sixteen-hour
days and working till 2 a.m. all week.  I don't sleep very well because
when I get home the NBC contingent work all night, filing to the United
States during their day.

The thought of my sleeping bag has never been so inviting.  I sleep
much better since I switched the short, plast icky sleeping bag bought
for me in Dushanbe, for a warm high-quality one made of modern fibres
'good to minus fifteen celsius', that belongs to the Northern Alliance.
Two officials gave it to a gorgeous blonde reporter from Finland whom
they found irresistible.  She left without the sleeping bag and, after
five days of looking at it lying crumpled on the floor of my room, I
took it well, swapped it for my short second-rate one.  I've squared
this with my conscience as I've also bought two mattresses in the
market, which I will leave here when I go.  It's almost a fair
exchange.

I'm thinking fondly of my new Northern Alliance sleeping bag when a
teenager with a gun peers in the car window and waves us through the
checkpoint on the road to the compound.  We reach the Foreign Ministry,
I say good night to the driver, and walk in to the dark compound, where
one small light is shining.  A guard, another teenager with a gun,
comes up and starts to shout at me, pointing at his watch and making it
clear that this is the Dari version of "And what time do you call this,
missy?"

I find myself shouting back, "Don't you wag your finger at me as though
I'm the sixteen-year-old and you're my father.  Where do you think I've
been anyway?  Out having a good time at Khoja Bahauddin's famous
nightspots?  I've been working, I don't choose to come home at 2 a.m."
it's my job .. ."

I trail off mid-sentence, realising that I am shouting, in English, at
a teenager with a gun, in a culture where they use them, and where
women's lives are worth nothing.  I'm losing it.  I don't shout at guys
with guns, especially at two in the morning.  It's time for a break.

I've been here three weeks, which is longer than most other
journalists.  The vast majority spend no more than two weeks here
before they are replaced by a new crew.  Many don't last a week.  It's
hard to file to hourly deadlines from the fifth century.  Maybe it's
time to go home, and pick up some money and equipment before coming
back.

It proves as hard to get out of Afghanistan as it was to get in ... you
can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

There are no reliable flights to Tajikistan.  People wait for days,
scanning the skies for a mythical helicopter that doesn't turn up.  Or,
when one finally appears, so many journalists scramble to get onto it
that it is overladen and is forced to crash land.  That's what happens
to five of the European journalists I flew into Afghanistan with from
Dushanbe on Chopper Number 3, was it only three weeks ago?  It feels
like a lifetime.  Waiting in the Panjshir Valley for a flight out of
Afghanistan, they had been promised that they would definitely fly on
the next chopper out.  However, when one finally turns up, days later,
they find that they are competing for seats with the Northern Alliance
military who need to ferry men and a dead body back up north.  The
journalists say they and their gear must have priority.  The soldiers
say they and their body must have priority.  Neither backs down.

The pilot says he can't take so many but in the end he gives in and
takes everyone.  The overladen, poorly serviced chopper takes off above
the mountains, carrying soldiers, journalists, gear and corpse, but
then its emergency lights come on, and the pilot says they will not
make it.  He tries to perform an emergency landing right where they are
at that moment -above a mountain in the middle of nowhere.  The
soldiers start chanting Allah Hu Akbar God Is Great preparing to meet
their maker.  My friends are sure they are going to die.  The chopper
hits the ground hard, but miraculously, no one is killed, or even
seriously hurt.

They climb out of the wreckage, with no idea where they are.  There is
nothing in sight.  The nearest village, Rustak, is seven kilometres
down the mountain.  Villagers scramble up the steep slope.  They have
never seen foreigners and are poor beyond describing.  They form a line
to help the journalists carry their heavy silver boxes of TV gear, and
climb down the mountain in a strange procession the journalists, the
barefoot villagers, the soldiers.  Everybody is carrying something:
gear, backpacks and, of course, the corpse.  The dead Northern Alliance
soldier is being borne down the mountain by his comrades and a boy from
Rustak.

When they reach the village, the grateful journalists then hire a jeep
and drive back to Khoja Bahauddin.

This salutary tale reinforces that the best way to get in and out of
here now is by road.  The route requires driving to the Tajik border,
which is actually at the Pyang River, and then crossing the river by
barge.  It's recommended you do this stage of the journey at night,
because Taliban snipers are sitting in the mountain opposite, and have
attacked a convoy here.

Once you've crossed safely, it's a six-hour drive back to Dushanbe.
Since there is nothing on the Tajik side of the river except reeds, you
have to co-ordinate a car to drive down from Dushanbe to meet you
there.

This requires a good deal of planning, not to mention bribing of border
guards along the way, but luckily for me the BBC has a correspondent
coming in the next day.  He is due to ring in and if he does they may
be able to hold his driver, and get him to wait for me on the other
side of the river.

I'm leaving more suddenly than I thought.  As soon as I adjust to the
idea, I find that I am thrilled.

The BBC's safety officer picks me up, and I feel very grand because we
are in the Beeb's armoured car, which last did service in Kosovo.  We
drive back along the familiar bumpy road to the river, for the border
is just down from the front line that we know so well.  It's dark when
we reach the river crossing.  There is a small mud-brick building,
where three turbaned men sit on mats on the floor.  This dark room, lit
by a lantern, is the Afghan border post.  The small flame casts long
shadows on the wall and on their guns, as one of the men notes on a
piece of paper that I am departing Afghanistan.

"Passport number?  Father's name?"

They make a notation in pen in my passport as well.  They have no
stamp.

I greet the incoming BBC correspondent and settle down to wait for the
barge.  I look over the dark stretch of water that the Persians called
the mighty Oxus when they ruled this region hundreds of years ago.  It
is reduced in size by drought and time and decades of Soviet water
diversion schemes, which are draining the river and the seas it feeds,
the fallout of a disastrous experiment with growing cotton in the
desert.

My favourite book on travel in Central Asia is written by Fitzroy Ma
cLean  He was a British MP and one of the founders of the SAS, but is
most famous for being the model for James Bond.  Ma cLean was in Moscow
in the 1930s as a diplomat, and wrote about his travels in Stalin's
Russia, as well as his adventures and flirtations during World War II,
in a wonderfully entertaining book called Eastern Approaches. It's
urbane, flamboyant and moving, leaving you shaken and stirred.

Fitzroy Ma cLean crossed by river from Russia into Afghanistan, the
same trip I am about to do.  Despite the passage of seventy years and
the demise of Communism, the experience has changed very little.

Now there is only one barge.  In the 1930s when Ma cLean travelled,
there were three paddle boats, but two were out of action and the third
was undergoing a complete overhaul.  Though it had a grand name the
Seventeenth Party Congress Ma cLean notes acerbically that 'to judge by
her antiquated appearance, she must have been built long before the
Communist Party was ever thought of.  The Seventeenth Party Congress
was also 'handicapped by the absence of an engine motor of any kind.
Eventually it was decided to take the motor out of one of the first two
and transfer it to the third.  It turned out to be an ordinary
unadapted tractor motor from the Stalin factory."

Once the work was done, Fitzroy Ma cLean boarded the boat.

"The Red Flag was hoisted.  The crew of seven counted and recounted in
case any should try to escape.  The tractor engine (an anxious moment)
started up.  And we set out on our somewhat unsteady course across the
Oxus."

When I first read Eastern Approaches, by my favourite dashing hero, I
didn't imagine I would one day be standing at the same river, doing the
same trip, only in an even more basic vessel.

The Seventeenth Party Congress was a boat with a frame and a roof.  Our
barge is just a pontoon, with no protection from the elements.  Our
barge is also powered by a tractor motor surely it couldn't still be
the same one, handed on from vessel to vessel, down the years?  I put
this thought out of my mind as I throw my bags on.  The barge hasn't
got a crew of seven, but it does have a captain, a kindly man in a
military uniform, who speaks Russian.

I stand and listen to the barge putt-putting through the calm, dark
water.  The sound hums through my feet.  Taliban gunmen are in the
mountains overlooking us, but I feel a great sense of peace and
accomplishment.  I am leaving Afghanistan.

I remember that I have some Afghan currency with me, which I meant to
leave behind for a friend.  On impulse, I offer it to the barge captain
instead.  It will be of absolutely no use anywhere else in the world.
In fact, it can't even be used in southern Afghanistan, since it's
'up-money', only valid here in the north.  But the captain refuses.

"It will be bad for Afghanistan.  Then you will write that we take
money and enrich ourselves," he says sternly in Russian.  I blush in
the dark.  Oh God, I've struck one of the only honest men in
Afghanistan and I wasn't even trying to bribe him.

I hear some desultory gunshots in the hills, but nothing disrupts our
slow glide through the water.  We bump into the bank.  Tajikistan.  I
heave my bag over one shoulder, grab my laptop, bid farewell to the
captain and walk off the barge.

I climb up the sandy riverbank and stand in the pitch darkness looking
for a man I've never met who is going to take me to Dushanbe.  No one
appears, and I keep walking, suddenly nervous.

Then a figure rounds a bend in the path, takes all my gear in that
insistent Russian "You are a woman, you cannot carry a bag' way, and
introduces himself.

"Hello.  My name is Anton.  You are Irris," he says carefully in
heavily accented English.

When I reply in Russian he is so relieved that he does not have to
struggle in English I can almost hear him smile in the dark.  He
introduces me to Sasha, a Russian soldier, not that I can really see
either of them.  Anton says that if I am not in a hurry, after we clear
the Tajik border post, rather than driving all the way to Dushanbe
tonight, we should drive for two hours to a Russian army base where we
can spend the night.

"We can then complete our journey more safely and comfortably in
daylight tomorrow.  "This sounds like an excellent plan and we drive
up along a sandy path to the border post, which is surrounded by barbed
wire and watchtowers, as befits the furthest outpost of the former
Soviet Union.  It is manned by Russian soldiers making it feel very
much as if it still is the Soviet Union although Tajikistan became
independent ten years ago.  The soldiers are a regiment from Vorkuta,
the northernmost settlement in Russia, within the Arctic Circle.  It is
dark there for eight months of the year.  What a contrast this hot, dry
desert must be.

The border guard is sitting in a small room with velour curtains and a
camp bed in the corner.  He is wearing military pants and T-shirt, and
the ubiquitous Russian slippers, tapo-chki.  Anton is also from
Vorkuta, which is why he is a perfect person to smooth us through
customs here and why the BBC chose him for the job.  The BBC are so
organised that the whole thing, bribes and all, works like clockwork,
and we are in and out in a matter of minutes.

I smile in wonder as we clear the border post and drive along a paved
road.  Both seem like miracles.

Anton tells me about Vorkuta.  It is a bleak name, full of blood and
fear like saying you come from the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz or
Treblinka.  Vorkuta was one of the most terrible outposts of the Gulag,
the Soviet labour camps.  It is in a position so far north in the
Arctic that in fact it is not really habitable.  No town could have
been founded there without the use of slaves whose lives were
expendable.  From its inception in the 1930s, freezing inmates worked
without proper food or clothing to build the camp, and slave labourers
were sent there until the 1950s because Vorkuta sits above a huge seam
of coal.

The camps and the mines consumed and extinguished hundreds of thousands
of lives.  The first of the death camps was set up in 1943, and within
a year more than one-third of the thirty prisons were death camps.
Their purpose was to kill their inmates, but the Communists didn't need
crematoria, they just used the climate.  When the temperature plunged
to minus forty and blizzards howled, prisoners were kept in lightly
boarded tents.  The only flooring was sawdust sprinkled onto
permafrost.  The prisoners hauled coal for twelve hours a day, and
within three weeks they were broken.

Anton's grandfather was sent to Vorkuta after World War II for some
misdemeanour invented by Communist bureaucrats, and froze to death.  He
says his mother is now used to the bleak, dark cold and couldn't live
anywhere else.

"Now already in October it is minus thirty-five degrees and dark all
the time."

Anton invites me to Vorkuta, and says he will put me up if I want to do
a story there after this war is over.  The best way to reach Vorkuta is
by train, a three-day journey, but more reliable than going by plane,
especially in winter.  You can wait at Siberian airports for days for
planes that are cancelled and never come.

"It is an interesting place, you know, the cultural life is quite
strong because all the people were dissidents and intellectuals," he
says.

As we drive into a Russian army barracks in Tajikistan, I wonder
whether I could brave somewhere as cold and bleak as Vorkuta.  To tell
the truth, in my Australian way I'm more frightened of winter in the
Arctic than of war in Afghanistan.  Just the thought of Vorkuta makes
these barracks seem inviting, though the toilets here are not much
better than in Khoja Bahauddin.  I unfurl my Northern Alliance sleeping
bag onto a sofa, a vast improvement to the floor I'm used to sleeping
on, and fall asleep exhausted.

In the morning, after breakfasting on packaged chocolate cakes that
Anton has thoughtfully brought, we leave our soldier with his comrades
and continue our drive to Dushanbe.  I marvel at what a difference a
border makes.  Just fifty kilometres out of Afghanistan, in the poorest
country in Central Asia, there are paved roads, cars and shops.

The drive is also one of the most beautiful I have ever done in my
life.  The gaunt brown mountains on this side of the Hindu Kush are
stunning, and halfway along the drive, as we climb higher, they snake
around a clear aquamarine lake, red-brown rocks marching down to meet
the turquoise water.  This beauty spot is man-made, flooded as part of
a Soviet hydro-e'ectricity project.  It is breathtaking, as if the red
rocks and rugged scenery of central Australia were set by a calm
turquoise sea.

We stop at a chaikhana, a traditional teahouse, by the side of the
road.  It has three open-air 'rooms' with a roof but no walls and a
raised platform where you sit cross-legged to eat.  First, you wash
your hands at a faucet in a pipe near the road, which has a small towel
hanging nearby for you to dry your hands.  After Afghanistan, this
small gesture towards public service seems so civilised and so
touching.  The restaurant owner comes out smiling, with two fish from
the nearby stream flip-flopping in his hands.  I instinctively reach
out to catch them.

"Yes, we will have those," says Anton, and they are thrown onto a pan
on a blackened grill, and cooked there by the side of the road.  When
the man reappears with two little live quails, we decline.  There is
too much food already a salad of fresh vegetables, dense sour
pomegranate juice and rounds of freshly baked chewy white naan bread.

Across the road from the chaikhana is a tiny, perfect mosque, with
exquisite silver detail on its roof.  It is the height of an ordinary
house and the width of a very small room.  I've never seen such a small
doll's house of a mosque, and the cafe owner explains it's for prayers
'to go'.  It's for travellers who want to stop to pray and quickly
resume their journey.  Hearing us ask questions, a diner at another
table realises that we are visitors and comes to introduce himself and
invite us to his home.  The hospitality here is spontaneous and warm.

I delight in the food, savouring the fresh ingredients.  The sun is
shining.  My hair is uncovered and I feel free, of dust, shit, and
tension.  Anton is reading a dog-eared book of Persian poetry.

"It's good to read these poems in the lands where they were written,"
he explains earnestly.

We drive on to Dushanbe, and an unexpectedly joyful reunion with the
dezhurnaya at the Hotel Tajikistan who had seemed so stern when I first
visited.

"You are back safely, thank God, dai bog, we have been worried about
you."

Her close attention to my life started out as the coldly professional
interest of the spy, but it is warming into something more personal and
genuine.

"You have been in Afghanistan?  What was it like?  For the women, yes
the poor women .. . and no water?  And no sewerage  Way, way, way.  but
I am so happy to see you safe, thank God, thank God."

I am overwhelmed by her concern and the luxury of a bed and a working
toilet.  Did I ever think of this hotel as basic?  It seems very grand
now.

The Hotel Tajikistan has never had it so good.  The joint is packed,
and the revelling in the bars is feverish, almost demented. Journalists
coming out are delirious with happiness to have escaped, and desperate
for all they were deprived of in Afghanistan.  The bars and the hookers
do a roaring trade.  Journalists going back to Khoja Bahauddin know
exactly what they are facing, and party as if they are on the Titanic. 
The bars and the hookers do a roaring trade with them, too.  I've never
known an atmosphere like it.

There is also a new selection of service industries springing up,
including 'airlines' run by companies that usually provide mercenaries
and 'logistical support' to both sides in war zones coups our
specialty.  They are run by ex-SAS soldiers, and have innocuous names
like Executive Outcomes and Global Solutions.  Some are in Tajikistan,
branching out from their usual tin pot dictator clientele, to try to
profit from the huge captive market of journalists wanting to get into
Afghanistan.  One is run by an Englishman who has come with his own
helicopter, and is charging US$4000 per person for the thirty-minute
flight to Khoja Bahauddin.  He has plenty of takers, even at this
inflated price, but as days pass without his helicopter moving, he's
growing more and more desperate.  He is one of those wonderful people
who become funnier and funnier as the situation grows more and more
dire, He tells bleak, hilarious stories about the frustration of
dealing with Tajik bureaucracy.

"This is nothing you want to know real misery.  Real misery is being
twenty-one years old, standing at attention in the freezing cold, with
your huge fat sergeant in front of you, his mouth three inches from
your nose, his spit hitting you as he bawls "It's only going to get
worse.  And if you want sympathy, son, you'll find it in the dictionary
between skit and syphilis."

Despite his buoyant attitude, his helicopter never reaches
Afghanistan.I want to leave Dushanbe and not on his chopper.  I go to
the airport and buy a Tajik Air ticket to Moscow for the following day.
I pay only a small bribe of US$30 to a uniformed man for this 'express
service'.

I'm going home.

AFGHANISTAN, 25 OCTOBER 2001

In the blink of an eye, which is really about a week, I am back.  Back
at the Hotel Tajikistan, back at the Tajik border post "I remember
you," one of the border guards says in Russian, smiling as he stamps me
through and back at the Pyang River.  I stand on the riverbank in the
early afternoon, looking across the calm, grey water.  Greeting the
captain loading my gear onto the barge, I'm preparing to cross this
physical border and a border within myself, to go back into
Afghanistan, and back in time once more.

While it is literally true that if I stayed in Moscow there would be
nothing to file on as no broadcaster is taking any other 'foreign'
stories, that isn't why I'm here.  I'm here because I want to cover the
biggest breaking story in the world, the one at the top of every news
bulletin.  Nevertheless, I have to steel myself to re-experience the
reality of Khoja Bahauddin.  On a practical level, I think I've kit ted
myself out better, but it seems that I still haven't brought enough
money or deodorant or tampons or face cream, because this time I end up
staying for weeks and weeks.

I return to Afghanistan in late October, just as the US starts a
massive air assault in the north, at the front line further down this
river, bombing Taliban positions in the mountains above Qala Qata.  It
also turns out to be the worst week of the war for the US, and it is
interesting to watch from here, where the war is actually being
conducted, how Washington handles the crisis in other international and
domestic arenas, far from the squalor of Afghanistan.

Pressure is growing to end the bombing campaign, now more than three
weeks old, with questions being asked about its efficacy, since the
huge and sustained use of US airpower seems to be yielding
disappointingly little in terms of results on the ground.  In Europe,
particularly, this has attracted strong criticism, and the White House
is nervous about attacks in the American media.

In addition there are high-profile blunders.  For the second time in
ten days, American warplanes hit a Red Cross warehouse in Kabul.  Two
2000-pound guided weapons are dropped on the warehouse on the night of
25 October, and a B-52 bomber delivers three more 2000-pound smart
bombs the next morning.  In the earlier strike ten days ago, a building
was flattened and a guard injured.  This time desperately needed relief
goods such as food, tents and blankets are destroyed.  They were
earmarked for the city's disabled.  The Red Cross says that the
warehouse now in flames had its emblem on the roof, clearly
distinguishable from the air.  It calls the attacks 'a violation of
international humanitarian law'.

A third bomb misses the warehouse but hits a residential area of Kabul
250 metres to the south.  Washington apologises.  The Pentagon also
admits it expected a speedier victory.  In late October, Rear Admiral
John Stuffelbeem acknowledges that the Taliban are proving to be tough
warriors, and that he is a bit surprised at how doggedly they are
holding on to power.

The bombing wakes me up.

It's my first morning back in Khoja Bahauddin, and I am once again
sleeping on the floor, in a room with snoring strangers.  At 6 a.m. a
heavy rumble shakes the ground, like the beginning of an earthquake. It
seems to be coming from far underneath me, and the windows in the house
start to rattle.  It's repeated boom, boom, boom thirty minutes later. 
I lie there trying to imagine what those huge bombs must feel like in
the mountains at Qala Qata if they shake the earth here twelve
kilometres away.

I reach for my short-wave radio.  Within an hour the BBC is reporting
massive bombing here.  It was the right decision to return.

Today we must go to the front line.  I team up with two other
journalists for the jolting drive on the familiar path to the hill at
Ai Khanoum.  We pass through the checkpoint and drive up the hill,
scanning the sky.  It's a cloudy grey, and cool, as if rain threatens.
We dismiss this possibility, as it hasn't rained in three years.

As we clamber over the top of the escarpment, a B-52 loops ponderously
overhead, dropping bombs on the Taliban positions.  They fall in a
series, causing the mountain opposite to kick up its guts, in
spectacular coloured clouds.  It ends with one huge ear-splitting,
ground-shaking blast.

The mountains look as if they are exploding, and from a distance, this
destruction has a macabre beauty.  But it is the sound which is
overwhelming, cracking and rolling like thunder, and reverberating in
the ground beneath our feet, all the way over on this mountain.  This
is sound you feel as well as hear.

Four Afghan men squat on the ridge watching the bombing, one wearing
the shiny black patent-leather shoes which are the strangest part of
the male winter wardrobe here.  They are like slippers, and the men
explain they are easy to clean mud off, not that there's much need for
that now, with such a severe drought.

It's as if we are at a fireworks display.  Plumes from the last bomb
hang in the sky and then disperse.  The next set of bombers loops
lazily in.

"B Pinjao Du, B Pinjao Du," the men point at the sky, shouting "B-52'
in Dari.

Ai Khanoum hill, where we are standing, falls within the margin of
error for the US bombs, but with the carnival-like atmosphere I never
feel seriously worried.  A plump grey-haired man is sitting on a ridge
behind me with a walkie-talkie clutched to his turban, listening to
Taliban radio traffic.  General Aziz says the Taliban are panicking,
they are shouting that a man has died.

"They are calling for an ambulance.  Most of the talking is in Arabic.
They are saying that three positions have been destroyed and nine men
have died.  "It does not seem like a very large return for such a huge
investment of airpower.  As we drive down the hill to go home and file,
I remember the comment attributed to President Bush at the beginning of
the war what's the point of using a two million dollar missile to
destroy a ten dollar tent?

And, what's more, the Northern Alliance isn't even grateful.

Deputy Defence Minister General Bariolai says that the US selected the
targets for the bombings at Qala Qata without consulting them.  He
tells reporters that he is happy with one lot of 'extremely precise'
bombing this week, which killed at least forty foreign Taliban
fighters, but generally he is not satisfied with the intensity of the
US air campaign.

"Even at Qala Qata, the ten bombs they dropped today are not enough,"
Bariolai says, on a tour of his positions on Ai Khanoum hill.

"The mountain at Qala Qata is big and the Americans have hit two
bunkers, but they have much more work to do.  I understand that for
American people, bombing some hill in Afghanistan might not seem as
important as bombing Kandahar airport.  But there is nothing left of
Kandahar airport, while Taliban fighters have retreated to front lines
like these.  This is where you can really hurt the Taliban, and
al-Qaeda."

The Northern Alliance says it has information that key figures in the
al-Qaeda network have retreated here to Qala Qata, including Juma
Namangani, an Uzbek fundamentalist leader and one of Osama bin Laden's
deputies.

General Bariolai's comments reflect the divergence of strategy between
the Northern Alliance and the US over the focus of the ground war.  The
Northern Alliance wants to start any action here in the north, securing
the power base from which they traditionally launch their attacks on
Kabul.  The US wants to destroy the Taliban strongholds in the south
first.

General Bariolai is defensive when reporters ask about growing
disappointment in the US over the lack of military action by Northern
Alliance troops.  He says the situation on the ground in northern
Afghanistan is complex.

"We have several isolated enclaves, and supplying them with enough
ammunition to start a major offensive is very difficult.  But we will
start the ground offensive before the winter sets in, and I hope by
that time we will have more understanding with the Americans."

The next day I am walking in the square when two men come up and ask me
if I need a translator.  This is quite a common experience here, as
Afghans with even a smattering of English descend on Khoja Bahauddin
from all over the country, lured by the possibility of earning US$100 a
day working as translators for journalists.  For the few Afghans lucky
enough to be in work, that's more than a year's salary.  In a week they
can earn more money than they would see in five years.

Men with desperate eyes clutch crumpled pieces of paper saying they
studied journalism in Kabul in the 1990s.  They ask, "Do you too much
need help, gracious madam?"  One journalist swears he was asked whether
he needed a transformer.

But these two men are different.  Older, edgier.  They are brothers,
both doctors, and they have just spent more than a week on the
gruelling journey from Kabul, walking and catching lifts with any car
that would stop, climbing up through the mountains to reach Khoja
Bahauddin.  They show me their hospital ID and ask me not to repeat
their names as it could endanger them or the families they have left
behind.  Although they are opponents of the Taliban, they are Pashtun
and they don't feel safe here in the north, in the Tajik heartland.

The brothers left Kabul the day after an American bombing raid killed
four security staff at a mine-clearing agency funded by the UN.  One of
the men who died was a close friend of the younger doctor, Momar.

"I told him not to go to work that night, but he insisted that he had
to, he was always so conscientious.  When they found him his head had
been severed, and his legs.  There was nothing left but his trunk."

Momar appears traumatised by his friend's death, but says this is not
why he left Kabul.

"No, I left because I am afraid there will be punishments, reprisals
against Pashtuns who stay."  He wants to leave Afghanistan and migrate
to Europe, where he can work to support his extended family waiting
back at home.

"Yes, the Taliban are evil, holding all Afghanistan to ransom for one
Why is one man more important than all of us?  "But he can see no
future for this country.  After twenty-two years of war he is not
confident this latest episode will stop the fighting or improve the
situation generally.  He wants to earn money and to lead a normal
life.

Both men are likeable, responsible professionals.  The older brother
appears more jovial and less dejected, but he says Kabul is a
frightened city.  The American air strikes are terrifying.  Every
Friday the service at the mosque ends with the imam saying, "Remember,
we may not survive the week and we may not meet again."

I walk with them across the square, but they do not want to do a formal
interview.

"In fact, maybe it is better if you stop walking with us now if it is
known at the guesthouse that we have been talking to journalists, it
could go badly for us."

Perhaps they will have to rethink being translators then, I tell them
sadly.  I wish them luck for their long journey, filled with the
prospect of so many impediments and so much heartache, as they attempt
to go first to Dushanbe, then to Moscow and then to Europe, where if
they ever arrive safely their qualifications will not be recognised and
they will most likely be despised as cheating, lazy, dishonest asylum
seekers.

We return to the front line, to see how the heavy US bombing affects
the troops.  We cross the Kokcha River on horseback, an easy ride today
as the river is sluggish.  As we ride into the first village we hear
gunfire close by.

On the top of the Puze Polihomri hill, at the Northern Alliance forward
position, there are about a dozen soldiers.  They say they are too
close to the American bombs, but otherwise morale is high.  They tell
us US soldiers were on this hill two days ago.

Canadian journalist Levon Sevunts spends many days on this front line.
He is an Armenian who has emigrated to Canada, where he files for the
Montreal Gazette.  We met queuing for visas at the Tajik Foreign
Ministry in Dushanbe, and I liked him instantly.  I rate his work very
highly, not least because he files in English, his fourth language,
after Armenian, Russian, and French, but also because he was a soldier
in the Soviet army, and brings a conscript's eye and understanding to
his coverage.  He is also clear-headed and brave, prepared to stay
overnight in the Northern Alliance's forward trenches during the US
bombings.  This takes courage since the front lines here are only
hundreds of metres apart.

His day with the soldiers starts at 4.30 a.m. The men get up in the
dark to pray, and then have breakfast several cups of tea with brown
bread.  After eating, it's time to fight.  They do this, says Levon,
'while the sun is behind their backs and blinding the Taliban gunners.
After a short firefight, everybody waits for the US air strikes.  The
Taliban hunker down and stop responding to sporadic machine-gun fire.
After each bombing run, Taliban soldiers fire a couple of rounds from
their heavy machine guns, to let the Alliance soldiers know they are
still there.  The soldiers spend the rest of the day waiting for the
orders for the offensive, killing time and trying not to get killed ..
They play cards and gorodki, a game taught to them by a Russian TV
crew, using machine gun casings as their targets instead of cylindrical
sticks."

War.  Still ninety per cent boredom and ten per cent panic.

The only other entertainment for the soldiers is watching a firefight
in the valley below.  There are two houses with a field between them.
One house is controlled by the Taliban, the other by the Northern
Alliance.  These positions are 300 metres apart.  Levon Sevunts reports
that "Soldiers cheer every time the shots come from the Alliance side
and curse when the Taliban house responds.  The houses belonged to one
family before the war, they say."  He adds dryly: "There is not much
talk about the future: why bother worrying about something that might
not happen?"

At this time the US suffers another blow, with the capture and
execution of Pashtun leader Abdul Haq.  The portly, balding
forty-three-year-old was one of the most famous Afghan commanders
during the war against the Soviets, when he was injured many times and
lost a leg in a famous gun battle.  Part of his legend was that he was
the Indestructible Abdul Haq.  He survived he always survived, until
now.

He was a fierce opponent of the Taliban and an influential figure in
the huge community of Afghan exiles.  He'd lived in Dubai for the past
decade, running a successful business.  Following the September 11
attacks, he volunteered to return to Afghanistan, to rally anti-Taliban
opposition among the Pashtuns, and in many ways, for the CIA, Haq
seemed an ideal candidate.

He was a Pashtun, like the bulk of the Taliban's supporters, and he was
acting as emissary of exiled King Mohammed Zaher Shah.  Despite his
record as a hero of the war against the Russians, Haq was not tainted
by the post-Soviet blood bath inside Afghanistan since he did not take
part in the Islamic civil war of the early 1990s.  He had also paid a
huge personal price for his opposition to the Taliban.  In January 1999
his wife and eleven-year-old son were assassinated, and the Taliban
were the chief suspects.

Most importantly, the US administration knew him of old.  He had
dealings with the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI,
during the anti-Soviet jihad, and in the mid-1980s had met with
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, when the CIA had dubbed him
"Hollywood Haq'.  The extent of CIA involvement in his mission is still
unclear.  There are some accounts that he went into Afghanistan with
CIA blessing and assistance.  It is known he made a request to
Washington, via intermediaries influential in President Reagan's time,
to delay US air strikes until he had a chance to return to Afghanistan.
This was turned down.  There are reports that Haq requested substantial
help from the CIA, including the provision of arms, but that the CIA
turned this down also.  According to this version of events, all that
the CIA offered Haq was the one item he had in abundance -satellite
phones.  Suspicious that the CIA wanted to track his movements, Haq
turned them down.

Looking at the sad sequence of events, it seems that Haq's was one of
the missions that the CIA knew about, but had not coordinated and
planned well enough particularly in case of the need for rescue.

On Tuesday 23 October, Haq crossed into Afghanistan from Peshawar in
Pakistan with nineteen men.  The group was only lightly armed.

Within thirty-six hours, having penetrated less than twenty kilometres
into Afghanistan, they were ambushed in a mountain gorge.  Abdul Haq
was trapped by an enemy employing the same tactics he had used in that
very region when he had fought the Soviets ten years earlier. 
Helicopters were the only way in and out when we first arrived in
Afghanistan before the road was opened But although the ageing ill
maintained Russian military choppers were a dangerous option locals and
journalists waited for them anxiously On the helicopter out we finally
made it flying over the HinduKush to Tajikistan with the Russian
emergency services Taliban soldiers blocked both ends of the Alikhel
gorge.  Though Haq and his men fought fiercely for twelve hours, they
were no match for the well-armed Taliban troops.  As the situation grew
more desperate, Haq called his office in Peshawar by satellite phone,
asking them to contact Washington.  Haq's office sent word to an old
CIA contact from the days when he was America's freedom-loving ally.

According to British journalist Jason Burke, the CIA's response was not
encouraging.  It said that it could track Haq's position from his
satellite phone, but that it could not help as the terrain was too
rough for it to land any rescue aircraft.  The CIA received reports on
the progress of the battle and an unmanned American plane attacked just
after midnight.

It was too late.  An hour earlier, Haq's aide had made his last call.
Haq's office in Peshawar told Jason Burke that they heard sobbing and
screaming and the crackle of automatic gunfire and then the line went
dead.

Taliban spokesman Mohammed Tayyab Agha said Haq was captured as he
tried to flee from his hiding place on horseback.  He was taken to the
capital and interrogated.  Then, in accordance with a fat wa issued by
Mullah Omar and the Taliban's council of clerics in September, he was
hanged as a traitor, a 'spy for the US and Britain'.

At 1 p.m. on Friday, less than seventy-two hours after entering
Afghanistan, Abdul Haq was swinging from a makeshift gallows.  Nine of
the men who accompanied him were also dead.

Some Northern Alliance officials suggest to me that Haq's death is due
to a failure of intelligence, that after a decade in exile in Dubai
running a successful business, he had lost touch with the rough
realities on the ground here.  Others argue that such a speedy,
desperate end could only be the result of betrayal, a sting operation
organised by the agents of Pakistan's intelligence service, the
favoured hand behind every conspiracy here.

The official US response is muted, expressing regret over Haq's death
and the failure of his mission.  Senior US government officials mention
Haq only when asked, and then dispassionately.

"Clearly he was, among other Afghans, a person who opposed the
Taliban," says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"And it's certainly regrettable that he was killed."

The administration moves to distance itself from this failed military
action.  In CIA briefings, old assessments are dredged up in which Haq
was described as 'unruly and immature'.  The CIA is also quoted as
saying that he moved too quickly.  It is left to right-wing columnists
in the US to rail against the 'bungled CIA operation' and the betrayal
of freedom-loving allies.

These events come at the end of a bad week for the US.  One American
journalist says to me pensively, "Why do I feel that despite all our
airpower, so far the Taliban is winning?"

The most active front in this war remains Mazar-i-Sharif, a major city
of 250,000 people 250 kilometres to our west.

The city, famous for its white doves, is named for an important Muslim
shrine, the grave of All, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, and is
especially holy to Shia Muslims.  Historically it prided itself on
being an enlightened cosmopolitan city, and for fifteen years it
avoided the worst of the war.  While Kabul was being destroyed, life
went on as usual in Mazar-i-Sharif.  Women were studying in Mazar when
all the universities in Kabul had been shut down.  A wide variety of
people lived in Mazar, even before it welcomed refugees fleeing the
Taliban, such as actors and singers from Kabul who could no longer
perform there after the Taliban captured the capital.

All this changed in 1997, when the Taliban captured Mazar as well.
Thousands died in some of the bloodiest massacres of the Afghan war.
There was a spate of terrible revenge killings as the Taliban took the
city, lost it and took it again.

Now fighting continues in Mazar, with reports that Northern Alliance
troops led by General Rashid Dostum have captured villages on the road
to the city.  Then the Taliban claims its forces have recaptured
them.

We can't verify these reports for ourselves because the front remains
unreachable.  Northern Alliance troops, which have massed to the south
of the town, are in a pocket surrounded on three sides by Taliban
forces.  When the US wants to provide ammunition and supplies to these
troops, they drop them in by helicopter.  We would have to cross
Taliban lines to reach Mazar from here.

Strategically, Mazar has two prizes for the Northern Alliance: a
working airport and a road link to Uzbekistan, about sixty-five
kilometres to the north, where US and British forces are being
deployed.  Once they hold this road, the US will be able to supply the
Northern Alliance with much-needed military equipment.

As the air strikes continue, reports filter through that Taliban
leaders in Mazar are becoming increasingly desperate and punishing
citizens to cement their control over the city.  They know Mazar is not
their heartland.  As a warning to its people, the Taliban hold a public
hanging at Hazrat All, the famous blue-tiled shrine to the son-in-law
of the Prophet.  According to three eye-witnesses, in mid-October the
Taliban brought five men to the shrine at around the time of evening
prayers.  Their hands were bound and the Taliban identified them as
Northern Alliance military personnel, although it is not clear if they
were Northern Alliance or simply unlucky civilians.  Taliban officials
ran a rope through an arch just west of the shrine, about seven or
eight feet off the ground, and then tied the rope around the necks of
the men.  The officials pulled at the ropes, but this did not provide
enough pressure to fully lift the men off the ground.  Two of the
witnesses say the officials then had to tie the ropes to vehicles on
either side of the arch to complete the botched hanging at the holy
site.

Nineteen-year-old Ahmed Umid watched the execution from nearby.

"It is difficult to watch five people being hanged in front of you in
such a wild way," he says.

"As the word spread, I can say that almost fifty per cent of people in
Mazar did not have dinner that night because they were feeling so
sad."

Ed Artis, Knight of Malta and aid worker superman, is trying to get
into Mazar to deliver humanitarian aid, and says he has Northern
Alliance support.

"We're considering going out to Tashkent, getting some cold-weather
gear and some better communications equipment, and going into Mazar
before it falls.  The technique may not be 100 per cent kosher or
legal, but our Northern Alliance advisers now trust us, they know
we're not in the government business, we're not in the God business,
and they'll get us in the safest way possible, whether on foot or by
donkey."

I point out that it is very dangerous to walk across Taliban territory
for a week in order to deliver food aid, and there are not many other
aid agencies that would do it.  The UN pulled all its people out of
Afghanistan as soon as the air strikes started.

"We're here to help the people and do whatever it takes.  It's always
been a rule of mine to hide in plain sight.  I got no guarantees of
living through the night, let alone surviving a trek through Taliban
territory."

I pursue this point.  The Taliban had an ambivalent relationship with
aid agencies even before the air strikes, engineering the expulsion of
most of them from Kabul in 1999.  If they catch an American aid worker
crossing their territories now on foot, they would immediately execute
him as a spy.  And for Ed Artis it is even more dangerous, since we've
heard rumours that the Taliban have put a bounty on his head.

He concedes all this, but says, "If we don't go, if we let the Taliban
threaten us, if we let Osama bin Laden threaten us, then they continue
to win the war on terrorism.  If they want to kill me they can do it
here or in the US, we know now their reach is beyond the borders of
Afghanistan.  They can get me anywhere that I am.  If I let them
intimidate me into not doing what I believe then I am part of the
problem not the solution."

After that rousing speech, I'd join the CIA, too.  I thank him and the
agency for the interview.  Though I can't help liking him, I'm not sure
how much of his story to believe.  How much aid could you carry on foot
across enemy lines, just for starters?  Sir Edward Artis is one of the
strange collection of characters you meet in war zones, but if he does
succeed in delivering food and tents behind the lines, or even here in
Northern Alliance territory, he will be doing some tangible good.
Sometimes I get the feeling that this is more than can be said for the
rest of us.

Journalists are also working to get into the region near Mazar, angling
for a seat on any Northern Alliance helicopter going in to supply
Dostum's isolated pocket of fighters.  So far, no one has been
successful.  A German producer promises he can get me a seat on the
chopper when he goes in.  He is well connected to the Northern Alliance
and he has interviewed Dostum before, so maybe he could get a seat for
himself and his cameraman.  But I can't help thinking what a funny
situation we are in when a man offers every female he speaks to a
one-way ticket to the spot where the fighting is fiercest and where
there is no exit strategy.

I don't really think the offer will come through, and think of it more
as a war-zone pick-up line.  But if it did, I don't know whether I'd
take it.  It would be too dangerous to be surrounded on all sides by
Taliban if things went wrong.  As an experienced front-line cameraman
says to me, "You've always got to know two things: how you're getting
in and how you're getting out.  If you don't know those, you don't
go."

In the meantime we make do with speaking to General Dostum via
satellite phone.  He remains feisty.

"We need more support, especially more weapons, and then we will fight
on the ground for the United States.  We will succeed in defeating the
Taliban."

Dostum says he is progressing and makes one concession that we don't
hear from the Northern Alliance here.  He says American Special Forces
soldiers are working with his men in a training capacity.  The Northern
Alliance denies they are on the ground in Khoja Bahauddin.  But we know
the Special Forces are here, and there is competition among the
journalists to be the first to find and to film or interview them.  The
CIA arrived first, before the Special Forces and two days after me, I
am pleased to learn.  Always good when the jour nos beat the spooks
onto the ground.  The first operative to make it also flew in in a
Russian military chopper, but unlike us he went straight to the
Panjshir Valley.  One other difference is that he was carrying a large
strapped metal suitcase containing US$3 million.  Oh, and he probably
had better communications gear with him than I did.

This agent tells American journalist Bob Woodward that he always laughs
when he sees a movie where someone carries $1 million in a small
attache case, because it just wouldn't fit.  woodward calls this
fifty-nine-year-old CIA man Gary.  He has been with the Agency for
thirty-two years, working undercover in Tehran and Islamabad, and as
station chief in Kabul in the 1980s.  He was weeks from retirement on
September 11, but a man with his experience who also spoke two local
languages was too useful to let go.

Gary sticks around for one more Central Asian adventure, code name
Operation Jawbreaker.  His task is to persuade the Northern Alliance to
work with the US, including receiving US forces.  His method is simple:
dole out the dosh.  He's done it before, during the late 1990s, taking
cash into Afghanistan in lots of US$200,000 for distribution to
anti-Taliban fighters.

But this time he's armed with serious money.  Gary's first meeting in
the Panjshir is with Muhammed Arif Sawari, who heads the Northern
Alliance's intelligence and security service.  Gary places a bundle of
cash on the table: US$500,000 in stacks of $100 bills.  He tells
Woodward he believed it would be 'more impressive than the usual
$200,000, the best way to say: We're here, we're serious, here's money,
we know you need it."

Gary tells Arif they want the Northern Alliance to spend the money on
food, weapons and intelligence operations.  Washington wants a partner
on the ground, and it is also planning to send in small units of its
own Special Forces soldiers to help the local fighters.  Arif tells
Gary that the Northern Alliance welcomes him.

The next day, 27 September, Gary meets with General Mohammed Fahim, the
Northern Alliance military commander, and Dr.  Abdullah, the Foreign
Minister, in the Panjshir Valley.  For two men, double the money.  He
puts $1 million on the table, explaining it's theirs to use as they see
fit.

General Fahim welcomes the United States.

There are lots of ways to win a war.

The bombings at Qala Qata continue, and we continue to go to watch.
After one colossal bombardment, we learn that the US is dropping bombs
five times as large, known as Daisy Cutters, in the east of the country
where Osama bin Laden is rumoured to be hiding.  The Daisy Cutter named
because of the circular pattern of destruction it leaves is the most
powerful non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal.  While most conventional
bombs weigh 500 to 2000 pounds, the Daisy Cutter is a 15,000-pound
automobile-sized bomb, so large that it has to be dropped from a cargo
plane and floated down by parachute.  It is designed to explode a metre
above the ground and to incinerate anything within 600 metres.

I try to imagine what the impact of those Daisy Cutter bombs must be as
we drive back from the front line to Mamur Hassan's to see what
information he has.  The General is busy, but quickly says that
according to his sources, nine positions out of 300 have been
destroyed, and around sixty Taliban soldiers killed.  Like General
Bariolai, he is critical of the US bombing campaign, and says the
Northern Alliance is waiting for greater results before it commences
any military action on the ground.  He also says he is still waiting
for the weapons and equipment that have been promised by Russia.

Washington and the Islamic warriors remain uncomfortable bedfellows.
Despite the cash handouts, the unholy alliance does not appear to be
becoming any easier with time.  12 Many locals remember me and seem
happy that I have come back.  An informal taxi service develops.  I
enjoy walking around Khoja Bahauddin, as it is the only exercise I get,
but every so often cars will drive past me and screech to a halt.  The
driver will stick his head out the window and say "EBU?  BBC?"  They
are always enormously pleased when I accompany them on the five-minute
drive to the European Broadcasting Union, repeating happily the only
words we have in common, "EBU' and "BBC'.  And because it smacks of
normality, of a more easy exchange between men and women, I like it,
too.

I find a new house to live in, the only two-storey building in Khoja
Bahauddin, which really only means that it's a building with basement
rooms as well.  It's located around the corner from EBU, making it
easier for me to get home after I file late at night.  The time
difference with Australia means I am always one of EBU's last bookings,
doing a 1 a.m. live shot for the next day's breakfast TV for Channel 9.
Then I can walk home through the inky Afghan night.

The new house has large rooms and possibly the worst toilet in Khoja
Bahauddin which is saying something.  Its fundamental flaw is that it's
been poorly dug.  Like every outhouse here, it has no door, but the
slit in the mud is positioned so that the wall does not hide you and
you can be seen squatting by anyone walking by.  It is also more filthy
and rancid smelling than most, and frankly I hate it.

There is also a concrete bathroom which all the inhabitants of the
house share a floor with a drain and a tin drum with water in it.  The
water is delivered by a sweet grey donkey, which has white flanks and
delicate feet.  If you pay extra for firewood, the water may be heated
on some mornings, and the bare rooms have carpet on the concrete floor.
That's the extent of the facilities.  It's BYO mattress, lamp, table or
chair.  And of course, if you want electricity it's BYO generator, too.
And BYO candles.  Sometimes the strangely sleepy Afghan teenager in
charge of the house will boil water for you on a gas ring, but that's
it.  The Foreign Ministry is charging US$25 per night for a space on
the floor here, in a room with four others, a fair whack for sleeping
on concrete.  Apparently they slug Japanese TV US$250 for the same
spot, so I suppose we should count our blessings.

The house does, however, have two lovely Russian photographers who are
friendly and helpful, and talk to me in that peculiar mix of Russian
and English that is developing into my second language here.  We have
dinner together, comparing notes about how we spent our day, and they
let me use their generator to charge my laptop at night.  Some Spanish
TV guys move in, and there is a strange collection of fly-by-nights
downstairs, including Americans in khaki army gear, dark sunglasses,
webbing, the whole box and dice, who call me 'ma'am' and file for the
right-wing Soldier of Fortune magazine.  Rob Schulteis, a fascinating
journalist and author, files for both Soldier of Fortune and Mother
Jones, a right-wing jab followed by a left-wing hook that leads me to
believe he must be a good writer.  He is also an Afghan 'veteran' who
has been reporting here since the 1970s.  He has written a book, Night
Letters, about the civil war fought here during the 1990s.

We have vehement arguments about Abdul Haq.  He was not naive or 'soft'
after years in Dubai, says Rob.

"These Taliban are a new breed of people, this is not the old
Afghanistan, this type of behaviour would not have happened ten years
ago."  I wasn't here then, of course, but this seems to me like an
overly romantic view.  These warlords were a tough bunch of guys, even
then.  After all, Haq had been aligned with Hekmatyar, who laid siege
to Kabul for three years, raining US-supplied rockets and missiles on
the city.  Haq's brother was a governor in Nangarhar province who
funded his fighters through opium cultivation.  There is not one of
those Mujaheddin leaders, even the 'sainted' Ahmed Shah Massoud,
without blood on his hands.

Rob argues that the Taliban are a quantum leap beyond the Mujaheddin in
cruelty and extremism.  They starved an entire people, the Hazaras, by
blocking the roads to the region around Bamian and refusing to allow UN
food convoys through the first time food was used as a weapon in twenty
years of conflict.  The Taliban's oppression of women is on a scale
never before seen even in the most backward rural sections of
Afghanistan and it is being imposed on all women, including those who
led very different lives in the capital.

I am sitting and talking to the blue-eyed, slightly fey Rob Schulteis
on the roof of our house.  With the sun warm on our backs, we toss this
argument back and forth.  It is true that the Taliban have brought a
new and much more restrictive version of Islam to a country that was
traditionally immensely tolerant.  Eighty per cent of Afghans belonged
to the Sunni Hanifi sect, the most tolerant of the four schools of
Islamic teaching.  But the Mujaheddin were the start of the change.

Rob says he wants to write about the Taliban and sexual perversion.  It
is a murky subject for a clear day.  The view from this slightly
elevated spot is stunning.  The mountains that are often obscured by
dust or clouds are visible today, and they have a gaunt, bare beauty
that suits an Australian eye.  Autumn is clearly the best season in
Khoja Bahauddin.

Rob pulls out a tin of has war a mixture of tobacco and spices, which
Afghan men hold in their mouths between their lower lips and gums.  As
he takes some, he says that he was born an expatriate, but that he will
probably convert to Islam after this trip.  When I ask him why, he
says, "Because I want to belong."

Following the failure of Abdul Haq's mission, US hopes are pinned on
another English-speaking Pashtun politician opposed to the Taliban,
Hamed Karzai.  Subsequently he becomes known as the leader backed by
the former king, the interim Afghan assembly and the West, to try to
rebuild a central government, as well as the man whose stylishness
turns him into the most surprising fashion icon of the new century.
This is reflected in articles with titles such as "The man who has
single-handedly brought capes back into fashion' and "Hamed Karzai is
in da house, yo, yo'.

In early October he's simply another former Mujahed, a potential
emissary for King Zaher Shah, entering southern Afghanistan with a
group of armed men to try to rally Opposition forces.

In fact, the tall, well-dressed Karzai is Afghan royalty.  At
forty-three years old he is a youthful politician by Western standards,
but in Afghanistan he has exceeded the average male life span.  He
heads a 500,000-strong Pashtun clan from the Kandahar region, the
direct descendants of the first king of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah
Durrani.

Karzai's grandfather was a Speaker of the parliament, and his father
was a deputy during the reign of King Zaher Shah.  In July 1999 his
father was assassinated while walking home from evening prayers at a
mosque in Quetta in Pakistan.  The murder is believed to have been
carried out by the Taliban.

Although Karzai was Westernised and moderate, initially the Taliban
trusted him because of his important tribal position.  Before they
seized power they sought him out and offered him the post of their
United Nations ambassador, a position which he declined.

Karzai has said that he did not initially oppose the Taliban, believing
them to be good, honest people, friends from the jihad against the
Soviets.  He only became suspicious when people he didn't recognise
began to appear at meetings and to take over the Taliban movement.
Karzai believes these men to have been Pakistani intelligence.  After
that he became an opponent of the Taliban and their 'foreign' influence
in Afghan politics.

Following the September 11 attacks, Karzai formulated a plan, similar
to Abdul Haq's, to infiltrate the south of the country in order to
encourage Pashtun tribal leaders to fight the Taliban.  He also planned
to convene a Loyajirga, the national gathering that traditionally
chooses an Afghan leader, to elect a replacement for the Taliban.

The softly spoken Karzai appears to have been more diplomatically
adroit than Abdul Haq.  He gained the support of Afghanistan's former
king, and crucially also that of Washington, obtaining a commitment
from the US to arm any Afghans who split from the Taliban.  He was also
brave.  His training was as a political scientist, and he'd never been
a military leader or fighter, so entering the Taliban's heartland to
foment opposition took guts.

Washington asked Karzai to wait until it gave him the green light.  He
received it on 8 October, twenty-four hours after the American air
strikes began.  With the approval of US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet, Hamed Karzai and a group of his
men left for southern Afghanistan.

They entered Afghanistan from Karzai's home in the Pakistani border
city of Quetta and travelled by donkey across the mountains on tracks
too rough for a four-wheel-drive.  In his desperately poor ancestral
homelands in the Uruzgan province, Karzai trekked from village to
village, rallying support for an attack against the Taliban.

But on Thursday 1 November, it was the Taliban who attacked him. During
a traditional debate among tribal leaders in the village of Dehrawut,
the alarm went up.  Taliban fighters were entering the town.

There was a fierce gun battle, during which Karzai and his men received
American air support.  Karzai reaped the benefits of better
co-ordination with the US than Abdul Haq had managed in his tragic
campaign two weeks earlier.  The Pentagon confirmed that US planes
fired missiles at Karzai's opponents.

Karzai escaped but his whereabouts were unknown.  He was believed to be
working his way across the hills towards the safety of Northern
Alliance territory, or back to Pakistan.  He failed to appear at the
first spot he had told his family he was heading for.  For the second
time in two weeks, CIA-backed opposition forces were in trouble.

The next day we contact Karzai's brother, Ahmed Walid Karzai, in
Pakistan by satellite phone.  He says that Hamed Karzai remains inside
Afghanistan and is continuing to organise resistance against the
Taliban.  He says he has spoken to him, he is well, and all his men
escaped from the fight with only one injured.

Ahmed Walid Karzai confirms that his brother has been talking with some
Taliban commanders about them defecting.  He says that Mujaheddin
leaders are gathering at the family home in Pakistan, waiting for a
signal from Hamed Karzai to cross the border and join him.

But in early November, the Taliban announce they have hanged three
tribal elders in Kandahar for backing Karzai's rebellion.  This is a
direct warning to the West and their own nationals that their
intelligence is still effective.

On 2 November the drought breaks.  After a gap of three years, it
begins to rain, a steady downpour that we initially greet with glee.  I
know that rain does not necessarily mean the end of a drought, that
it's about the quantity of rain, and when and where it falls, but I am
so busy wondering about the implications for the region that I don't
think about the implications for us.  They turn out to be horrendous.
By the next morning, the dust everywhere has turned to mud.

Just when you think Khoja Bahauddin can't get any more miserable, it
does.

The mud has become an oozing, sucking, filthy prison.  Everything is
bleak and grey and our lives become even more circumscribed.  It
reminds me of the mud-spattered accounts of soldiers' lives from World
War I. I find myself grumbling that I haven't signed up for Flanders
field, or the Battle of the Somme.  All right, all right, minus the
trenches and the gassings and the shootings, but still..  .

I go to visit my friends from the British tabloid press, and end up
having to stay the night, sleeping on a mattress, with a blanket
improvised from three jackets.  I am trapped because the walk to my
house, which usually takes seven minutes, has turned into a sea of mud.
It's too risky to attempt it at night, for in certain spots the path is
already so gooey you can sink.  Also the trenches in the ground
outside my house have filled with water, and the new deep pools are
dangerous in the dark.

Even the journey across their yard to the toilet is fraught.  The
toilets, never my favourite part of life here, are slowly leaking and
toppling inwards, as the mud walls sink back into the mud floor from
which they were built.  Squelching in, and then squatting above the wet
clay, there is the dispiriting sound of rain dripping inside the small
structure.  I feel as if at any moment the whole edifice will ooze back
into the ground, naturally when I'm here rather than any of the boys. I
can see the funeral service now ashes to ashes, dust to dust, mud to
mud.

Walking back to the house involves avoiding the puddles, the worst
patches of ankle-turning clay and the only occupant of the yard, the
bedraggled satellite phone, which is slowly sinking into the ground as
well.  One of the photographers snaps this dreary scene, and captions
the picture "Sat phone with toilet and hay'.  That's before the sodden
pile of hay on the wall topples into the neighbour's yard.  Then it's
just "Sat phone with toilet'.

Another British journalist tells me that one night she slips and slides
into the outhouse only to find a donkey and three chickens have taken
refuge there.  She chases the donkey away, but decides to let the
chickens stay.

"They had so politely put their heads under their wings, I felt they
were saying, "We won't look", so I didn't have the heart to push them
out into the rain."

The other grim feature of the ram is it binds everything together.  The
two keynotes of life in Khoja Bahauddin dust and shit are now
coalescing.  As they amalgamate everywhere, nothing is ever clean.
Everything stinks.  Your hands after you do up your shoelaces are
fetid.

During this time, while I'm camped out with the Mirror boys, I hear a
story I never quite recover from, and one which makes me vow never to
go to the toilet again.  A female journalist is perched on the mud,
squatting over the toilet hole, when she hears giggling.  She looks
out, and she can't see anyone.  But some instinct makes her look down,
to see that two boys have climbed into the toilet, so they can look up
at her.  Those boys were willing to stand in a privy on a pile of
excrement and be shat on just so that they could stare up at a woman. I
guess they recognised it doesn't make much difference where you stand
in Khoja Bahauddin.  It is all mud and shit, just different quantities
of each.

After three days of remorseless, relentless, endless rain, just when I
can't bear it any longer, the downpour stops.

I am thrilled at the end to our enforced inactivity.  But we are warned
that the heavy rain has repositioned the land mines that litter the
area, making driving increasingly dangerous.  Once-safe roads in this
remote region may now be full of mines.  And we won't know till we set
one off.

When I first see Sarah from the Daily Mail I can't believe my eyes.  It
takes me only a moment to realise what is wrong.  She's not wearing a
headscarf.  Her long, red hair is cascading to her waist, and she's
wearing tight jeans, a white T-shirt and a leather jacket.  In this
environment, what she's wearing has the impact of watching a woman walk
naked down a city street in the West.  But Sarah says she has had
enough.  She did wear a scarf for a while, but it didn't stop anyone
staring.

"So I've decided that I won't cover my hair any more, since it makes no
difference."

This is part of the paradox of Afghanistan in the north, no one insists
she covers her hair.  If this were Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, or
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, she'd probably be lynched.

Later we go together to the front line to watch the bombing.  It is the
first clear day following the rain, and there is a strange feeling of
reprieve as we wait for the US cluster bombs to fall.

"Which is worse the dust or the mud?"  we ask each other, as we step
over the puddles and sniff the clean, rain-washed air.  We eat Sarah's
pistachio nuts while she sings 1960s songs and dances as we wait for
the bombs to drop.

An Afghan man whom we don't know says she looks very happy.

"Yes, it's a beautiful day," she replies.

"Are you happy that bombs are being dropped on my country?"  Sarah
backtracks.

"I wasn't talking about politics, just about the weather."

US jets have bombed the mountains here almost every day for the past
week.  At the forward positions on the front line at Puze Polihomri,
Major General Yusuf Muhammad watches the bombing.  He walks back to a
safer spot, satisfied.

"They should have been doing this from day one."

His troops controlled the Qala Qata hills opposite six months ago, but
they were pushed back further and further, until they dug at the
village cemetery, on the top of this mountain.

"The Taliban enjoyed numerical superiority, they had better equipment
and facilities," he says.

"But now the American bombing has levelled the playing field for us."

Muhammad's men are Uzbeks, as are many of the Taliban soldiers in the
hills opposite.  But the men here have little sympathy for their
compatriots.

They allied themselves with the terrorists and now they are paying the
price," says one of the soldiers.

I visit my friends at other news organisations, to gather news, or at
least the rumours that pass for news.  All the broadcasters I file to
want to know only one thing: will there be a ground war, and when and
where will it start?  Since none of us has any hard information, we
discuss this question for hours, swapping rumours we have heard from
generals at different front-line camps, till our original rumour
returns, inflated but recognisable.

The other hot topic is the huge cost of this war not for the combatants
but for the media.  The big news organisations are spending millions of
dollars every week.  BBC News has exceeded its entire annual budget,
and is being bailed out by the Director General from week to week.

"Our money will run out on Friday so go on, have some of our instant
noodles," they offer cheerfully.

All my NBC friends have left, but the house shared by the American
networks ABC and CBS is now so well organised that they have a
percolator and proper coffee, making morning visits a special pleasure.
They are building 'winter quarters' so that staff will not have to
continue sleeping in tents when it gets cold.  Every time I visit, the
work is further advanced.  Ten rooms are being built on the edge of the
compound, and I sit watching Afghan labourers on the ground throwing
the bricks they have made up to workers on the roof.  Their movements
are quick, fluid and mesmerising.  It makes me think that if things
were different, they would be good cricketers, like the Pakistanis who
are their neighbours.

One of the CBS techs tells me that the favourite part of his working
day is buying petrol.

"You can't just buy petrol, you have to choose it.  It's not pure here,
they have various grades, and if you're not careful and you get the
wrong one, it simply won't power the generators.  You have to make sure
it hasn't been adulterated too much.  So I go from vat to vat,
checking, smelling, testing this one's too light, I don't like the
smell of that one as if it was wine."

One morning when I have to go to the Foreign Ministry compound, I visit
Massoud's house.  A new NBC contingent is camped out there, the old
crowd having been so keen to see the back of the place that they could
barely spare ten minutes for a han dover

Veteran reporter Jim Maceda is here now.  He is funny and friendly, and
driven, as all successful correspondents have to be, and we discuss the
latest developments in the conflict.  He has set up an office in a dark
corridor, right outside the room where Massoud was assassinated.  On
his dusty table he has a satellite phone, and a laptop with email and
the wires.  It is one of those miracles of modern communications that
Jim can access information from all around the world in this remote
spot.  He is always happy to share what he knows.

"I used to live in this house with NBC," I tell him, 'and your
colleagues were very kind to me."

I meet the rest of the crew and, for the second time, they are a great
bunch of guys, welcoming and interesting.

Your first impressions of people are so crucial.  I walk up onto the
roof with its panoramic view of the river and the town beneath.  There
a cameraman who looks like Kevin Costner is filming the Russian
military helicopters swooping past, and reading a history by Herodotus
in between shots.  This is an unusual guy.  He's a New Yorker called
Tom Streithorst, and I sit talking to him while one of Massoud's
bodyguards prays just beyond the tripod.  Tom is funny and clever and
there's something about this setting with the Islamic warriors and the
sunshine and the Taliban over the ridge that imparts an extra edge to
every exchange.  The pheromones of war.

Tom summa rises what he's learning from Herodotus: This place used to
be the centre of the world.  When Manhattan was inhabited by
hunter-gatherers, an Afghan invented algebra.  When London was an
outpost on the edge of the world, this place was the centre of trade
between Russia and China.  Afghans invented the axle, and therefore the
chariot, and conquered much of the known world.  Look at them now."  We
gaze down from the roof.

A child carrying firewood walks past us bent double, as much a beast of
burden as the donkey that usually does this job.  He passes camels, and
men guiding donkeys bringing water up from the river.  Tom is right, it
is incredible to look at this society, and to wonder where our own
self-confident civilisation will end up in a thousand years' time.
Could it be such a steep decline?

The NBC crew invite me to join them for lunch, the perennial plastic
packaged Meals Ready to Eat.  Cheese tortellinis still rule.  They have
an American conversation, utterly different to the British
conversations at the BBC house the cadences, the subject matter, the
energy, the humour.  One of the pluses of being Australian is being
able to understand the jokes in both languages.

The NBC guys are still concerned about anthrax, which was sent to their
head office at the Rockefeller Center in New York.  But it's not all
serious.  One of them is in mourning because BBC radio reported this
morning that the 1960s are now officially forty years ago.

"That means I'm so old," he wails.

I remind him of the old hippie saying, "If you can remember the 60s,
then you weren't really there."  He cheers up slightly.

"Stay as long as you can," says Tom, 'it's good to have you here.  We
need some oestrogen in this sea of testosterone, it's a relief, you
know."

I tell them that I cooked dinner last time I was here, regaling them
with the story of the wonderful Babette's Feast, with its 'tablecloth'
and candlelight and wine.

They look down at the same grimy table, covered in dirty dishes and
cups, with a packet of Rice Krispies and part of an opened Meal Ready
to Eat, flies trailing over everything.  They ask entreatingly, "Could
you do it again?"

I tell them that it was probably an unrepeatable experience, but I
might be able to cook something more modest.

Jonathan, the sound recordist who works with Tom, says he will help.
He's a dark-haired, funny New Yorker in his late twenties, who looks
and sounds Hispanic, but turns out to be Jewish, the son of an Israeli
father.  This adds another layer to the experience of being in
Afghanistan, but the possible dangers don't deter him.

"I was freelancing for NBC news in New York on September 11, so I've
been on this story right from the start," he says.

"We worked round the clock for the first three days, and from then I
knew I had to come to Afghanistan."

I cover my hair with a scarf and we go to the markets to buy
vegetables.  The approach of winter means that there is even less
choice than before.  The mounds of vegetables on the dusty sheets on
the ground are smaller and mingier.  Most of the tomatoes are green,
and you have to pick out the few remaining orangey ones.  The carrots
are a pale yellow and look like turnips, or long radishes.  There are
still chillies, garlic, onions and potatoes, and a dried herb mixture
that we decide to try, too.  Flies swarm over everything.

"Don't use your hands!"  Jonathan stops the stall holder just as he is
about to scoop the herbs out.  He squats on the dusty sheet, looking
bemused as Jonathan finds him a plastic bag, a small attempt at
hygiene.

Jonathan enjoys the whole process, from communicating without a common
language, to vegetables being weighed out in rocks.  He can't get over
the crowds that accompany us everywhere.  I am by now inured to being
watched and followed, and only notice them because he does.

We walk back through the bazaar, and hear an ear-splitting,
blood-freezing scream from inside one stall.  Jonathan snaps a pic and
I ask what terrible cruelty is going on inside that dusty shack.

"It's a circumcision.  The boy is four years old."  A man beams at us
happily.  We move away from the hellish sound as fast as we can, but it
reverberates in my ears for a long time.  Later Jonathan buys a carved
wooden pipe, which turns out to be a circumcision tool.  I never figure
out the mechanics of that pipe.  When he puts it to his lips at the
bazaar Like this?  the locals laugh helplessly.

We walk back via the new house that NBC is refitting in the centre of
town.  They are moving out of Massoud's house and into a building that
will one day be the Khoja Bahauddin town council.  I suspect it will be
liberating for them to be away from close day-to-day contact with the
Foreign Ministry, but moving their base home, office and feed point for
more than ten people who file around the clock is an enormous
logistical undertaking, especially as they have to keep churning out
reports at the same time.

Their satellite engineer, Hans, has taken charge of this project.  He
is one of the most competent people I've ever encountered, so he should
be able to do it if anyone can.  He's never been outside the United
States before.  The first overseas trip for this Chicago home boy has
been to Afghanistan, and he hasn't missed a beat.  He selects the
building for the new base, decides that for the sake of security it
will need a wall, and goes to the town hall to investigate the title to
the property, so he can make sure the wall is built in the correct
place.  Then he tackles the really important stuff.  He builds a
toilet.

"I need a forty-foot drop," he says to the local builders, with that
fantastic American clarity of vision.

"Oh no, we don't do those.  Our toilets are only six feet deep.  We
only dig six-foot holes."

"Do you ever dig any holes that are forty-foot down?"

"We dig wells..  ."

"In that case bring me a well digger!"

Hans is about to build the best toilet in Khoja Bahauddin, with a
wooden toilet seat, inside a small wooden outhouse, which has a door
that you can lock.  NBC puts an end to squatting in Khoja Bahauddin!
All glory to the US of A. It is a beautiful day and, while we wait for
Hans, Jonathan and I climb up onto the roof.  NBC will do their 'live
shots from here.  It overlooks the slaughterhouse and the public
toilets and the town square, and is overlooked in turn by the mountains
beyond.  Living in close proximity to a mountain range, you gauge its
moods at different times of the day.  This afternoon the air is clear,
and the desert stretches out to the peaks.  They bank up grandly above
us, every crag and facet sharply defined.  Their eternal grandeur
inspires confidences.

Jonathan and I are soon telling each other about our lives and our
dreams, including the films we've made and the films we want to make.
Jonathan reminds me of my favourite cousin in Australia.  Is it time to
go home when you start seeing your family in every new person you meet
in Afghanistan?

When an Afghan boy comes up onto the roof, I write our names in Russian
in my book.  Bashir.  Irris.  Jonathan.  It's funny how everyone loves
the Cyrillic alphabet.

Then Hans is ready: "G to G' - 'good to go', he translates for me and
we carry our vegetables back to Massoud's house.  We cook on the
balcony where the two-ring hot plate is still sitting.  When I last
lived here, the boys stuck a CD to the wall at this spot, and used it
as their shaving mirror.  Now Hans has rigged up a pizza oven. Jonathan
smears the dusty Afghan bread with olive oil and garlic and the dried
herbs from the market, and we bake it in Hans' oven.  We make a real
tomato sauce for the pasta, debating whether to add wine or parmesan
cheese.

"Wine???  Where does this wine come from?  Can we waste wine on this
sauce?"

"Sure we can," says Jonathan, splashing it in.

"It came with the house."

All of the crew who are here tonight around ten guys -sit down to
dinner.  It's a very happy meal.  Producer Karl Bostic, tall, busy and
gracious, asks everybody to say a few words about why they are here,
and what the experience means to them.  I am dumbfounded.  This is not
an Australian way to go on.  Do they do this every night?

They say warm, funny things, about what an unusual bunch of guys this
is and how they couldn't think of anyone they'd rather be stuck here
with.  Tom can lecture us about Herodotus, and Jonathan will tell
anyone who will listen about his current musical obsession: the
Goldberg Variations.  They propose a toast to Club Khoja: "It's better
to be in hell with friends than in paradise with assholes."

I know what they mean, and I search for something significant to say to
a group of complete strangers.  I thank them for taking me in, a second
time once may be accidental, but twice ... I tell them the thing I have
been musing on ever since I have been here, which is how much men have
looked after me.

"Women often dump on men, but I think I see men at their best.  Working
in a team, helping each other.  It's a privilege actually."

They seem to like that.

"When we move out next week, will you come and live with us?"

It's late and I stay the night.  One guy clears a spot in the room,
another finds me a spare sleeping bag, and a third provides me with a
toothbrush and soap.  It's as if they want a girl to look after.  It
makes me realise that for all the bravado "Women: you can't live with
them, and you can't kill them' most men actually miss women when
they're not around.  Wasn't what I expected to learn in a war zone.

Facilities have improved, and everyone has stretcher beds.  I'm perched
on mine, laughing with Jonathan about how the standards have improved
since I last lived here.

"When we pioneers first came .. ."

It's funny to be back in Massoud's house, back in my old bedroom again.
Ahmed Shah Massoud spent one of the last nights of his life in this
room talking with a friend, Masood Khalili.  The two men sat on the
floor, where our packs and stretchers are now.  Khalili says that he
and Massoud looked out over the river and talked about everything, from
poetry to politics.

I look out over the same river and think about how close Massoud was to
death, though he did not know it.  He was with an old friend, I am with
new ones.  Then a battle was raging at the front line near Kabul.  It
was in the back of both men's minds all night, but Massoud did not
speak of it, instead seeking refuge in poetry.  He read from a
beautifully bound book of the verses of a famous Persian Sufi poet, and
asked his friend to recite one poem over and over again.

It was about friends spending time together, talking, and enjoying a
night like many to come, though this night 'will never be repeated'.

Afghanistan reminds me that we must all try to live our lives with that
awareness, appreciating every experience, including those we think we
will enjoy again ... for this night 'will never be repeated'.13 For
the NBC guys, the reference point is Afghan men.  They never see any
Afghan women, except as shapeless figures, their burqas flapping like
tents.  They certainly never see their faces.  Tom Streithorst says,
"I've been here for a month, and I've never heard an Afghan woman's
voice."

They live with Massoud's bodyguards, who have adopted them, playing
chess, using their equipment and eating their food.  The unforgettable
Tom Baer, a huge man with a voice and a sense of humour to match, would
retrieve his Leatherman knife from a different soldier every night.

"Can I have your knife?"

"Yes, but you have to give it back, I need it," Tom would say
sternly.

He'd have to go to get it back each time.  He'd find the man asleep
with the knife enclosed in his fist, like a small child.

It's odd this male addiction to knives.  The great American novelist
John Steinbeck visited Russia in 1946.  He was one of the last
Westerners permitted to travel through the Soviet Union, as the
goodwill created by fighting as allies during World War II rapidly
disintegrated into the Cold War, and such contacts became impossible.
Not knowing what to expect, Steinbeck armed himself .. . with a
pocketknife.  It had 'a blade to take care of nearly all physical
situations in the world, and some spiritual ones.  It was equipped with
blades that were scissors, with blades that were files, awls, saws,
can-openers, beer-openers, corkscrews, tools for removing stones from a
horse's foot, a blade for eating and a blade for murder, a screwdriver
and a chisel.  You could mend a watch with it or repair the Panama
Canal."  Steinbeck had this wonderful pocketknife nearly two months,
and the only thing he ever used it for was to cut sausage.  Deadpan, he
assures us that it cut sausage very well.

Every bloke from every news organisation has come to Afghanistan with a
pocketknife.  They know every feature on each other's models, as well
as the colours they come in and what each can do.

"His is much better than mine, it has two extra blades," one sighs
enviously, as they compare knives at the table.  Actually, 'compare' is
the wrong word.  They name the brand and the model and then sigh they
don't need to look to know that the other guy's is better.

Just to prove it is a guy thing, the Afghan men soon also know the
difference between each knife, something I never really retain no
matter how often it is shown to me.

I find Massoud's bodyguards with the exception of Samim, a clansman of
Massoud's positively creepy.  They speak no English, so we have to rely
on other cues.  The way they look at women leaves little to the
imagination.  One of them has a very unsettling stare.  I try not to be
around him when I am alone at the NBC house.

But the NBC boys react differently.  They enjoy their time together and
all the paradoxes of living with Islamic warriors.  When one of the
Americans catches a moth, the soldiers grab him and lecture him sternly
about letting it go because "It is a living creature'.  Human life
seems to be more expendable.

Jonathan and Samim become close.

"We are brothers," they announce, cementing their bond in the Afghan
way having their photo taken holding Samim's gun.  Jonathan decides he
can be open with Samim, and tell him that he is Jewish.  As the
cameraman who works with Jonathan, Tom is angry.

"You've got to stop.  It's dangerous.  You'll get yourself killed but
what's worse, you'll get me killed along with you."

Tom's right.  Jews and especially Israelis cannot travel to many
Muslim countries, and if they do manage to slip in, it is not safe for
them to reveal their religious identity.  Jonathan says he just wants
the Afghans to know that Jews don't have horns and tails, but he is
taking a risk, American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl is later
kidnapped while interviewing Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, and
after some weeks in captivity, he is butchered like a sheep because of
his religion.  He is forced to intone "I am Jewish, and my mother is
Jewish," before his head is pulled back and his throat slit.  His
murder and his last words are filmed.

We are transfixed with horror as this story unfolds, but in the Islamic
state of Afghanistan, no one takes any action against Jonathan.

The only thing the NBC boys can't handle too well is that Afghan men
walk around hand-in-hand, and sometimes want to hold their hands, too.
Or sit too close behind them on the same chair when they are at their
computers.  There is a lot of 'boy love' here, apparently another
reaction to the repression of women.  The Taliban, having come to power
in part by taking a stand against rampant paedophilia, also punish men
suspected of homosexuality severely.  One punishment involves standing
the offender behind a wall and backing a vehicle into it, so that it
falls on top of him.  If he dies he deserved to die, if he survives he
is capable of being 'reformed'.  It is God's choice.  Like the simple
test for witches in fourteenth-century Europe: women suspected of
witchcraft were thrown into a river, weighed down with stones.  If they
drowned, as they all inevitably did, they weren't witches.  Sorry about
that.

Taliban Chief of Staff Mullah Mohammed Hassan explains the problem this
way: "Our religious scholars are not agreed on the right kind of
punishment for homosexuality.  Some say we should take these sinners to
a high wall and throw them down, while others say we should dig a hole
beside a wall, bury them, and then push the wall down on top of
them."

Feeding the starving people takes second place to such important
doctrinal questions.  However, this ferocious punishment doesn't seem
to be a very effective deterrent.  As far as we can see here,
homosexuality flourishes.  In the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, it is
so common they joke that crows fly above the city with one wing clamped
to their bums, just in case.

Despite all this, cameraman Tom Streithorst says he's never met men
like these, and that he's learnt a lot from them.

"They are like heroes in the Iliad.  Brave, hospitable, resourceful,
hardy, loyal, unselfish, they never complain, they are never ironic.
They play chess like champions.  They are oddly gentle, these killers,
cupping their hands around a moth, helping it escape.  Afghanistan was
never conquered, never colonised.  Unlike most third-world peoples,
Afghans have no sense of inferiority to the West, actually hardly any
sense of the West at all.  They do not doubt themselves.  They do not
compare themselves to Donald Trump or Michael Jordan or Brad Pitt. They
envy no one.  They are not post-modern, not even modern at all."

Tom's twenty-first-century American assessment complements a
nineteenth-century British account by diplomat Mountstuart Elphinstone.
Sent to the region in 1809, six years later he produced one of the most
remarkable books about Afghanistan, An Account of the Kingdom of
Caubul.  He says of Afghan men: "Their vices are revenge, envy,
avarice, rapacity and obstinacy.  On the other hand they are fond of
liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependants, brave,
hardy, frugal, laborious and prudent, and they are less disposed than
the nations in the neighbourhood to falsehood, intrigue and deceit." He
reports an old man saying "We are content with discord, we are content
with alarms, we are content with blood, we will never be content with a
master."  Perhaps such insights are still true. Elphinstone's
experiences in the region, he would later say, cured him of ambition.

Still, Tom Streithorst is disturbed by an exchange about men and women
he has with a teenager working as a translator.

"In America, do men beat their wives?"  nineteen-year-old Fayoz asks
him.  Tom replies that no, in the West, wife beating is regarded as
something a man should not do.  Fayoz is confused.

"So do the women beat the men?"

Tom laughs and Fayoz tells him the following story.  Two years ago in
Taloqan, where Fayoz lived until it was conquered by the Taliban, one
of his neighbours had been betrothed to a young girl.  The wedding was
a month away, but the boy had not seen his future bride.  Impatient, he
took a chance.  He walked to her house and knocked on the door.  She
invited him in and made tea.  They sat on the floor to drink it.

Her brother came home and saw a boy sitting with his sister.  Although
he knew it was her future husband, the brother got his AK-47 and shot
them both dead.

"The boy's father is outraged and demands justice," Tom recounts.

"The village elders reject his plea.  They conclude that killing is
justified as the boy was sitting with a woman who was not his relative.
Killing the sister is never questioned.  A small fine is paid to the
boy's family and that's that.  This is why premarital sex is rare in
rural Afghanistan.  By law it is only the women who are stoned, but the
men can be shot by indignant fathers or brothers."

Tom adds cynically "You can see why in Afghanistan bestiality is less
dangerous than heterosexuality.  The donkey's father won't be looking
for revenge."

Sex and death.  When you can't get one, it seems you focus on the
other.  We talk a lot about death, and who is more determined to win
this war.

"You guys have got the gear, but do you want to win as much?"  Again,
the attitudes of Islam are very different to those of the secular West.
We are aware that our rewards are in this life, Muslims' in the next.
Massoud's bodyguards are constantly discussing sacrifice and martyrdom,
and even the boy NBC employs to clean up at Massoud's house, who looks
to us no more than thirteen years old, talks about his death and what's
waiting for him in the afterlife.  Everyone knows the reward waiting
for the martyred Islamic warrior is seventy-two virgins.  And shade. In
the heat of the Middle East, where Islam was born, a garden with shade
was as important as seventy-two virgins.

The NBC boys sit around discussing this.  I hear them as I am writing a
script.

/ thought it was twenty-one virgins?

Oh, I thought it was 100.

Only twenty-one, I don't know if it would be worth it.

Tom Streithorst has the last word.

"I've been thinking about this.  I'd want seventy virgins and two
experienced older women to show the virgins what to do."

I sense that here it is fear of women that underlies the rigidly
enforced separation of the sexes.  The terrorist who headed the
September 11 attacks, Mohammed Atta, specifically instructed that no
woman, including his mother, should attend his memorial service.  And
where in the West, repression of women has been traditionally framed in
terms of protecting women from the lust of men, in Islam that is turned
on its head.  The Prophet said that when God created lust, he gave nine
parts of desire to the woman.  To man he gave only one.

Men have to be protected from the threat of being consumed by women's
untrammelled lust.  That's why women have to be locked away.  Most of
the men around me are separated from their wives and families.  Since
Afghan women only have a place in the private sphere, the men never see
any other women at all.  They live here with each other, in a world
virtually without women.

In a world without women, men go to war.

There are advances on the front line at Mazar-i-Sharif.  General Rashid
Dostum is once again within twenty kilometres of the town.  He was in
this position two weeks ago, but he could not secure his gains and had
to pull back.  He could not defend the villages he had captured and
could not supply the men so far ahead of his rear positions.  There was
also some squabbling with a rival warlord over who would take the
credit.  Now by satellite phone, General Dostum claims he has regained
the same ground with American aid.  He says eighteen British and
American Special Forces officers are working with his men as advisers,
helping to direct air strikes and pinpoint targets.

General Dostum says he has received airdrops of weapons and
ammunition.

"American helicopters have dropped fifty AK-47 rifles, with 100 boxes
of AK-47 ammunition, twenty boxes of rocket-propelled grenades and
fifty boxes of ammunition for PK machine guns."

General Dostum says this is a start, but he still needs more.  "I have
10,000 soldiers to equip.  This won't go far among 10,000 men."

The Taliban deny Dostum's forces have advanced, and claim they are
repelling his attacks.  But they concede that one disputed province has
fallen to the Northern Alliance, and they are reinforcing their troops
at Mazar.

Taliban resistance is also being weakened by the millions of dollars in
covert money the US is spreading around Afghanistan.  Gary, the CIA
agent, is soon requesting and receiving an additional $10 million in
cash to hand out, and the CIA believes it has bought off thousands of
Taliban members.  The prices are $10,000 for a low-level commander with
dozens of fighters, and $50,000 for a bigger commander with hundreds of
fighters.

Bob Woodward reports that one commander who's offered $50,000 to defect
wants some time to think it over.  The Special Forces A-team direct a
precision bomb right outside his headquarters.

"The next day, they called the commander back.  How about $40,000?  He
accepted."

On Thursday 8 November Mamur Hassan predicts Mazar will fall within
days.

"One of the most infamous Taliban commanders was killed and three
others were captured yesterday," Hassan tells reporters at his compound
at Dashti Qala.

"The ferocious and ruthless Taliban Commander Gargaray was killed as
the result of the US bombing near Mazar-i-Sharif.  He was one of the
most feared and despised Taliban commanders.  We were worried when we
learned about his appointment to the Mazar-i-Sharif front.  We called
him "The Dog", but now he's taken care of."

Mamur Hassan also pays tribute to General Dostum, who captured the
three other Taliban leaders.

Rashid Dostum's story reveals a lot about Afghan politics because his
ability to bounce back can be attributed partly to his willingness to
switch sides.  Once a Communist commander, he has been allied to, and
has betrayed, every other leader and political movement including the
Taliban.

In his defence, it could be said that he generally only betrayed his
'friends' before they betrayed him.  He was twice forced to flee his
capital, Mazar-i-Sharif, and in 1997 he was forced to bribe his own
soldiers in order to escape, after his second-in-command defected to
the Taliban.

In the Soviet years, Dostum was a union boss working on a gas field.
Then, finding his vocation as a soldier, he became the leader of an
Uzbek militia fighting on the Soviet side.  By the mid-1980s, he
commanded 20,000 men, and controlled the northern provinces.  He went
on to join the government of Communist President Najibullah, fighting
against the Mujaheddin and receiving a medal for his services.

But towards the end of Najibullah's rule, he saw the writing on the
wall.  In early 1992 he switched sides to fight with the Mujaheddin. It
was this 1992 defection that brought down the Communist government. He
allied himself with Massoud, and together they took Kabul.  But the
leaders who had been part of the anti-Communist resistance excluded
Dostum from the new government.  In the following five years, he fought
with them and against them, switching allegiances within the many
Mujaheddin camps whenever it seemed pragmatic to do so.

In 1994 General Dostum retreated to his power base here in the north,
an area with a population of around five million people.  While much of
the rest of the country was in ruins, and warring Mujaheddin factions
including Dostum's had destroyed Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif was thriving.
Dostum had an army and a sizeable air force, and support from the
Russian, Uzbek and Turkish governments.  He became known as an
efficient administrator, running a largely secular fiefdom with a
health service and higher education, both available to women.  But he
was also a harsh ruler.  Criminals were publicly executed and justice
was often summary.

When author Ahmed Rashid visited Dostum in his headquarters in the
Qala-i-Janghi fortress outside Mazar during this time, he noticed that
there were smears of blood and pieces of flesh in a corner of the
courtyard.  At first he thought a goat had been killed, until the
guards explained that no, this was human flesh.  Dostum had ordered a
soldier accused of stealing to be tied to the tracks of a tank, which
was then driven around until he was mincemeat.

I guess at least you save on bullets that way.  Dostum's followers
called him Pasha, a title used by some of the region's ancient kings,
and he appeared to have ambitions to emerge as the new ruler of
Afghanistan.  No Uzbek has ruled here for 500 years, since the
fourteenth-century Uzbek horseman Tamerlane conquered Afghanistan and
started an empire that stretched from Baghdad to China.

But by 1997 comparisons with Tamerlane appeared to be no more than
hubris, for in May the Taliban attacked Mazar, defeating Rashid Dostum
and forcing him to flee.  Dostum's defeat was partly due to betrayal
from within his own ranks, and was followed by a series of double
crossings, which led to some of the worst massacres of Afghanistan's
civil war.

First, one of General Dostum's senior commanders, Abdul Malik Pehlawan,
defected to the Taliban.  Malik did a deal with the Taliban that gave
them the city.  At that point, Dostum was forced to flee to the border
with Uzbekistan, leaving his vehicles and much of his money.  But when
Malik realised that what he understood to be a power-sharing
arrangement was, in fact, a Taliban takeover, the deal fell apart.
Pakistani diplomats and ISI officers flew in to the city to try to help
the Taliban renegotiate.  However, this failed when Malik switched
sides again, and the Taliban's brutal fundamentalism provoked an
uprising among the people of Mazar, the most liberal city in
Afghanistan.

The Taliban were subjected to their most punishing defeat since they
had begun their roll across Afghanistan in 1994.  They lost
approximately 3000 soldiers in ten weeks of fighting, with a further
3500 taken prisoner.  These figures include 250 Pakistani soldiers
killed and 750 captured.  The Taliban withdrew from Mazar-i-Sharif in
July 1997.

After taking refuge in Turkey, Dostum returned in early 1998.  In order
to discredit Malik, his disloyal deputy, Dostum revealed that Malik's
men had massacred some 2000 Taliban soldiers.  One of Malik's generals
admitted that they had crammed around 1250 captured Taliban fighters
into airless containers, leaving them to bake to death in the
blistering sun.  When the containers were opened the bodies were found
to have turned black.

Paik Chong-Hyun, a UN special rapport eur who investigated the Taliban
deaths, wrote in his report that many bodies were also tossed down deep
wells, then hand grenades were thrown in, and the wells were bulldozed
over.

In a desert land, who would poison a well?

Dostum was unable to unite the anti-Taliban opposition.  In August
1998, the Taliban again bribed their way through the Northern Alliance
front lines.  Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the Taliban for a second time.
When they came into town they extracted a bitter revenge for their
losses the previous year, killing civilians indiscriminately.

"A Taliban commander said that Mullah Omar had given them permission to
kill for two hours, but they killed for two days," writes Ahmed
Rashid.

The streets were piled high with corpses, which were not allowed to be
buried for six days, in breach of instructions in the Koran.  A Tajik
man who escaped the massacre said dogs were eating human flesh, and the
smell was intolerable.

Hazara prisoners were locked in containers, in direct revenge for the
deaths of the Taliban soldiers the previous year, and 300 men
suffocated to death in this way.  All in all, estimates are that some
6000 people were massacred by the Taliban during this retaliatory
killing frenzy.

General Dostum was forced to flee into exile a second time as the
Taliban took over the territory he once ruled.  He returned to
Afghanistan only in June 2001, when he reached a compromise with Ahmed
Shah Massoud, his former enemy, to join the Northern Alliance and fight
the Taliban.  Following Massoud's assassination, Dostum was not
appointed to succeed him as military commander.  However, Dostum's is
now the most active front.  It seems that when the war will start, it
will start there, in the north, a fight for Mazar.

So cometh the hour, cometh the man, and this is the man who has come.
This knight, with no shine left in his armour, holds the Northern
Alliance's future in his hands.  If Mazar-i-Sharif falls, it is widely
assumed that the Northern Alliance will take control of the rest of the
north, and then the capital Kabul.

On a personal note, it's our future, too, up here in the north where
the fighting will be.  In the back of our minds is the knowledge that
if Dostum fails, the Taliban will most likely overrun Khoja Bahauddin,
where we are living.

Our hopes are pinned on him, too.  He's all we've got.  NBC is moving
its stores of food, water, furniture, generators, petrol, tools,
first-aid kits, cameras, batteries, laptops, edit packs, telephones,
videophones and satellite equipment out of Massoud's house, just as we
hear the first confused reports that Mazar is falling.

Details are sketchy.  It appears that a Northern Alliance commander
fighting with Dostum, General Ustad Atta, has marched into Mazar from
the south, capturing the power station and the city's strategically
important airfields.  His 2500-strong troops have met with no
resistance.  About 7500 of General Dostum's men attack from the
south-west, capturing the military base at Ferkededadi.  US military
sources report that the Mazar-i-Sharif hospital is tending to hundreds
of Taliban casualties.  Taliban forces are reported to be fleeing
south, towards Kandahar, and hundreds of Taliban soldiers are said to
be defecting.

We obtain what corroboration we can.  Foreign Ministry officials here
say they are monitoring Taliban radio traffic and confirm that the
Taliban forces are withdrawing from the city.  General Mamur Hassan
says that a large number of Taliban soldiers drowned while trying to
escape by crossing a river to our west.  The Northern Alliance
attributes this victory to greater coordination between the American
air force and its troops on the ground.

I call Voice of America to fire off a quick radio news report.

"Oh, hi Irris," says a sleepy voice in Washington.

"Yes, we have your earlier piece about fighting at Mazar."

"No- you can't use that.  Mazar is falling," I tell him.

"Mazar is falling?"

"Yes.  Mazar is falling.  I've written a piece."

"You've written a piece?"

Sometimes dealing with the news desk can drive you crazy.  Of course
I've written a piece, it's the news, and it's breaking, but at this
rate it'll never get on air because of our little comedy routine.  I
finally file for VOA.

I also do a live broadcast for Deutsche Welle and for Australia, and we
move into NBC's new house after midnight on the night Mazar falls.  It
is the closest thing to paradise in Khoja Bahauddin.

I'm exhausted, but I don't sleep well, despite the luxury of a
stretcher bed to lay my sleeping bag on.  I am filled with adrenaline,
plans and doubts, as the war we have all been waiting for has finally
begun.

The next day, Saturday 10 November, Taliban radio confirms that its
troops have left Mazar-i-Sharif, but says this is merely a strategic
withdrawal.  There are unconfirmed reports of further Northern Alliance
gains north of Mazar, clearing a land corridor to Uzbekistan where US
troops are stationed.

Mamur Hassan says he is planning to start his offensive at Qala Qata,
breaking through the Taliban lines and launching an offensive to
capture Taloqan and then Kunduz.  He has had to postpone the attack,
waiting for one more US bombing raid, which has been delayed by bad
weather.

My friend the Canadian journalist Levon Sevunts goes to the front line.
He reports that the Northern Alliance forces are getting ready for the
big push.  Trucks are unloading ammunition, and soldiers are busy
digging tank positions at the top of the Puze Pulihomri hill.  Taliban
soldiers don't respond to the sporadic firing from the Northern
Alliance trenches.  Instead, they reply over the walkie-talkies, with
taunts.

"That's it, you must have fired your last shell," a Taliban soldier
says to a machine gunner who has just fired six shots in the direction
of the Taliban positions in the valley below.

"Get your stinking head out of the trenches and you'll see if this was
the last shell," the gunner responds.

Inoyatullah, a twenty-six-year-old fighter, tells Levon that they speak
with the Taliban soldiers several times a day.

"It gets boring here, there is nothing to do," Inoyatullah says.

"So we talk on the walkie-talkies.  They tell us to come to their side
and we tell them to come to our side.  If they are nice to us, we speak
nicely to them.  We don't like to swear and curse, we are Muslims."

Inoyatullah says that often after shooting at each other, they ask
about each other's health and family.

"But that doesn't prevent us from fighting."

At a triumphant press conference, Northern Alliance Foreign Minister
Dr.  Abdullah announces that troops are mobil ising here, with columns
of tanks and armoured personnel carriers moving towards the front line
where US air strikes have been concentrated over the past two weeks. He
confirms what Mamur Hassan has said, naming the Alliance's former
regional headquarters of Taloqan as a military priority, followed by
the next major town south, Kunduz.

There are already garbled reports of human rights abuses by Northern
Alliance soldiers in Mazar-i-Sharif, but Dr.  Abdullah flatly denies
them.  At the press conference, I sit next to Johanne Sutton, a French
radio journalist.  She is dark-haired and shy, and she sympathises with
me when the Northern Alliance boys my former friends!  won't let me
crouch down where I need to in order to get the best audio.

"No, you can't sit there," they say, moving me off the patch of
concrete that used to be my outdoor 'office' when I first came to
Afghanistan.  This is a problem because I don't have a long enough
cable with me to reach Dr.  Abdullah from the chair near Johanne's.
Since I am the only one they have moved, allowing all the men to stay
where they are, I gear up for a full-scale argument, when a kind
American reporter lends me a cable.  Another outbreak of hostilities
avoided!  As we wait for Dr.  Abdullah, I chat to Johanne about the
difficulties of working here.  I can't conceive that the next day she
will be dead.

Johanne is one of seven journalists who accompany a Northern Alliance
brigade when it crosses the front line here at Dashti Qala, following
retreating Taliban troops.  The group includes Australian Paul
McGeough, the striking blond-haired German e-mag reporter Volker
Handloik, and my friend Levon Sevunts.

Commander Amer Bashir leads the brigade they accompany.  On the day
after Mazar falls, Saturday 10 November, the battle for Qala Qata
begins.  Mamur Hassan starts the battle theatrically, as befits a
celebrity warlord, declaring, "I order the men to start fighting."
Bashir and Mamur Hassan lead bravely, wandering openly in the line of
Taliban fire.  Commander Bashir wins the ridge near Qala Qata on
Saturday, but loses it later in the evening when the Taliban advance
and retake it.

The next day, Sunday, Commander Bashir takes the ridge again after an
afternoon of fierce fighting, claiming he's killed about 100 Taliban
soldiers who 'fought to the death', for the loss of ten of his own
men.

The seven journalists accompany the advancing troops less than an hour
after the Taliban retreat on the Sunday night.  Commander Bashir warns
them against it, saying it could be dangerous.

"There are mines near the Taliban trenches and the Taliban might launch
a counteroffensive."  But Levon Sevunts later tells me that the
temptation of seeing the Taliban trenches and bunkers dug into the hill
is too strong to resist.

They climb on top of Commander Bashir's armoured personnel carrier,
with Levon praying the Taliban haven't laid any anti-tank mines.

"We passed a first line of trenches similar to the Alliance trenches we
had just left.  Approaching the second line, we passed by an Alliance
platoon marching toward Taliban positions.  The second line of trenches
had been bombed more heavily than the first, and a huge crater blocked
our way.  There was no sign of bodies or abandoned equipment.  The
fighting had subsided considerably and only occasional red tracer
bullets could be seen flying gracefully from one position to
another."

But 100 metres further up the hill it becomes clear that the Taliban
have not quit the ridge.  The armoured personnel carrier comes under
attack from three directions.  At least one large machine gun and five
AK-47s are firing, illuminating the dark night.  People start jumping
off.  Sitting on the edge of the armoured personnel carrier, Volker
Handloik is one of the first to jump.  Two other journalists Johanne
Sutton and Pierre Billaud follow.

Levon finds himself thinking, Mines and unfamiliar territory don't
jump!

"One of the last things I saw before the driver of the APC made a sharp
left turn and started descending a steep hill was Volker in his green
Uzbek coat rolling on the ground like a stunt man  Those who had
nothing to hold onto fell off.  I was thrown in the air as the APC
jolted violently and landed one metre away, flat on my back atop the
vehicle, holding onto the cannon."

After several sharp turns in different directions, the armoured
personnel carrier reaches a hollow where it can hide.  Northern
Alliance fighters who have been thrown off start showing up one by one,
'appearing like shadows from the darkness'.  Soon only five people are
missing: Volker and his interpreter, and Pierre, Johanne and their
interpreter.  They wait, calling out their names.  There is no sign of
them.  Commander Bashir tells Australian journalist Paul McGeough he is
confident the three foreign journalists will be rescued -after all, the
armoured personnel carrier has passed dozens of his men walking in the
dark.

But Bashir's confidence is misplaced.  A Northern Alliance search team
finds Johanne Sutton dead in a Taliban trench.  They are forced to
attack the trench to retrieve her body.  They say there might be
another body, but they can't get to it because of renewed Taliban fire.
They bring Johanne Sutton back to the camp.  Levon sees soldiers in
tank helmets standing on the APC and shaking their heads in disbelief:
"Way, way, way."

"Can you come up with us to the Ministry of Defence?"  the commander
asks him.  Levon clambers aboard the armoured personnel carrier
again.

"We need somebody to hold her so she doesn't fall over."

"Johanne's body lay sprawled on the back of a Russian-made armoured
personnel carrier, her dead eyes staring into the billions of stars in
the Afghan sky.  There was nothing else I could do for her but tie a
shred of cloth around her head to close her half-open mouth and hold
her lifeless hand for one last bumpy ride on Afghan roads on the back
of an APC," Levon wrote in his account of the night.

By daybreak it becomes known that the two other journalists and the two
interpreters are also dead.  They have been shot, but it's unclear
whether they have been killed in crossfire, or whether Taliban soldiers
executed them.

Paul McGeough accompanies Commander Bashir to search for the bodies.
They find them, looted of all valuables, and bring them back to Khoja
Bahauddin.  The army will move on, but for the journalists, Afghanistan
has proved to be their final journey.

We hear about the deaths the next morning as we are making our new home
habitable.  The news casts a pall over all of us.  It is somehow
unthinkable that someone who was sitting next to me at a press
conference such a short time ago can now be dead.  Or that all Volker's
outrageous stylishness can have simply been extinguished.  As my NBC
friend Jonathan and I do our washing in tin pails on the balcony, we
discuss whether the journalists took an unnecessary risk, and whether
they should have waited longer before accompanying the troops on such a
volatile battlefront.  Everyone comes up to throw in an opinion.

It was foolhardy.  The same ridge had changed hands twice the previous
day.  This is war, if you're covering a war you have to be 'in there'
and be with the men to see what is really going on.  Levon survived.
But Levon is an ex-soldier, and he is savvy and physically fit.  Of
course Levon would survive, if anyone would.  You shouldn't jump off an
APC into a battlefield when you are unarmed.  Sometimes if you stay on
the APC, then you become the target.  Why were they on top of the APC,
and not inside it, that shows they were running a ridiculous risk.  It
was night time what could they hope to see in the dark?  That shows it
wasn't about journalism they were just bored.

The discussion goes round and round as we wring and rinse our clothes.
And in the end the only incontrovertible fact is that three of our
colleagues are dead, and we are here, doing our washing on a balcony
in the sun.  Even the smallest practicalities of life suddenly seem
very precious.

At this time I have a premonition of my own death.

It's a jarring experience because it happens in the very ordinary
context of filing a story at the TV feed point run by the European
Broadcasting Union, EBU.  Filing here at night has a religious quality.
The glow from the EBU compound is the only light in the sky, in the
utter inky darkness of night in northern Afghanistan.  It draws us like
the star guiding the three wise men.  I arrive at the familiar dark
door in the wall, with the makeshift office at the far end of the yard
radiating light.  The generator is humming, the soundtrack to our lives
in northern Afghanistan, and Bruno Beeckman is saying suavely into a
satellite phone, "EBU Afghanistan, how may we help?"

So far, so normal.  As I walk into the light, preparing to discuss the
latest news, people come up to me and put their arms around me.  Some
are crying.

I'm mystified.

"What's wrong?"

They explain that they'd heard I was dead, a terrible rumour which
quickly assumed the status of fact.  Coming the day after the
journalists and their interpreters were killed at the front line, it's
plausible, and for the small and close community of journalists in
Khoja Bahauddin, it's frightening.  Another journalist dead, another
friend lost.  An Afghan boy at the house where I had been living before
I moved in with NBC was the source of the rumour.  I said goodbye when
I moved out, and I've no idea why he told people I was dead.

I assure everyone standing around me in a circle at EBU that I will go
and check with him about that, and joke that reports of my death have
been greatly exaggerated, but seeing how shaken my colleagues are gives
me a chill.

I walk back to the NBC house holding onto my torch very tight.  The
darkness is overwhelming, and watching the tiny light the torch throws,
I feel vulnerable.  I try to fight off the fear that my death has just
been foretold, but there is no reassurance from the black Afghan night.
In the light of day at the NBC house, my premonition of death seems
less frightening, and I convince myself that it doesn't have any
significance.  Luckily, I'm distracted by a rapidly moving story, and
by helping to organise our new house.

We send our washing out to local families, but since the rain the
service has been much more erratic.  Tom has been waiting for his
clothes to come back for over a week.  It's also become much more
expensive.  The prices have been creeping up, until when a bag of
washing in Khoja Bahauddin costs the same as it would in New York, we
suspect something is up.  Later we learn that the oldest translator
working for NBC, nicknamed the Professor, was adding a huge whack to
the prices of everything from washing to drivers' salaries.

"Yep, we'll have to fire the Professor," Tom says sadly.  The Professor
is a former teacher.  He is balding with a flowing grey beard, a gentle
voice and manner.  He is Tom's favourite.  NBC has been paying him more
than the local annual salary every day for months.  You can never tell
who is going to fleece you.

My favourite local is Shah Mahmood.  He is a driver with the worst car
in Khoja Bahauddin, and a volatile temper, but he is so entertaining
that everyone loves to drive with him.  He is short, wiry and
mercurial, his body pulsing with energy.  He answers a question with
his entire frame, and has an elastic face and innate comic gift.  Shah
Mahmood is always laughing and so is everyone around him, even though
he speaks no English.  He teaches us all to say burro b'chai - 'let's
go'.  If he were living in New York he'd have an Afghan comedy channel
within six months.

When Shah Mahmood tries on a pair of American sunglasses, he is
immediately transformed into a rapper" Snoop Mahmood.  I know that Shah
Mahmood probably would fleece us, as he's a 'wide boy', a chancer.  But
like with the CIA and the warlords, he may be a con man but he's our
con man, and I adore him.  I knew him when I first came, before this
lot of NBC guys hired him as a driver.  He was kind to me before I
moved in with the people who pay his wages.

NBC producer Karl Bostic and I are driving with Shah Mahmood when he
suggests coming with me to Australia.

"You.  Me.  Go.  Australia," which he pronounces Afc-stralya.

"But Shah Mahmood, I live in Moscow."

He adapts quickly.

"You.  Me.  Go.  Moscow."

Karl chips in, "Shah Mahmood, if you want to drive to Moscow, you're
going to have to get those brakes fixed."

We finish setting up home.  The satellite engineers connect this remote
spot to New York and London, and we move our bags from the corridors
into our rooms.  Our bedrooms are luxurious there are stretcher beds,
curtains on the window, and we are only three to a room.  I share with
the two sound recordists, Jonathan and Stan.  It's a pleasure not to be
sharing a bedroom with a constantly changing cast of characters.  On
our first morning, when I do a yoga stretch, Jonathan says, "Irris, it
looks as if you're praying.  In fact, it looks as if you're praying to
Stan."

I pray to Stan every day for the next two weeks.

That evening, I tell the NBC guys how grateful I am that they have
taken me in.

"It's gotta be because you're a chick," says Tom the cameraman.

"You're on the inside, and Tim from USA Today, he's here, too, but he's
outside, in his tent."

"Yeah, but it's a very cool tent..  ."

"Best tent in Khoj," Tom agrees.

The house works very well.  Everyone confides in me, about their lives
and their heartaches and their sexual adventures.  Everything's open
here, it's as if we are on an extended plane flight, and I don't think
these are things they share with each other.  But I look out for them
and they look out for me; in this hostile environment, that makes a big
difference.  And they make me laugh.

Jonathan wants to teach the Afghans we work with to knock on the door
before they come into our rooms.  Before NBC fires him, the Professor
is in charge of the household, so Jonathan tries with him first.

"Okay, so you knock, go on, knock, and then I say come in and you come
in.  Let's try it, Professor."

The Professor listens, bemused.  He knocks and walks straight in.

Jonathan says, "No, you knock and you wait, and then I say "come in",
and then you come in."

The Professor tries, but once again he knocks and comes in without
waiting, and can't understand why he still hasn't got it right.  The
Professor and Jonathan fall about laughing, which makes it fun, if
futile.

An American friend of mine has a small illustrated book called Toilets
of the world, with examples from various cultures, in different
materials and styles.  I feel that the toilet that Hans built in Khoja
Bahauddin deserves an honourable mention.  It instantly changes my
quality of life, as does the addition of hot water in the bathroom, now
that it's getting colder.  The bathroom here is the Khoja Bahauddin
standard: a concrete room with a drain and two tin containers, both
probably made by Ahmed from the market, on the look-out for wife number
four.  One container has cold water, and the other has water that has
been boiled over a hob.  There is a small pitcher for mixing the two,
and voila\ my first warm 'shower' in weeks.  Producer Karl Bostic's
slogan is chera they?  - 'why not?"  Or, as the boys soon adapt the
Dari, chera fucking neyt This breezy optimism is responsible for the
improvement in living standards, and we are inspired to broaden our
culinary horizons, too.  We introduce 'take-out' to Khoja Bahauddin,
and are now having goat shashlik delivered from across the road.  You
just return the steel skewers after you're done.

We walk out our front door, cross the border where there will one day
be a wall, and jump across a sedentary pool of rancid muddy water,
which men use as a urinal.  Then we go round the corner to the shashlik
joint, which doubles as a class house.  Men wrapped in blankets sleep
on raised platforms.  It is dark and filthy, another reason for
preferring take-out.  They broil the shashlik on an iron grill out
front, putting two small pieces of meat and one piece of fat on each
long skewer.  When we ask for 'shashlik, hold the fat', they are so
perplexed they give us the fat to take home in a separate bag.  Who
could not want the fat, it's the best part?

We give in to the take-out shashlik because no one can bear the "Meals
Ready to Eat' any longer.  It went one cheese tortellini too far.  And
my vegetarianism is long out the window, though it's strange that the
first meat I eat in twenty years turns out to be goat not what you'd
expect to fall off the wagon for.

Then we become ambitious.  We decide to look beyond goat.

"Let's make chicken," says Jonathan.

First you have to buy a chicken.  No, in fact, first you have to catch
a chicken.  Outside our front door, near the slaughterhouse, there are
chickens for sale, scratching around in mud and human excrement, God
help us.  Just shut your eyes and pick one.  Amer, a local who used to
live in Moscow, comes up at this moment, just as Jonathan and I are
having second thoughts.  Dubiously eyeing the ground, I check with Amer
whether these chickens are any good.

"Charoshy, charoshy' good, good he assures me emphatically in Russian.
So Jonathan nominates the chickens that look best, from a distance,
against this filthy background, and agrees a price.

"Ten US dollars for the three.  I think I paid too much," he says.

Then the owner of the chickens appoints a small boy to catch them.  The
chickens run away as fast as their little legs can carry them, which is
surprisingly fast, actually.  It is amazing how they go from insouciant
scratching in the dirt to frenzied escaping before we have even come
for them, displaying an instinctive comprehension that danger is at
hand.  What's most interesting is that not all the chickens run, only
the ones we want to buy.

The boy runs after them, and they run in the other direction, hopping
over bicycle parts, puddles of mud, and through the crowds that have
gathered to watch the purchase but are now only complicating the
transaction.  Then they turn around and run in the other direction,
straight through the patch of ground used as a public toilet.  Bam, the
small boy doesn't miss a beat, he runs straight after them.  Then when
the chicken tires and he catches it, the small panting boy has to do it
all again.  Twice.  We walk back, with Shah Mahmood carrying the
chickens by their feet and clucking approvingly over their weight and
feel.

"Morgh good' chicken good he says, mixing Dari and English in his
delight.  I teach him the English word, and he repeats 'chick-en'
laughing.  And then you really know it's Afghanistan, because once we
get the chooks home, the locals fight over who gets to kill them.

After our purchase, I go driving into town with Shah Mahmood.  I want
him to stop in the square on the way back home, but he is clearly not
happy.  He uses his new English vocab to say 'chick-en' and to mime
wringing its neck.  I sigh.  We go straight home.  How can I stand
between Shah Mahmood and such pleasures?

The chickens are stringy, but the meal we cook, with lots of garlic and
potatoes, is delicious.  We eat it on our concrete verandah, looking
out over the wall which is slowly rising on the boundary of the NBC
property.  We feel like proud landowners.  We watch the locals who work
all day, breaking rocks with iron bars until they are the right shape.
It is primitive, and back-breakingly difficult, though the men are very
industrious.

"But you know what's amazing, at lunchtime, not one of them is to be
found.  It's as if they were unionised," says Jonathan.

"They take a break at eleven and there is nothing you could threaten
them with to make them work."  The eleven o'clock 'smoko' crosses all
cultures.

The city of Taloqan falls to the Northern Alliance on the day after the
three journalists die.  The next day, Monday 12 November, Levon returns
to Dushanbe, accompanying the corpses of our dead colleagues.  Before
he leaves, he shows me the piece he has written about the experience.
It is very moving, but I think he ran a big risk for a guy with a wife
and kids back in Montreal, and I find myself angry because I like him
so much.

"We wanted to see the Taliban trenches before the Northern Alliance had
a chance to interfere with them," he says, and he appears tired and
shattered by his experience, as if a light has been extinguished behind
his eyes.  I decide I won't press him now.

After we say goodbye to Levon, we decide to go down the Taloqan road.
We take flak jackets and drive down to the front line we've been
watching for weeks.  It's almost unbelievable to think we will be able
to cross it, like entering a special room you were forbidden access to
as a child.  Standing at the river crossing, I suddenly understand
Levon's urge to see the Taliban trenches.

It is safer this morning than last night, twelve hours that may make
the difference between life and death.  It is still dangerous, of
course, but there is a small distance between us and the front-line
troops.  It seems the Taliban really have left the ridge now.

The sky is pale blue and the river gleams turquoise, but the water is
almost obscured by the chaos on the bank.  The ground has been torn up
by tank tracks and there are people, vehicles and animals everywhere.
There are soldiers and refugee families, trucks, jeeps, APCs, horses
and camels, all preparing to cross the river, or already in the water.
Small piles of goods some sacks and a table wait patiently for their
owner, a donkey saddled nearby.  Trucks full of soldiers are crossing
back and forth, bringing news from the front.  We all listen
urgently.

Refugee families squash themselves onto the backs of horses and camels.
One animal can carry a man, a woman and a child, and their few
possessions.  They ford the river, wet up to their saddles, holding
their bags aloft.  Next they will have to travel down mined roads.  At
this stage we have only heard that Taloqan has been liberated, it is
not confirmed, and the journey remains extremely dangerous, but the
families are prepared to take any risk to return home, to see the
houses and families they left behind more than a year ago.

I am with five American journalists, most from NBC.  None of us are
wearing our flak jackets.  They are so heavy and cumbersome no one
wears them unless they absolutely have to.  Some TV journalists put
them on while they are being filmed and take them off again
afterwards.

As we wait to cross the river in our open-topped truck, one of the
locals approaches Tom Streithorst and says, "Give me your camera."
Turban fronts up to baseball cap, and I can see from the tilt of Tom's
cap that he's not amused.  He is not going to hand over a Betacam worth
more than US$30,000, but the man is armed and will take some handling.
It always makes the guys edgy to refuse a man with a gun.

Fortunately, we get the call to cross the river before there is an
international incident.  It's finally our turn to go into the territory
that the Taliban controlled until yesterday.  We mask our nerves by
discussing food.  Tom says he misses mozzarella and basil salad.
Another journalist says pumpkin pie.  The first shock is how familiar
everything looks this road could be any of the roads we travel down
around Khoja Bahauddin.

We drive up a narrow, rutted path, between the high mud-brick walls of
a village, and we are tossed about in the back of our truck.  Only one
vehicle at a time can pass through here.  Even then it risks getting
stuck or overturning if one of dozens of small bridges in reality just
a few logs bound together -gives way.

Our driver is careless, grazing walls and trees, and almost killing one
of the children who run in groups on the road and climb onto the walls
to watch us.

"Duck!"  NBC producer Kevin Sites shouts as we drive under the branches
of a large tree.  Three small faces peek out, above a door in a wall.
They are beautiful girls, with green eyes shining out of dirty faces
framed with red scarves.  Two girls wearing purple scarves sit on top
of the wall.  Although every inch forward is hard won, we often have
to reverse because trucks carrying soldiers are coming in the opposite
direction.  The only road rules seem to be that vehicles with guns have
priority.  We wave at them and check where they have come from, and
whether Taloqan is free, and if the road is clear of Taliban.  At this
rate it's going to take us a long time to get anywhere.

Suddenly I hear shouting, "No, no, no!"  and a loud crash, almost
before I feel the impact.  Our driver has reversed into another wall
with such force that he smashes it.  Tonnes of mud brick come crashing
down on our truck.  It hits me on the back of the head, and I fall
under the weight of it.

If it had been concrete I would be dead, but mud brick is surprisingly
light, as I now know.  I hear shouting, "No.  No, stop, for Chrissakes
stop, you've hit a wall, someone's hurt," as the boys come to help
me.

Before they reach me, I emerge from the rubble.  Five men are looking
at me as if they are watching a resurrection.

"It's okay, I'm okay," I tell them, brushing myself down.

"Are you sure?  Are you hurt?  You're not hurt at all?  You must be
hurt," says Tom.

"There's an awful lot of mud brick here, you know."

He's right.  The tray of the truck is full of debris.

Jonathan says, "I put my arm out to save you, but it was too quick.  I
really thought you were dead."

"Well, all I can say is it's a miracle.  Nothing hurts.  I'm not even
scratched."

I feel a mixture of shock and relief.  No one seems concerned about the
wall we've knocked down, so we keep driving, and reversing, and driving
until we make it through the village onto a wider stretch of path.
There is still mortar fire in the hills as we stop another truck full
of soldiers.  They are on their way south to Kunduz, where they say as
many as 20,000 Taliban soldiers are now surrounded.  We ask them about
the fighting here.  They say they took Taliban prisoners, mainly
foreign fighters.

"They were foreigners look, we took their cards, and the letters they
were writing."  They show us cards and letters, in Arabic and the
Pakistani language Urdu.  They also show us a Dari-Arabic dictionary.
Before we leave we ask them about the land mines here.

"Yes, the road is still very heavily mined.  Your driver should leave
the road where it is indicated."

The local sign for land mines is three small rocks laid across a path.
But these roads may not have even these rudimentary warnings yet.

The men on the truck speak to our translator in Dari, gesticulating as
they talk.  It's hard when the discourse about your safety is being
conducted in a language you don't understand.  I get our translator to
ask our driver if he knows where the land mines are.

"No, he says he does not know this road at all," the translator informs
me.

"Well, get him to ask these soldiers they know!"  I find myself
snapping.

There is more stopping and shouting and hand waving, until the driver
says he now knows which is the safe stretch.  If I hadn't asked, would
he have driven blindly down a mined road?  We plough off the path, into
a field.  Other vehicles have taken the detour ahead of us and
flattened the grass.  This is an even more unstable ride, but it feels
safer.  When we return to the gravel path, three kilometres further on,
two men are walking towards us.

It is a soldier and his prisoner.  The Northern Alliance soldier looks
like Omar Sharif, and his Taliban prisoner, a delicate handsome
Pakistani with hair down to his shoulders, looks like Jesus.  The
soldier is carrying a gun and has bound his prisoner around the chest
with a rope, as if he had tethered a goat.  This is as sophisticated as
it gets here.  We interview both men, and Omar Sharif unties his
prisoner for the camera.  Abdul Manan looks about seventeen years old,
but says he is twenty-two.  He clutches at his side, wincing in pain,
increasing his resemblance to Jesus.  His clothes are ragged, and he
has grass in his matted hair.  He says he was on holiday in Afghanistan
when the Taliban shanghaied him into their army.

I hear this frequently from captured Taliban prisoners.

"I was sightseeing in Kabul' is clearly a line they have been taught to
trot out in case of capture.  Omar Sharif says Abdul Manan was hiding
in another room when the Northern Alliance killed his friends.  And now
he is here.  He is thin and thirsty, and he winces again.  Producer
Kevin Sites offers him some water, and he is drinking from the NBC
bottle just as a truck full of Northern Alliance soldiers comes into
view behind him.

I wonder what their reaction will be.  Tom, who is shooting the
interview, says he pulled out to a wide shot, waiting for violence.

"I wanted Jesus beat up on camera in front of me.  I was disappointed
when he wasn't.  I was even pissed off when Kevin gave him the water.
Isn't it funny what this place does to you?"

The soldiers don't attack the prisoner, and Omar Sharif says he feels
no guilt about shooting at him or at any of the Taliban soldiers he
killed.

"I have been a refugee for two years.  The Taliban took our wives, our
land and our children."

The interview over, the truck full of soldiers drives off towards the
new front line.  Omar Sharif re-ties his prisoner, clamping the rope
around his chest and arms, and they walk together in the opposite
direction, down a dusty lane.  We watch them leave.  Both are thin,
filthy and poor, and neither is in uniform.  Victor and vanquished are
bound together in a way that seems to summa rise this conflict.

When they are out of sight, we continue in the direction of Taloqan. US
bombs, which were targeting the Taliban trenches, have left huge
craters here by the side of the road.  We also see land mines studded
in the soil around them.  The trenches are already crawling with locals
who are looting them, stealing back what the Taliban originally stole
from them.  It is not much.  One man is removing a blue door.  Another
is taking some sacking.  The trenches are poor and dark.  The Taliban
soldiers departed so recently their discarded tea leaves are still wet.
They were grilling mice to survive.  The ferocity of the American
bombing at close quarters must have been terrifying.

The sun is setting, and we decide to turn back.  We did not intend to
stay overnight.  We stop by General Bariolai's headquarters and he
cheerfully describes the battle he has fought and what lies ahead.  He
says that the Northern Alliance has taken Herat in the west, and its
troops are now twenty kilometres from the gates of Kabul.  He also says
the Northern Alliance will be ready to attack Kabul within the next few
days.  Having watched and waited here for so long, the speed of this
offensive is bewildering.

We go back in the dark, and I file on all that we have seen today,
trying to predict a timetable for the conflict.  I write by hand in my
battered exercise book, by the light of a paraffin lamp.  Then I carry
that lamp inside to use a satellite phone, which is sitting next to
banks of TV equipment.  It's a strange combination.  NBC has set up a
massive television operation, running all their state-of-the-art
equipment from the generator, but there are still no lights.

I look up to see Maurice, the Kiwi cameraman, at the door.  In case he
needs the sat phone I tell him I won't be long.

"Yes, I'll just put the cat out, and I'll be coming to bed," he replies
cheekily.

We both laugh.  I didn't realise how domestic I sounded.

Taking my paraffin lamp, I go back outside to write my next piece.  We
are receiving the first reports that Taliban leaders are loading up
their cars and fleeing Kabul.

It's cold as I sit down at the table on the concrete balcony, the
candle's shadow flickering across my pages.  Tim from USA Today is out
here, too.  He can't sleep, even though he has the best tent in Khoja
Bahauddin.  My last live shot is for Deutsche Welle's 11 p.m. bulletin,
which works out at 3 a.m. local time, and Jonathan and Tim sit up with
me, talking into the cold night, huddled on the balcony under the
gleaming sky.  We go to bed just before dawn, while down south,
Northern Alliance troops are entering Kabul.  When we wake up the next
day, Tuesday 13 November, Kabul has fallen.

I thought General Bariolai was being optimistic when he predicted
yesterday that it would take a week.  I can't believe that the Taliban
have simply abandoned the capital they had vowed to defend to the
bitter end.  I discuss the speed of this collapse with our translator,
Halim.  He is forty-eight years old, with a wonderfully refined face,
good English, and a roguish sense of humour.  He has the most
extraordinary laugh, like The Riddler in Batman.  He lived in Germany
for five years, selling used cars, and is always bringing us Greek
antiquities to buy.

I enjoy hearing Halim's opinions, and he has an unusual take on the
Taliban's speedy retreat across the country.

"Yes, it is a sign that the people were sick of them because they were
so boring."  Halim is actually learning a new word, 'boring', which he
uses incorrectly in many sentences, but I like this angle on things. It
wasn't just the Taliban's cruelty that made them so unpopular, it was
also that they enforced dreariness, and made people's lives so drab.

This is not unlike the end of the Soviet Union.  The Communists were
atheists and the Taliban are religious fanatics they were polar
opposites in ideological terms, but both inflicted greyness on
people.

I am busy filing all day on the flight of the Taliban's leadership from
Kabul.  They took care to clear out the country's coffers before they
left and also seized eight Christian aid workers whom they had charged
with proselytising Muslims, a crime punishable by death.  It appears
they regard the Westerners as a bargaining chip in any negotiations
with Coalition forces.

I also file on the big news of the day: the Northern Alliance's
victorious entry into Kabul.  Joyful crowds swarmed onto the streets at
dawn to cheer the troops on.  There are the first reports of men
shaving off their beards to celebrate the Taliban's departure, and of
looting by soldiers as well.  Every news desk wants an analysis of
Washington's demand that the Northern Alliance troops should stay out
of the capital.  The Northern Alliance says it has to intervene to
secure the capital and prevent a dangerous power vacuum from
developing.  Will the US succeed in imposing this unrealistic demand on
the Alliance leadership?  Are events moving too quickly for Washington
to control?

Now Kabul is free, we can't keep on reporting on events there from up
here in the north.  It is three weeks since I returned to Afghanistan,
and though I was thinking about leaving, I can't go home now.  The
logic of history is pushing us towards Kabul.  When I go to the
European Broadcasting Union to file, I hear about a convoy of
journalists preparing to drive first to Taloqan, and then over the
mountains to Kabul.

Should we join?  I discuss this with NBC correspondent Jim Maceda.  We
pore over the map.  The roads from the north aren't yet secure, or free
of land mines.  The main highway south is one of the few good roads in
Afghanistan, and the journey should take little more than a day, but
the Taliban still control stretches of this road.  There are reports
that some 20,000 Taliban soldiers, Afghans and desperate foreign
fighters are surrounded further south, near the town of Kunduz.  A
siege is developing.

So that road's out.

Instead we will have to travel to Kabul across the Hindu Kush, the
highest mountain range in this mountainous country.  It's not
reassuring to learn that Hindu Kush means "Hindu slaughter'. Conditions
are so rugged that this journey of less than 500 kilometres takes four
days.  It involves driving off road, in winter, in Russian military
jeeps, along goat tracks strewn with land mines.  The wrecks of
vehicles destroyed by mines sit as grim warnings along the paths. There
are also no guarantees that our vehicles will be able to cross the
passes at the summit.  The winter snows have begun and many of the
paths are already impassable.

When a BBC crew did this trip three weeks ago, the pass was blocked and
they had to transfer two tonnes of gear onto thirty-five donkeys, and
ride across, through snow reaching up to their saddles.  The price was
an added complication.  The Afghan horsemen used to charge ten dollars
per animal in pre-air strike days.  But they upped their prices
mid-ride, demanding US$5000 from the BBC, and pulling out their guns to
collect payment.  That's a cautionary tale.

We look at the maps again.  The best ones are printed in Russian, from
the days of the Soviet war in the 1980s.  We can't make out much, which
doesn't stop us returning to them frowningly over and over.  NBC
decides it will join the convoy.  Do I want to come with them?  It is
expensive and dangerous, with drivers now charging up to US$3000 per
car more than thirty years' salary for the mountain journey.

I take a deep breath.  I suppose I do, though I am very frightened of
this drive, which I have been avoiding for six weeks.  I didn't travel
down to the Panjshir Valley because of the demands of this journey and
other journalists' tales of near-death experiences, as well as the
difficulty of making it back out.  I don't want to go, but now that the
war has been fought and 'won' in four days, I find myself agreeing to
do the drive that terrifies me.  There are many farewells to make.  My
best friends Torn and Jonathan are staying behind.  Jonathan will be
going home to New York.  Tom is staying on, but will remain in Khoj to
pack up the gear.  I hope he will come to Kabul next week, but there
are no guarantees.  I'm sad to say goodbye to both of them.

I file till very late, as the fall of Kabul is big news.  The presenter
of Ireland's most prestigious breakfast program ends our interview by
saying, "Look after yourself and God bless."  I can't think of any
other national broadcaster who would be so solicitous during a live
bulletin.  Who could not love filing for the Irish?

I'm cold and tired by the time I come back to the room, but too tense
and scared to sleep.  Jonathan is up and I confess to him how
frightened I am.  There are no safety nets, and this journey breaks all
the rules about knowing how you will get out.  If we need to, if
someone's sick, or we have an accident, or hit a land mine, I have no
idea how we will ever get off that mountain.

Jonathan tries to reassure me, in whispers so as not to wake Stan, that
everything will be all right, and that this crazy journey is the right
thing to do.  I suddenly remember how when I worked for ABC Australia,
and we were filming at a remote spot somewhere on a mountain in Laos or
PNG, the sound recordist used to say "Right, this is the place if your
appendix bursts now, you're dead.  No one can save you."

Jonathan laughs, but says, "You'll be good," using that unintentionally
comforting New York phrase, before adding, 'after all, you're the
toughest sheila I know."

I'm not so sure, and in the morning as I'm packing to leave, Jonathan
changes his mind.

"I don't think you should go, I've got a bad feeling about this
trip."

"Jonathan!  You're not allowed to say that.  Even if you think it."

"I know, I know, but I do think it..  ."

He tries to make up for it by plying me with useful gifts.

"Here, take this torch, you'll need it.  And a knife.  I can't believe
that you don't have a knife."

Knives again but he's right.  I do need both.

"Please, please be safe," he says as I pack the pocketknife.  I carry
my bags outside for the last time, and promise to be as careful as I
can, brushing aside that premonition of death two nights ago.  I beg
him to take care, too, and looking around the desolate vista of Khoj a
Bahauddin, I have a sudden moment of clarity.  This is not the time to
leave Afghanistan.  We should both see this story through to the end.

"Jonathan, don't go to New York.  Come to Kabul!"  16

OVER THE HINDU KUSH, 14 NOVEMBER 2001

"You.  Me.  Go.  Kabul."  I say to Shah Mahmood.

Shah Mahmood's small intense face lights up as he repeats "Kabul' and
slaps me on the back, laughing.

Seven of us are travelling on this journey over the Hindu Kush,
excluding our drivers.  Producer Kevin Sites, reporter Jim Maceda,
engineer Jim Bruton, Maurice the Kiwi cameraman, Stan his sound
recordist, and our translator Halim.

There are three vehicles, and I'm travelling with the two Jims, in Shah
Mahmood's jeep.  It's an old Russian military jeep, olive green,
battered and dusty, like everything else in northern Afghanistan, with
no brakes, clutch or suspension to speak of.  It's the worst car in the
convoy, but Shah Mahmood is driving it, so I don't mind.  He is
eccentric and quite wild, but perversely I feel safe with him.  I
realise that I've known him the whole time I've been in Afghanistan.

We pack our gear into the back of the jeep.  Two doors open onto a
small area behind the back seats, where we pile our luggage and
provisions for the long journey.  We take enough food, water, petrol
and first aid kits for five days.  The other vehicles have more petrol
and all the generators, editing gear and videophones.

"Laptops on top," we remind each other.  As it turns out all this
ensures is that whenever we have to brake suddenly our laptops go
flying, injuring us and them.

We climb in.  It's 14 November and Northern Alliance troops have
entered Kabul, despite calls from Washington to hold back.  Like
everyone on the ground journalists, Northern Alliance leaders, perhaps
even some Taliban leaders officials in Washington have been caught off
guard by the speed of the Taliban collapse.  The US fears the situation
will spiral out of its control and that itA will merely replace one set
of Islamic militants with another.  However, when we discuss this in
the jeep we agree that it is impossible to ask victorious troops to
stay outside a city in these circumstances.  In the end, Washington
does wring a concession out of the Northern Alliance: that they will go
in and secure the city, to ensure that the Taliban really have left,
and then they will withdraw, waiting for the new multi-party interim
government to take control.  They will do this to prevent a power
vacuum from developing, which in Afghanistan is code for a takeover of
sections of the city by armed bandits.  Soon we'll be able to gauge for
ourselves whether this is being put into effect.

We stop in at the Foreign Ministry to meet the other vehicles leaving
in the convoy.  The office and Massoud's house are both empty.  It is
the end of an era.  All the ornate heavy furniture is being loaded onto
a truck for relocation to Taloqan.  Khoja Bahauddin is reverting to
being the sleepy, irrelevant backwater it always was.  This is the
quickest shutdown I've ever seen.

I feel a moment's nostalgia, but it's a bright, cool morning and the
beginning of a new adventure puts us in fine spirits as we jolt along
the well-worn path to the river.

"I'm in the mood for the Shah ma dude," carols Jim Maceda.

Shah Mahmood laughs, an infectious sound.

Contemplating the perilous drive ahead, I check with the boys, "Why do
we do this?"

"Because out here, we know we are alive," says Jim Maceda.

"I can be myself here in a way I am not back home," Jim Bruton offers
reflectively, but certainly, in his distinctive Southern drawl.

"These extremes place demands on you that you never face in ordinary
life.  Rising to those challenges -that's what I'm here for."

I tell them that an English journalist says he's here for the 'kicks
and chicks and cash and chaos'.  They both smile.  Okay, so that's
nailed them.  But what am I doing here?  Danger is invigorating and
addictive but being the boys' own adventure girl doesn't seem like
enough of an explanation at the moment.  Frankly, I think we're
crazy.

At Dashti Qala, the sky is a dazzling blue above the bare brown
mountains, and the river that we know so well is once again full of
traffic.  In fact, today, Wednesday, three days after the Taliban have
retreated from this front line, the river is crowded with people,
animals and vehicles.

The river flat is muddier than when we were here two days ago, but the
most significant difference is in the state of the river itself.  Where
before it was sluggish and quiet, today it is fast moving and swollen.
We stand on the flat, looking out, and see a dispiriting sight.  A
Russian jeep just like ours is stuck in the middle of the muddy water,
submerged up to its roof.  The owner is standing barefoot on top of it,
his pants rolled up to his knees, shouting half-heartedly at someone on
the shore.  He has the defeated air of a man who knows rescue will take
some time.

We discuss our situation and conclude that the only way we'll make it
across is if we are towed, but what vehicle could do the job?  On cue
one chugs into view.  It's an old Soviet T-54 tank, straight out of a
Russian war movie, except for the turbaned Afghan fighters sitting on
top of it.

For US$50 they agree to haul us across the river.  Shah Mahmood
attaches our jeep to the tank with a rope, and the soldiers wave at us
from the tank top as it starts up with a muffled roar and jerks
forward.  Shah Mahmood steers intently, and the rope pulls and holds.
Some water comes in under my door, but with much shouting in Dari and
waving of hands, we are towed across the river between trucks, horses
and camels.  It's a thrilling start.

"At my age, this is better than sex," Jim Maceda jokes.

Others in higher vehicles pay for horses to ride across in front of
them, feeling out how deep the water is, so they know where it's safe
to drive.

The exhilarating crossing is followed by hours of slow progress through
the villages of the Q'urogh Mountains.  We pass the wall our truck
crashed into two days ago and I am surprised at what" a large chunk we
tore out of it.  When we are clear of the village we drive along
unmarked tracks through the desert of northern Afghanistan.  Our wheels
kick up clouds of sand, and the drivers stop to fight over whether the
Taliban laid land mines here before they fled.  Shah Mahmood opens the
door and stands with one foot on the car seat, the other on the door
handle to give him height, looking out over the jeep's roof and
surveying the desert.  His calf muscle, like all of him, is twitching
with tension.

"No, it is this way.  We must go this way."  Shah Mahmood is certain.

The drivers get out of the cars to shout at each other.  After close to
an hour of vehement disagreement, we change direction, backtracking
through the sand, and circling around in the opposite direction.  Shah
Mahmood is furious with his fellow drivers.

"This is the wrong way.  This will take us hours more."

They are furious with Shah Mahmood.

"He is crazy.  He wants to take us across the land mines.  This desert
has changed since we were last here.  It is not good enough to say ins
hallah we won't be killed"."

We lurch through rocky outcrops, the jeep's gears crunching with a
terrible grinding noise.  It is hard going.  Shah Mahmood's jeep
basically has no suspension, and we jolt painfully over craters, taking
our position from a river that has dried up during the drought.
Eucalyptus and birch trees still grow there.  There is a dusty
waterwheel in the dry riverbed, ancient vines trailing over it like
spider webs.  We drive along tank tracks through the hills, passing
trucks carrying soldiers also headed for Taloqan.  The dust billows up
until it covers the windscreen and the road and we can't see the path
in front of us.

"Stop.  Shah Mahmood, stop!  Wait until the dust settles and you can
see the road," Jim Maceda says as he peers ahead from the front seat.
We seem to have lost everyone else in the convoy.

"Are they behind us?"  he asks.

Jim Bruton looks through the back window and replies, "I don't know.  I
can't see a thing."

When we rejoin the path that Shah Mahmood was heading for three hours
earlier he is once again furious about the waste of time.  He shouts
in Dari, and Jim Maceda shouts back at him in English.  Neither can
understand the other, but everything is clear.

"Yes, Shah Mahmood, it took longer, but we couldn't take the risk.
There could have been land mines there."

Shah Mahmood responds furiously in Dari.

"I bet you he was right and we could have gone this way after all," I
say.

We'll never know.  When we finally crawl into Taloqan that evening,
there's dust in every crevice of our bodies.

The road into Taloqan is clogged with returning refugees and soldiers.
Military trucks swerve around donkey carts and people on foot.
Everyone, including Shah Mahmood, is blaring their horns.

The first thing that we notice about Taloqan is that its main street is
paved, and that some houses are built of concrete rather than mud.  The
land here is not as badly affected by the drought as the desert area we
have just left.  Food stalls are stocked with fresh vegetables, of much
better quality than any we saw further north.  There are large,
creamy-coloured cauliflowers, red apples and purplish pomegranates with
shiny rinds.  Bakery windows are full of bread, and sides of lamb hang
from hooks.

After Khoja Bahauddin this is a big, busy city.  We are wide-eyed.

One of the translators travelling in the convoy with us, Fayoz, is
nineteen years old, and this is his home.  He was living in Khoja
Bahauddin with his father and is now returning to see his mother,
sisters and brothers for the first time in almost eighteen months.

"This is the best day of me," he says, beaming.

We go to the Foreign Ministry.  Zuhair is there, proud, no longer the
diffident man I met reeling from the shock of Massoud's death almost
two months ago.  I congratulate him on the Northern Alliance's return
to Taloqan.

He says that we cannot continue our journey tonight as the road is not
yet safe, and suggests an address of a house we might be able to stay
in.  It turns out to be a single-storey building from which the Taliban
only recently departed.  Their slogans are still scrawled in huge
curving black Arabic script on the walls, but otherwise they have left
nothing.  It is bleak and empty, with cement walls and floors, and the
stink from the filth-encrusted bathroom pervades the whole building.
Though the light is fading and everyone is tired, I hope we can do
better than to live in Taliban dirt.

We go to look at a second house, which is in a compound with a number
of empty buildings.  The windows are broken, but it has better
security, cosier rooms, and a garden area with a camp oven.  Once, it
would have been appealing, a compound which could house many families
who would meet in the fertile garden.  Even now, empty, the garden grey
with dust, it retains some of that charm, and so we decide to stay.  We
buy a carpet for the floor.  The owner of the house brings mattresses.
And I put my sleeping bag beside Stan's, for old times' sake.

Outside, the streets of Taloqan are heaving and joyous.

"The Taliban are gone and now we can listen to music and shave our
beards and go out at night.  We couldn't go out at night during the
Taliban times," says twenty-four-year-old Freydon.  He is clean shaven,
revelling in the street with his friend Safiollah.

"The first thing we did after they left is we went to the barbers and
we shaved off our beards.  Then we turned on our tapes, then we threw
away our turbans," he says, counting off the signs of freedom on his
fingers.

In the bazaar, barbers are doing a roaring trade.  Men queue patiently
to have their beards shaved.  Inside, the mirrors are cracked, the
walls are covered with ancient travel posters so faded it is difficult
to divine which country they are advertising.  The barbers wield their
scissors energetically, and everyone, staff and customers, is smiling
broadly.  The snipping sound reminds me of the old Australian shearer's
song .. . click go the shears, boys.

Outside there is music.  We follow the sound through the bazaar, like
the Pied Piper's children, to a chaikhana, a teahouse, where men gather
for kebab and rice.  The owner, Nafisullah, welcomes us.  He is also
smiling.  There's an epidemic of smiling in Taloqan.  Nafisullah is
playing a tape of Afghan pop star Farhad Darya, which he kept hidden
from the Taliban's brutal religious police for more than a year.

"We love music and for two years here when the Taliban were in power we
did not hear it.  You know that without music people are dead," he
says.

Everything here appears festive.  Carts are drawn by horses adorned
with bobbles and bells.  A particularly splendid black horse with
multicoloured braids and red bobbles pulls a wooden cart carrying four
passengers.  Two men with guns across their knees face forwards, and
two blue burqas face backwards.  It jingles by.

We go back to base to file about the celebrations in Taloqan, and about
the war still to be fought thirty-five kilometres down the road in
Kunduz.  The estimated 20,000 retreating Taliban fighters remain
trapped there.  Six thousand of them are understood to be 'foreign'
fighters from Pakistan, Chechnya and many Arab countries, trained and
paid by Osama bin Laden.

The Northern Alliance is planning to attack Kunduz, but Commander
Mohammed Daoud holds a press conference in the garden outside the
Foreign Ministry here to announce that he is postponing the offensive
at the request of the local mayor.  The mayor hopes to separate the
Afghan fighters from the 'international terrorists' at Kunduz.
Low-ranking Taliban will be given an opportunity to defect.

"But for high-ranking and foreign Taliban, there will be no deal.  They
will all be tried."

General Daoud also says that two Pakistani jets have landed in Kunduz
over the past forty-eight hours, and according to Northern Alliance
information Pakistan is evacuating its military personnel from the
besieged city.

At the press conference we ask him about disturbing rumours that the
Taliban have not left Taloqan, and that there are militias in hiding
here, preparing an attack from within the city.  General Daoud concedes
that it is possible, for one of his brigades was fired on and some of
his men were killed when they entered a compound here yesterday.

"That is why my soldiers are mopping up house by house."

He tells us that the eight Christian aid workers have been freed by
Northern Alliance troops and that Hamed Karzai is back in Kandahar.

The snake is shedding one skin and growing another.

General Daoud tells American journalist Jon Lee Anderson that the
former Taliban commander in Taloqan is in 'a safe location'.  Jon's
translator discovers that the safe location is Daoud's home, and he
talks the guards into letting them in.

The Taliban commander, Mullah Shabir Ahmed, agrees to meet them.  A
pale man in his mid-thirties, with a long reddish beard, Mullah Ahmed
is being held in a building just inside the front gate.  His room is
small and he sits near its sole window, an AK-47 resting on the sill
behind him.  It gives a new dimension to 'house arrest', living as your
enemy's guest and being allowed to keep your guns.

"I was studying at a madrasa in Pakistan," says Mullah Ahmed, 'and when
the Taliban began I joined and entered Afghanistan with them, filled
with pure Islamic feeling.  In the beginning, this feeling we had was
splendid, but, more recently, we have begun having doubts about some of
the commanders who are with the Taliban," he says, alluding to the
foreign fighters.

"Following the martyrdom of Ahmed Shah Massoud, we realised that
outside hands, terrorists, were involved in the movement."  He's on
solid ground with this line here in Taloqan, Massoud's old capital.

"So, for the good of the country, we decided to come over to the
Northern Alliance."

He and the two commanders under him, who are also now being held here
at Daoud's house, remained behind in Taloqan and turned themselves over
to General Daoud, along with several hundred fighters.  The rest of the
Taliban retreated to Kunduz.  Mullah Ahmed says he stayed on to ensure
the security of the town, and he personally called General Daoud to
tell him the way into Taloqan was safe.

This was how Taloqan was reconquered by the Northern Alliance.

The Taliban leader has not revised his Muslim beliefs.

"I am still proud of the name Taliban."  The attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, he claims, were not the actions of the
Taliban, but of terrorists.

"It's hurtful to hear the Taliban name insulted, and to see it used by
others who have their own purposes in mind."

He says he supports the rules against rape, pederasty, fornication,
gambling and drinking alcohol.  And also the importance of beards.
These are things commanded by the messenger of Islam."

Mullah Ahmed says that he doesn't agree with all of the Taliban edicts,
like the ban on music and kite flying, though it appears he was happy
enough to enforce them, ordering the religious police to beat people
who broke the rules.  He says he opposed the Taliban's destruction of
the giant Buddhas at Bamian.

"They posed no danger to Islam, and they were part of Afghanistan's
history."

It seems that despite what General Daoud indicated at the press
conference, it is also part of Afghanistan's history that this man will
not be punished for his support of the Taliban and his top-level role
in the regional Taliban power structure, simply because he has
defected.

Locals are not impressed.  The owner of a Taloqan bookstore, Ghulam
Sarwar Akbari, tells Jon Lee Anderson he is 'at a loss' about this
merging of the two forces.

"Yesterday, Shabir Alhrned was a mullah wearing a black turban, and
today he is living in Daoud Khan's house!  And there are others who
were wearing turbans and are now in pakuls, walking the streets. Akbari
is appalled.

"Every time a new government comes into power, the local strongmen
change their disguises.  They face up to no responsibility for the
misfortune their wars cause to the civilians."

I ask every person I interview about the side switching, since it is
the most incomprehensible strand of the conflict for me.  Some explain
it in terms of poverty.  Poor fighters join whoever is powerful.  If
the man who is paying you switches sides, you switch sides with him. It
is feudal, like the structure in Europe in medieval times.  Some
explain it in terms of the absence of nationalism.  In this region,
people don't feel themselves Afghans, they are more closely defined by
their tribes.  You go where the tribal leader goes.

Many people blame foreigners for the plight of Afghanistan and the rash
of side switching.  They remind me that America helped the Mujaheddin
in order to defeat the Soviets, but that after the Mujaheddin were
victorious, America didn't stay to help them create a good government.
If America had stayed, they argue, all this side switching would never
have happened.

Others also blame the foreigners for cementing the rule of the gun,
which allowed fighters to gain control of the country and push out or
kill Afghanistan's educated elite.  Now, people say, the few who remain
are powerless to speak out, in the land where the Kalashnikov is
king.

Everywhere, people look to these same foreigners whom they blame for
their predicament to intervene and enforce a reasonable political
solution.  Like a mantra, every man I interview repeats that he is sick
of war.

Walking in the bazaar I realise that this whole story can be understood
through hats.  Fashion explains everything.  If a man wears a black
turban and a long beard he is Taliban.  If he wears a coloured scarf
and pakul, the grey cap favoured by Ahmed Shah Massoud, he is with the
Northern Alliance -or perhaps a foreign journalist (more and more of my
colleagues seem to be wearing this kit whenever I see them).

A hat-seller in the bazaar in Taloqan says he almost sold out of pakuls
earlier this week, in the days before the city fell.  The Taliban once
threatened to shoot anyone wearing the pakul, the symbol of Massoud.
But now it's the Taliban's own soldiers who are queuing up at the hat
stall to buy them.  When a war is being won through defections, it's
important to show distinctly where your new loyalties lie.

The Taliban had a ludicrously strict dress code.  Men were compelled to
wear the local pyjama suit (a good choice1 now have two pairs) and they
had to wear it with a waistcoat, which had to be striped.  The long
blanket men wrap around themselves in winter was also compulsory, as
were turbans.  These had to be worn with a long, loose end hanging
below the shoulder.  Decrees were posted in public, signed by Mullah
Mohammed Omar himself, saying that those who did not wear their turbans
crooked would go to gaol.  Beards had to be long enough to be clenched
in a fist and protrude at the far end.

Although there is something almost comical about the dour, bleak
Taliban as Style Nazis, the sanctions were serious.  Any man who
didn't obey would be locked in a container a punishment with a terrible
history of death in northern Afghanistan.  No wonder everyone is
rushing to buy Northern Alliance outfits.

We all sleep in one room, seven of us lining the walls, head to toe,
Afghan style.  A large lamp gives off some heat in the centre of the
room and our translator, Halim, tells us about his wife.

"She is so old and so ugly you can't believe it.  Her teeth are so
long.  She is sixty years old and I am only forty-eight, that is twelve
years older than me.  It is time I took a younger wife."

He has his eye on an educated younger woman, perhaps one who used to
work at a university, a woman in her twenties.  That would be ideal.

It's a strange bedtime story.

I dream of hideous hags with grey hair and long teeth, and am woken
before dawn by lengthy calls to prayer.  A new moon has been spotted in
the sky above Mecca.  The Muslim holy month of Ramadan has begun.  I
lie in my sleeping bag, listening to the muezzin and remember all the
column inches devoted to whether there would be fighting here during
Ramadan.  Most of the country has fallen before Ramadan began.

In the morning we pack to leave Taloqan.  The Professor appears bearing
Stan's laundry and a piece of audio equipment he'd left behind in Khoja
Bahauddin.  Stan is touched.  He feared he would never see it again.
Even though we are about to sack the Professor for stealing from us, he
is also kind and helpful one of the paradoxes of relationships in this
place.  Perhaps you can't have a real relationship with people so much
poorer than you.  You almost have to expect them to steal from you.

There are continuing reports of marauding Taliban gangs.  It's not safe
to stay any longer.  The siege in Kunduz is a fascinating developing
story, but when I check with Deutsche Welle and Voice of America they
want me to move on.

"Get to Kabul."

The Foreign Ministry is organising a convoy to the capital,
theoretically one where we'll stay in contact with the other vehicles
and won't lose each other.  But before we can join, we have to find a
new driver.  The rough road has caused Shah Mahmood's jeep to break
down one time too many, and he has to stay in Taloqan for major
repairs.  We will have to continue without him.  I'm heartbroken, but
he promises that once he returns to Khoja Bahauddin, he will come to
Kabul with the rest of the NBC crew.

The women's activist Farahnaz Nazir, whose interview with me earned her
a death threat from Khoja Bahauddin's military commander, is also
travelling to Kabul in this convoy.  It is wonderful to see her and her
family here.  They are accompanying CBS, who can no longer take them to
the safety of Tajikistan because they are not going there themselves.
The fall of Kabul has changed everyone's plans.

Farahnaz is worried because among the Northern Alliance soldiers
assigned to the convoy are some men loyal to Quazi Kobir, the commander
who threatened her life.  The men assigned to protect us are dangerous
for her, and they make it plain they know where she is.  She feels as
if her guards are her gaolers.  Even the house CBS rents in Taloqan
turns out to be owned by Quazi Kobir.  Farahnaz doesn't sleep a wink
all night.

I remember my first interview with Farahnaz, when the only threats she
had received were from disgruntled local men in Khoja Bahauddin, not
its all-powerful military commander.

"Do you think that without freedom we are alive?"  she said.

"Women are alive, but it's not life, we are a dead body that moves,
with no permission to act.  Women are only sitting at home.  It is
better to die than to live this life."

Farahnaz and her family plan to apply for asylum in Canada, following a
suggestion from a CBS correspondent who is Canadian.  I don't think
there's any point in Farahnaz applying to Australia.  Its current
policies on accepting asylum seekers are very tough, so I also
encourage Farahnaz to apply to Canada.  Any application in either
country will be made more difficult, of course, because Farahnaz's
oppressor comes from our allies against the Taliban, the Northern
Alliance.  We find a new driver.  Jamal is more quiet and modest than
Shah Mahmood.  While he is also an excellent driver and a skilled
mechanic, his Russian jeep turns out to be in pretty bad shape, too.
Battling across the rough tracks on these forbidding mountains destroys
vehicles.

We line up for the convoy at a bridge at the western end of town.  If
you follow this road for fifty kilometres you will reach Kunduz.
Although it is the best road and the most direct route, we can't take
it because of the Taliban fighters trapped there.

Instead we travel through a plain dotted with small wheat farms.
Snow-capped mountains surround us on all sides.  About thirty
kilometres away, the front line in the battle for Kunduz begins at a
river near the village of Bangi.  Taliban and Northern Alliance forces
face each other, less than a kilo metre apart.  We turn off before
Bangi, where children stand guard over patches of wheat, spread out to
dry along the road.  We avoid the wheat and the children, and
regretfully leave the paved road behind.  We start bouncing along the
gravel paths once more and begin our ascent.

The nearness of the Taliban makes everybody nervous.  Our convoy's
armed guards include Samim, one of Massoud's bodyguards who lived with
us in Khoja Bahauddin.  We are genuinely happy to see each other.

"Is Jonathan here?"  he asks about his Jewish 'blood brother'.  Samim
is returning to his village in the Panjshir Valley for the first time
since the Northern Alliance victory.

We drive along these dusty foothills for most of the day.  Strange,
empty white cones dot the landscape, abandoned tents stopped up with
stones.  Here, people don't pack up their tents when they go home they
just leave them, in case they have to return.  In Afghanistan, people
have no confidence that they won't be refugees over and over again.

When we stop anywhere, crowds of men surround us.  Had they started to
get used to us in Khoja Bahauddin?  It seems that the attention there
had begun to abate slightly.  Here it is unremitting, open-mouthed,
slack-jawed staring once more.  At the village of Naharine we stop as
our drivers are arguing once again.

"What is it?"  I ask.

Halim explains that the drivers are uncertain what to do because the
word is that the Salang Pass, which they'd hoped to take, is closed,
and the road is mined.

"Why would they drive up a mined road to a closed pass?"  I ask
Halim.

"What else are they fighting about?"

"Where to go next."

After some time they agree that if we take a longer detour via a lower
pass, the Hawaq, we might make it across because it won't be blocked by
snow.  My heart sinks as it will take significantly longer, but at this
point it doesn't seem we have many options.

"Burro b'chai let's go," I say sombrely.

Our jeep turns off the path and starts climbing up into the mountains
an hour before sunset.  Driving cross-country, uphill, in a heavily
mined area, is a bone-jolting and terrifying combination.  We veer up a
rocky stream to avoid land mines and are soon driving through this
landscape in the pitch-black Afghan night.  Even though there is water
in the creeks, the dust has not abated; it streams towards us out of
the dark, picked out by our headlights.  The drive continues into the
night, on narrow ridges, above high cliffs, with walls of rock above us
and icy rivers far below.

We follow hairpin bends, frightening enough to traverse in our jeep
which fits on the path, but there are huge trucks, too, reversing up
and downhill because the paths are too narrow to allow them to turn.
They have developed this strange zig-zag, taking one section forwards,
then the next section backwards, from ramp to ramp, in order to
negotiate this part of the drive.  I watch this push-me pull-you
progress in the darkness in disbelief.  Sometimes two trucks meet back
to back, one reversing uphill in the dark, the other reversing
downhill.  I have never seen anything like it anywhere else in the
world.

We manage to make it across this mountain without reversing but then on
the next peak, in the middle of a rocky outcrop, our jeep loses its
drive shaft.  Impatient cars from our convoy, caught behind us, begin
tooting and cursing, as if we have stopped on a mountainside in the
middle of nowhere, on a freezing night, out of choice.

Our driver, Jamal, takes his toolbox and lies under the jeep, while
other cars edge past on the narrow path, spraying him with gravel.  It
is very dark, and Jim Bruton lights the undercarriage of the jeep with
a torch.  I keep moving to maintain body warmth.  The stars offer
consolation, spilled out across the sky in a gleaming carpet, so close
and so dense I feel I could reach out and touch them.  I fear it is
going to be a long, cold night, but within half an hour Jamal has
inserted a pin into the drive shaft, and it appears to be holding.  We
continue] bumping along the rocky path.

In his book Eastern Approaches, Fitzroy Ma cLean records I that he was
travelling in the same region in the 1930s, when the gear stick on his
truck also broke down.  A spare part was missing, so they searched
about for alternatives.  In his James Bond way he found a metal collar
stud that fitted, and 'well-pleased' with his resourcefulness he
proceeded 'contentedly' on his way.  While driving along a mountain
path, 'negotiating hair-pin bends in the dark at fifty miles per hour
with a wall of rock rising on one side and a rushing torrent at the |
bottom of a precipice on the other, I wondered sleepily how the collar
stud, which occupied so important a place in the steering gear, was
standing up to the strain."  It's that 'sleepily' that lets you know he
really is James Bond.  After our drive shaft has been fixed, and the
temporary pin inserted, none of us is quite so sleepy, even though we
are all by now] exhausted.

We are the last to arrive at the village of Andarrob.  It's after
midnight, but the good news is that we don't have to sleep in [ the car
as there's a guesthouse here.

In Andarrob a guesthouse is a room with a raised platform on which 100
men sleep side by side.  Well, 100 men and me.  It is also the first
chance for men who have been fasting all day to eat, so they are
breaking out their food.  After eating, the Afghan practice is to roll
yourself in the blankets you wear, and just sleep in whatever nook you
find.

But we don't have it too bad.  An American journalist!  describes the
guesthouse he stays in as the worst place he's ever been.

"Crack addicts in New York have it better than this, and I've filmed
with crack addicts, I know," he tells me.

"It's like some medieval inn, we climb up into our room through a
ladder and it's the filthiest place I've ever been.  Spiders wouldn't
even go in there it's so filthy.  I don't want to unroll my sleeping
bag onto that dirt.  And it is freezing.  We have to sleep in all our
clothes.  But that isn't the worst thing.  The worst thing is the
smell.  The air is dense with the stench of centuries of travellers. Or
maybe they've buried someone in there.  All I know is that I had to put
my socks over my nose while I slept so that I could breathe."

So, relatively speaking our Andarrob guesthouse is all right.  I unroll
my sleeping bag between the two Jims, feeling as exhausted as if I've
been travelling since medieval times myself.  I'm also losing my sense
of humour.  There's nowhere to wash and we've just calculated that the
detour via the Hawaq Pass could add another two days to this trip.
That's if snow has not blocked the pass.  If snow has blocked the pass,
it could take even longer.

I grumble as I get into my sleeping bag, berating myself for having
come on this journey in the first place.  Jim Bruton tells me to stop,
there's nothing I can do about it, I certainly can't go back, but his
pep-talk only makes me feel worse, because now I feel trapped as well.
I fall asleep in a very dark mood only to be shaken awake four hours
later.  The drivers want to make an early start so that they have time
to eat before their daily fast begins.  Every soldier here comes to
shake me awake it's an irresistible lure, I can see that, a woman in
the joint but I'm never at my best in the mornings and after the
seventh soldier has his hands on my feet, I'm forced to sit up and bark
at them to leave me alone.

Once again, with no water in sight, we proceed on our way.  The air is
becoming thinner and clearer.  At various spots you can still hear
artillery fire in the hills.  The tracks are sprinkled with matchstick
hamlets and at each one the villagers come out to watch us pass.  The
crowds never include women.  Perhaps they watch from behind the closed
shutters of their shacks.  The men stand in a row, solemn, dirty and
curious.  Though it's winter, many are barefoot.  They are wearing
heavier clothes than the people in Khoja Bahauddin, made of wool. 
them with the sun gleaming on the snow all around us.  There is a
feeling of release, and here on the roof of the world, last night's
tantrum appears ridiculous.

As we ascend there is less and less oxygen and our jeep needs repairs
more and more often.  We are stopping every half hour, so that our
driver, Jamal, can carry out frenzied tinkering beneath the bonnet.
Soon we are stationary for longer than we are moving, and all the other
vehicles in the convoy are overtaking us.  The jeep stalls in the
middle of an icy creek as we are inching over its rocky bed.  Jamal has
to perch on the freezing slippery stones to do the repairs, with Jim
Bruton holding him upright.

We finally continue on our way and at the next pit stop, Jamal takes a
photo of the three of us.  Five minutes later the jeep loses its brake
and clutch simultaneously, sliding backwards on a mountain path near
the snow-covered summit of the Hawaq Pass.

Only Jamal's quick response saves our lives.  He turns the steering
wheel, hard left, into the mountain rather than away from it,
preventing the jeep from tumbling off the cliff and plunging into the
river hundreds of metres below.  But when the jeep backs up into the
mountain it rolls over instead.  The sickening lurch sideways feels as
if it is happening in slow motion and I'm not frightened not
immediately, anyway -just incredulous.

Miraculously, no one is hurt.  But when the jeep stabilises I'm lying
on my side with all our gear and Jim Bruton on top of me, and I can
smell the petrol that we need in order to continue our journey dripping
over us.  We climb out shakily through the window and hoick everything
out.  We are standing beside the overturned jeep with our bags piled
around us when a car from our convoy drives by and a woman sticks her
head out of the window.  She sneers and says, "We're not going to stop
to help you, because you didn't help us earlier."

I'm astounded even if she did think this was a punishment we deserved,
what would possess her to say it?  We could easily have died ten
minutes ago.  In another ten minutes, it could be her.  I'm also
confused; I have no idea what she means, because I remember that we did
stop to help her earlier today.  Extremes bring out the best and the
worst in people they test you and not everyone passes the test.  By
contrast, an Italian journalist, seeing our predicament, stops his
truck a kilo metre along the path and walks back down to offer help.

"If it turns out that your jeep can't drive any further, don't worry.
We have room in our truck for you and your bags."

We accept this kind offer, and when we start walking up to his truck, I
realise that any exercise at this altitude is surprisingly difficult,
and that simply walking towards us was an act of remarkable
generosity.

With the aid of one of the other NBC vehicles, we right the jeep,
though the driver of the second vehicle complains bitterly throughout
the operation that this is not what he was hired to do, he was hired to
drive directly to Kabul and not to delay by stopping to help rescue
other vehicles.  Halim translates all these complaints to me until I
finally ask him to tell the driver to shut up, that as long as he's
being paid, for Godsake, could he stop whingeing.  I am the only person
here not being paid on a daily basis and I am not whingeing, I say,
self-righteously, forgetting about my tantrum last night.

Jamal patches up our jeep so that it can drive, although its door is
broken and has to be tied shut with a piece of wire.  We will need to
siphon petrol from the generator we are carrying to enable it to
continue.

I am not sure that I want to continue the journey in this unreliable
jeep, now minus a door we can close.  Just as I am thinking that I
might opt for the Italian journalist's truck, it backs down the path
towards us and becomes bogged in the mud and snow.  I can't believe it.
This afternoon is starting to feel cursed.

Our resurrected jeep now tries to extricate the truck.  The huge wheels
turn, and the engine whirrs, but it soon becomes a hopeless whine as
the truck digs itself deeper and deeper into its prison of icy mud. Men
shout orders at each other in a variety of languages.  They try again
and again.  Nothing.  If anything, the situation is worse.  The men
become angrier and the wheels spin themselves deeper into the hole.
Before they come to blows, we decide that we need a bigger vehicle with
snow chains.

In the end, with only about two hours of daylight remaining, we have to
leave the truck, which only stopped in order to save us, on a mountain
in the middle of nowhere.  The friendly, decent Italian journalist,
whom I only ever know as Ivo from La Stampa, never once looks at me
accusingly or hints that this predicament is in any way our fault.  I
will never forget his kindness, and I promise him that we will go to
find a truck before the light fades, or that we will return for him.

Turning to look at them over my shoulder, I feel a wrench as we drive
away.  Our jeep limps over the Hawaq Pass.  It is snowing, in stinging
flurries, but it is passable, as our drivers had promised.  I feel
queasy as I look over the side, reliving the jeep's roll.

"Get over it, Irris," says Jim Bruton.  It's the right advice.

We see a truck with snow chains and flag it down, explaining where our
trapped colleagues are and sending it to help.  Relieved, we drive on.
Barely an hour later, we see a jeep broken down by the side of the
road.  It belongs to the woman who jeered at us.  We stop to help.  We
don't need to say anything.

Once over the Hawaq Pass, we drive down into the Panjshir Valley, a
200-kilo metre-long canyon that stretches almost all the way to Kabul.
It is overwhelmingly beautiful, hairpin bends above a crystal river,
jagged rock faces seeming to tumble all the way down to the water.  It
has a wild grandeur and a self-contained ruggedness.  Soviet-era tanks
still litter the route.  The road is narrowed by mudslides, making
driving here dangerous, even if you are not in a vehicle prone to
losing its brake and clutch.

"Not so close to the edge, don't drive so close to the edge," Jim
Maceda pleads with Jamal fruitlessly.

It is immediately apparent why this was the place where the Soviet army
foundered.  These unrelenting cliffs favour guerrilla fighters.  Even
with the use of modern weapons, wars in these mountains find no
conclusion.  Standing here it seems that Ahmed Shah Massoud owed his
victory to the Panjshir Valley.

In the dog-eared article by Mohsen Makhmalbaf that I'm still carrying
with me, the Iranian film-maker argues that if Afghanistan were not
mountainous, it's conceivable that the Soviets could have conquered it.
Geography is destiny.

perhaps, as Makhmalbaf suggests, the true fighters of Afghanistan are
not its hungry people but the high mountains that don't surrender.

Panjshir means five lions, and locals say that the sixth lion was Ahmed
Shah Massoud, Shir-e-Panjshir.  He was born here and he is buried here.
His tomb is in a shallow cave burrowed into a hillside at Jangalak on
the "Chief of the Martyr's Hill'.  The sun is setting as we drive past
the Jangalak memorial.  Massoud has a spectacular view from his resting
place.

We drive on in the dark until we reach Bazarak, the village where
Massoud was born and where his widow and six children still live.

Here we find another guesthouse, for our fourth night on the road. This
one is built above a brook, but it is too cold and dark to wash now. 
At the guesthouse, I bump into an American colleague, a tough war
correspondent, the veteran of many front lines who says that if there's
no other road out of Kabul, he'll simply stay there, and take out
Afghan citizenship.  Nothing would induce him to do this drive again.
His joke comforts me, making my constant fear seem reasonable.

Stan sets up the satellite phone, as he does every night, to call back
to base.  He was late last night since we arrived in Andarrob after
midnight, and Tom in Khoja Bahauddin told him they were ten minutes
away from calling the US Air Force to report us missing.  Tonight it is
not so late, although it is already dark when I chat to Jonathan on the
sat phone sitting on a tiny bridge above a small brook, squashed
between two jeeps.  I tell him about our jeep rolling.

"I thought I told you to be careful," he chides me.

"Next time you have a bad feeling about something, I'm going to
listen," I say ruefully.

Jonathan says he's not going home, he's coming to Kabul.  This news
makes me both happy and worried a constant combination in
Afghanistan.

"Please tell me that you guys are not driving all that gear along these
goat tracks."

"I think that's the plan."

"Don't do it!  It's a death trap," I warn him.

"You should take the main road through Kunduz and risk the Taliban for
five miles, it can't be worse than this trip."

Jonathan clearly thinks I'm mad.  To humour me, he tells me about the
strange time they've been having in Khoja Bahauddin, where they are the
only journalists left.

"We were sitting on the roof of the house at sunset, a bit out of it,
when we saw an American Chinook helicopter, you know the one with two
rotors.  But we weren't in work mode, so it took us a moment or two of
watching it to wake up to what it was, and to realise that we should
film it.  Then it was like Vietnam.  We ran down to where it was
landing, blades whirring against this amazing pink sunset, and out hop
these American Special Forces officers.  They were happy to be
interviewed, so we beamed them in to the breakfast show, live."

When it works, there's nothing like television.

We sleep in one room, once again arranged along the walls like
furniture.  I brush my teeth in the icy crystal water, the cleanest
I've ever tasted.  Then I remember a Russian producer in Dushanbe
begging me, "Whatever you do, don't drink the water in the Panjshir, it
looks clean, but it isn't."  Oh well.

The Panjshir Valley is the Northern Alliance's heartland.  The Taliban
never conquered the Panjshir, partly due to its geography, and partly
also due to tribal loyalties.  The hardy, volatile mountain people in
the Panjshir are mostly Tajiks, not Pashtuns like the Taliban.  They
are overjoyed at the Taliban's retreat from Kabul, crowding around to
talk and to cheer whenever we stop our cars.

At its southern end, the Panjshir Valley opens into the Shomali plains,
at the bottom of which, three hours south, lies Kabul.  This fertile
area was once dotted with farms, but in order to create a buffer zone
and remove any chance of cover for Northern Alliance soldiers preparing
to attack Kabul, the Taliban burnt the farms and the fields here in
1997 and 1998.  Thousands of families were left homeless.  The plains
are desolate, dotted with blasted vehicles, ruined tanks, and collapsed
houses, their broken walls covered with bullet holes and star-bursts
from shellfire.

Our translator, Halim, is saddened.  He has not been to Kabul for more
than a decade.

"I remember it was all vineyards here," he says.

"This area was once so beautiful."

There is nothing left now.  As we drive on, Halim is overwhelmed.  He
struggles to find the right word.

"It is so boring."

I feel I have to explain, "No, Halim, that is not a good way to use the
word boring."

The road is still obscured, but in a gap between the clouds of dust,
the city of Kabul is suddenly spread out beneath us.

"Kabul!"  we say to each other excitedly, before it disappears behind
another cloud.  We see it, and we feel it getting nearer, too.  Our
bodies are no longer braced for impact, and we aren't hitting our heads
on the roof of the jeep.  We are driving along a paved road, and the
relief is delicious.

This is the road the Northern Alliance forces took five days ago as
they fought their way into the capital.  It is strewn with burnt-out
Russian tanks and armoured personnel carriers.  In the weeks leading up
to the Taliban's retreat from Kabul, American jets pounded the
front-line positions here heavily, leaving the road torn up and
impassable.  Looking at the bomb craters, Maurice, who drove into
Kuwait city in 1992, says US bombing is more precisely targeted now.
The weaponry has improved in the intervening ten years.  We swerve
around the huge craters, taking care not to stray too far off course
because the surrounding area has not yet been cleared of mines.  But
after days grinding along a mountainside, it's a relief to be on a real
road.  And it means we are nearing our destination.

We are driving into a divided, uncertain city, but a city nonetheless.
I have mixed feelings: tremendous relief because that terrible route is
behind us, and anticipation because so much new lies ahead.

Jim Maceda was last in Kabul in 1980, and he is looking forward to
returning.  But in my mind I run through all that I know about Kabul,
and it's mostly terrifying.  While outside the window, devastated
villages zoom by, images from news reports flick through my head like
snapshots.

They go back to the time the Northern Alliance conquered Kabul in the
early 1990s, and the Mujaheddin of Ahmed Shah Massoud emptied
libraries at Kabul University, burning books on a pyre.  I also
remember pictures of a soldier executing a government office worker as
Northern Alliance troops entered Kabul in 1992.  Someone documented his
death, photograph by photograph, with nightmarish precision, from the
moment the soldier forced the worker to leave his office at gunpoint,
until the end when the soldier dragged the corpse away, using the same
cloth with which he had tied the worker's wrists only minutes before,
smearing blood behind him.

Kabul is a city without heroes.  The images from Taliban times are even
more terrible.  I remember pictures of a man being grabbed by the
Taliban's religious police, who were forcibly cutting his hair.  They
said it prevented his forehead touching the ground when he prayed,
letting the Devil stand between him and God.  His face was a mask of
terror because he did not know what they would do to him next.

The stories of the women are especially painful, such as the pregnant
woman who walked to a clinic because she needed treatment.  On the way
she felt giddy and raised her burqa to take some deep breaths.  A Talib
beat her repeatedly for showing her face.  She lay in the street
bleeding, but no man dared to help her because he would also be beaten.
She struggled alone to the clinic and lost her baby.

The public amputations and executions produced the most disturbing
images filmed by brave men and women who smuggled the pictures out of
Kabul in order to show the world the true nature of the Taliban regime.
I have seen a photograph I will never forget of a man with three left
hands.  It was a Taliban soldier parading through Kabul, holding two
left hands.  He dangled them from his index finger by a piece of
material tied around their index fingers.  The hands seemed to be
clasping one another.  They were the hands of thieves.  Amputations,
like beheadings, were carried out in football stadiums.

There is footage from the first public execution of a woman found
guilty of murdering her husband, watched by thousands in the Kabul
football stadium.  Although several minutes before the execution the
husband's family announced that they forgave the woman, which under
Islamic law meant that she no longer had to be executed, Taliban
officials said it was too late.  The execution had been announced over
the radio.  The condemned woman was brought into the centre of the
football stadium, and knelt, wearing a burqa, even now, even in death,
anonymous.  How were we to know this was the right woman?  A Taliban
soldier took aim with his Kalashnikov, but suddenly the woman stood and
tried to flee.  She was forced back down and shot three times in the
back of the head.  The execution was watched by her seven children, all
crying loudly for their mother.

I try to re-focus on the scenery outside the window, but these images
distract me.  I am ambivalent about entering Kabul, fearful of what I
will find.  17 I'm distracted from grave political issues by something
more immediate.  Almost the first thing we find in Kabul is the bomb in
our kitchen.  You can't relax here for one second!

This is my third brush with death in a week, coming after our car
rolled, and the wall collapsed onto me near the Taliban front line.
Although I've emerged each time without a scratch, I don't know how
much more I can take.  I am becoming too familiar with the jolt of
shock as it happens, followed by the adrenaline rush, I'm alive, I'm
alive, and then the stab of fear once you calm down and realise what a
close call it was.

I'd been so sure that I had to see this story through, and persuaded
Jonathan in Khoja Bahauddin to also come to Kabul, but now I find
myself wanting to leave.

I can't avoid feeling that three brushes with death is a significant
number.  Does danger come in threes?  Will the next one get me?  Or am
I safe now because I've had three near misses?  That's the problem with
tea leaves, you can read them any way you want.

I try not to dwell on the fact that all three experiences happened in
the week after that eerie premonition in Khoja Bahauddin, when everyone
was told I was dead.  Am I a marked woman, already a walking ghost?

I don't think of myself as superstitious, but in a war zone, when your
colleagues are dying, the truth is everyone is superstitious.  No
atheists in foxholes, and no one here who doesn't believe that the
lucky rabbit's paw, carried in their left pocket, never the right, was
what saved them from being killed yesterday.

You take to examining every event for meaning, seeing providence in the
fall of a stone.

"That wouldn't have happened to me," you reassure yourself on hearing a
journalist has been killed, "I'd have done it differently."  You weigh
risks, and assess them relative to other risks in this dangerous place.
Going to the front line eighteen hours after the Taliban withdraw is
okay but only three hours afterwards is foolhardy.  Driving down the
main highway south is dangerous crossing the Hindu Kush in a
broken-down old Russian military jeep is reasonable.

But the lesson of Afghanistan is that it's never safe to exhale, to
think, I'm all right here', even standing in your kitchen.  You have to
stay alert, keyed up, until you leave.  Even going for a drive or a
walk is dangerous, since death is waiting for you down every path.  The
UN estimates that as much as seventy per cent of Afghanistan is covered
in land mines.  If you set one off, and are lucky enough to survive,
your injuries will be terrible, as the high number of maimed victims of
mines here can attest.  There are US bombs, stray bullets, and all the
usual dangers of being in a war zone, exacerbated by the fact that in
Afghanistan everyone has a gun.  At least one.

So you take all this in, and navigate around it, sometimes with lucky
charms, sometimes with alcohol, sometimes with love affairs.  Anything
to keep your luck afloat.  Because in the end, no matter how careful
you are, I believe it is luck.  That's how I keep going.

Now I'm worried that my luck has run out.  When we find the bomb in our
kitchen, I discuss this with the UN mine man, Ross Chamberlain.  In his
kind, laid-back Australian way, he helps convince me that an unexploded
bomb is only a middle-order danger, not a serious one.  After all,
there were unexploded bombs in London for years after World War II. And
this bomb wasn't directed specifically at me, so it doesn't count as a
real 'third time unlucky'.

To cheer me up, Ross tells me that there is a UN bar in estimates that
as much as Kabul where alcohol has been available throughout Taliban
times.  The UN brings the booze in solely for its staff and other aid
workers.  No journalists are allowed, but there are ways of getting
around that, too.  Ross will be happy to help, only not straight away
because at a little party two nights ago the UN boys, returning to
Kabul for the first time since September 11, drank their bar dry.

I find myself smiling.  Suddenly there seems to be a way to live
between the rules here.  Maybe I don't have to leave Afghanistan
straight away after all.  I decide I'll sleep on it.  If I ever find a
place to sleep.

Accommodation is at a premium in Kabul.  The Taliban weren't big on
tourism, so there are almost no habitable hotels, and now media from
all over the world are arriving.  My NBC friends are looking for a new
house, and in the meantime they are bunking up with other NBC
colleagues at the Intercontinental Hotel.

The word "Intercontinental' conjures up images of luxury rooms, fluffy
bathrobes and sumptuous service.  But of course, the Intercontinental
in Kabul is different.  It's fallen on hard times since its heyday in
the 1960s, when it was part of the famous hotel chain.  The large,
squat building on top of a ridge in the centre of the city has a
spectacular view, and a ballroom, but that's about all that's left of
its former grandeur.  Despite faded signs promising a "Beauty Parlour'
and "Night Club', they are long gone, and most rooms have no phones, no
heating, no water and no sanitation.  In the lobby you have to dodge
the buckets that collect water from leaking pipes.  Management says the
pipes burst when a high-ranking Taliban official emptied his gun into
the ceiling.  Exactly why is never explained.  Maybe it was frustration
over the slow service in the restaurant.

But despite all this the Intercon is the best hotel in Kabul.  It is
the place to be if you can find a room.

In the five days since the collapse of the Taliban, broadcasters from
all over the world have set up here.  Fortunately, the hotel has a
large, easily accessible flat roof.  It is like a TV factory, with rows
of satellite dishes beaming at the stars, and rows of cameras pointing
at rows of correspondents, talking away to their national audiences,
with the vista of the city behind them.  The hotel has electricity, but
if everyone plugged in they would short circuit the building, so each
broadcaster has its own generators, and tents to protect all this
expensive equipment from the elements.  These are also lined up in rows
on the roof, as if a circus has blown in to town, which in a way it
has.

The Intercon is the most practical place to be if you want to file at
night, because Kabul has a rigidly enforced 10 p.m. curfew.
Broadcasting to Europe, the United States and Australia, I can't avoid
filing at night, so for many reasons this hotel looks like the best
bet.

But the man at the front desk is adamant.  There are no rooms at the
Intercon.  He would like to help, but he shows me a waiting list of
hundreds of journalists.  Knowing it's futile, I scrawl my name on the
bottom and sit despondently in the lobby, wondering what to do next.  I
am psyching myself up to check out the rest of Kabul's dodgy hotels
when Adriana, a journalist I'd known slightly in the north, conics up
to say hello.  She arrived yesterday, and it turns out she has the most
sought after commodity in the capital a spare bed in her room here.

"It's only for one night.  After that we will see what we can do," she
says in her musical Mexican accent.  The room has no toilet, no water,
no ceiling and no heating but it does have a bed, and the offer of a
place to stay drops into my lap when I am desperate.  This kindness
from someone I hardly know reminds me that covering this conflict has
not been all about fear.  It has also been about good fortune,
overcoming problems with the help of strangers, and forging
friendships.  My luck, I decide, will hold.  Chapter 18 Oh, the
beautiful city of Kabul wears a rugged mountain skirt, And the rose is
jealous of its lash-like thorns.  The dust of Kabul's blowing soil
smarts lightly in my eyes, But I love her, for knowledge and love both
come from her dust.

I sing bright praises to her colourful tulips, The beauty of her trees
makes me blush.

How sparkling the water flows from PuliMastaan!

May Allah protect such beauty from the evil eye of man!

I am reading this love song to Kabul by the seventeenth-century poet
Saib-e-Tabrizi as we drive around the city and see the overwhelming
scale of destruction war has wrought.  Despite the poet's plea, Kabul
has not been protected from the evil eye of man.

I have never seen devastation on such a scale so long after a war.  The
city lies in ruins, with entire sections obliterated.  In some areas,
it is like an archaeological dig.  We drive for miles and see nothing
but ruins.  Row after row, block after block, street after street of
damaged shells of buildings.  Buildings whose roofs have caved in.
Buildings where only one wall is left standing, and it's been pierced
by tank shells.  Buildings where concrete joists and iron girders list
out to the sides, with half a storey still hanging by a steel thread as
if it will fall at any moment.  But it's been like this for five years
or more some parts of the city were destroyed almost ten years ago.
Rusty cars lie upside down, riddled with bullet holes.  There's the
wreck of an old Soviet ambulance.  In five years, no one has bothered
to remove anything but the tyres.

People move in and around the rubble as if it were a normal city, but
it looks as if they've returned to Pompeii or the fort of Masada, and
simply resumed living there.  In places market stalls nestle among the
ruins.  Sometimes a wall, the only part of a building that remains
standing, has a billboard on it.  This is the only concession to the
present, to repair.  In the evenings, smoke wafts above the collapsed
buildings.  People are building fires so they can stay warm or perhaps
cook before they sleep beneath the lee of the broken walls.

I cannot think of any other city that compares, unless I reach back
into history.  This rivals the pictures of Berlin or Dresden after
World War II, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was
dropped.  Today, the Chechen capital Grozny also lies in ruins, but
that war is more recent.  Here the ruins already have the patina of
age, as if they were relics that Afghans have cherished, instead of
being something they are too poor and despairing to repair.

A whole generation, including some of the teenagers translating for us,
have known nothing but war.  Sabi is a nineteen-year-old from the
Panjshir Valley and we drive through the ruins of Kabul listening to
his favourite tape.  He is a great fan of Titanic.

"Did you like it?  It is my favourite.  The story is too sad."  He
plays his pirated cassette of the score, with its glitches and sudden
stops, over and over again.  It provides a surreal soundtrack to the
devastation.  I want to tell Sabi that what is 'too sad' is outside the
window, but for him, this is just Kabul.

Does he feel he is living on a doomed vessel?  The UN's Special
Representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, graphically described
the country as a 'failed state which looks like an infected wound.  You
don't even know where to start cleaning it."  Driving here, I have an
inkling of what he means.  The destruction occurred in layers, caused
not by the American bombardment which just ended, nor by the
decade-long war with the Soviets, but mostly by the bitter civil war of
the 1990s.  Afghans did this to themselves.  Like a forensic
pathologist, our translator tracks the destruction, explaining which
Muslim warlord caused what damage.  American journalist Jon Lee
Anderson, whom I meet at different points covering this conflict, says
of the experience, "We are examining the city the way one assesses the
age of a dead tree by counting the rings in its stump."

Whenever we get out of the car, locals come up.  They are quick to
blame the Mujaheddin warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar for the destruction.

"Gulbuddin!  Gulbuddin!"  they say, pointing at the ruins with the
Afghan habit of referring to people by their first names that is so
disconcerting in the context of warlords and war criminals.  It feels
far too personal.

We get back in the car, and Sabi has Titanic at full volume as we drive
further into the rubble.  He gives me his wide, sunny smile as we go to
the front lines of each of the Mujaheddin factions.

In 1989, Ahmed Shah Massoud attacked the city with rockets, attempting
to seize it from Communist President Najibullah.  General Dostum fought
with Najibullah until 1992, when he switched sides and joined Massoud.
Together they took Kabul.  Hekmatyar then started his campaign,
pounding the city with his stash of US-made rockets for three years. As
a result, Kabul had no electricity and no running water, and the lives
of the civilians who survived the attacks were absolutely desperate.

More factional fighting followed, but the intricacies of attack and
betrayal, betrayal and counterattack, soon become mind numbing.  We
drive and drive and the ruins fan out in front of us.

I re-read the seventeenth-century poem as an antidote to present day
reality.  I love the line 'knowledge and love both come from her dust',
though I don't sense either in the dust here now, just bitterness and
resignation and the need to make do, to survive in the face of all
odds.  It is apparent in the angle of a woman's back, bent under her
burqa, as if she is carrying a burden; in the defeated way a man
trudges, hauling firewood to the corner where he now sleeps.

At the Intercon, the postcards on sale acknowledge the city's
devastation.  They show tourist sites the ornate Darulaman Palace, the
long, low, beautiful Id Gah mosque, founded in the 1890s as they were
in their heyday, accompanied by inserts of the same sites, as they are
today in ruins.

They're the saddest postcards I've ever seen.

On my second day, I go back to the NBC house with the bomb in the
kitchen to see the other sites in the cross-section of neat, tree-lined
streets that were bombed on 12 November.

This wealthy suburb of Wazir Akhbar Khan was once the capital's
diplomatic sector.  Expensive homes are hidden behind high fences.
There are almost no cars, though ancient yellow taxis drive by
frequently.  You don't have to wait long for a cab in Wazir Akhbar
Khan.  Architecture here seems to have stopped in the 1970s, when Kabul
was still on the 'hippy trail' for Western tourists.  The King was
deposed in 1973, and the Soviets invaded in 1979, so perhaps that fixes
the dates for the last construction boom.

This section of Kabul is like a low-rent 1970s Canberra or Brasilia,
representing the last time when Afghanistan seemed to have some kind of
future.  One house has a downstairs bar, with a wall-sized mural of
belly dancers.  Four curvy Persian women are picked out in red and
white on a black background, in cartoon style.  They are doing an
erotic dance, wearing bras and harem pants, with acres of flesh showing
above and below their belly buttons.  It's a shock, and a reminder that
there was once sex here before the Taliban.

When the Taliban commanders fled Wazir Akhbar Khan a week ago, they
cleared their homes of personal possessions, but left the basements
stashed with weapons.  There are rooms packed from floor to ceiling
with all types of guns, and wooden crates full of ammunition, with
Russian writing stamped on the side, some broken open with rounds
spilling out.  This was all the Taliban had, and this is how they
enforced five years of repressive rule throughout Afghanistan.  They
built no roads and no infrastructure they had no source of political
power apart from these guns, yet they fled and left them.  Locals tell
rue, "Many Arabs lived here."

"Arabs' is what Afghans call the foreign soldiers who fought with the
Taliban, most recruited and funded by Osama bin Laden.  Two streets
away from the NBC house, an American missile hit a parked car, leaving
a mangled wreck.

In the next street, another bomb hit a house opposite the home of a
Taliban commander.  It's a mass of rubble, as our house would have been
had our bomb exploded.  Standing on mounds of mud brick, locals from
the surrounding streets say the house was a bakery, and no Taliban
lived here.  People living in the house behind were injured in the
explosion.  These residents are suspicious and unhappy.

"Does America want to take over Afghanistan?"  one man with a white
turban asks me, troubled.  I tell him I don't think so.

Another man, wearing an embroidered blue cap, asks the reverse
question.

"Will America stay long enough to help us fix our problems?"  He
gestures at the rubble, "America has abandoned us before."

I don't know the answer to this one.

"Let's go to the zoo!"

The offer comes at breakfast at the Intercon.  Breakfast is the most
sociable meal of the day in a city with a curfew and where most of us
work at night.  The service is so slow that we spend a long time over
the sweet toast and weak coffee, with the wintry Afghan sun spilling
over our tables, and some of my best leads for stories come from
here.

I've bumped into Chris Stephen, a friend from Moscow who files for a
number of English and Scottish newspapers.  He was in the Panjshir
Valley when Kabul fell, and accompanied the Northern Alliance troops
into the city.  He says he does a zoo in every war zone.

"You always get a great story.  I did a piece at the Sarajevo zoo, and
that's the one story that everyone remembers.  They didn't have much
food left, and they had to decide who to feed whether they were going
to sacrifice the small animals to keep feeding the big bear."

So we go to the zoo.  It sits on the former front line, at the
cross-section of two Mujaheddin factions' territories.  A lonely lion
roars.  The animals here are grisly survivors.  Not all of them made
it, of course: the elephant enclosure took a direct hit during the
civil war, and other unfortunate creatures were turned into meals for
hungry fighters.  There are only seventeen animals left.

Some of the enclosures are in ruins, but compared to the surrounding
streets, it's not too bad.  The zoo is in a pleasant, dusty park, and
walking here is enjoyable.  Attendance has doubled since the Taliban
fled.

"It is a sign that people are less tired and sad than they were during
Taliban times.  They are happier, so they come out to see the city.
Also in the Taliban times it was not really possible for women and
children to come out to the zoo, only men," says zookeeper Sher Agha,
known by his nickname, Omar.

Two hundred people now come here every day to see the seventeen
malnourished animals, including an Afghan mountain cat and a small
black bear so neglected and miserable that it hurts to look at him. His
name is Khers and his snout is raw, swollen and bleeding.  Zoo
officials say Taliban visitors would tease Khers by holding out food,
then smack him on the nose with sticks when he reached for it, though
his injuries look more severe than that to me.

The zoo has one lion, which is ancient, injured and almost completely
blind, but the king of the jungle remains king with the public.  During
the time of Communist President Najibullah, the zoo boasted seven
lions.  Marjan is the only one left.  He is fawn with a dark mane now
peppered with grey, and he is so decrepit that he allows cameramen into
his cage without attacking them.-"It's beautiful!"  exclaims NBC
translator Halim.

"We could pat him."

Marjan named after an Afghan precious stone is forty-eight years old,
much older than the life expectancy of most lions in the wild,
especially if, like Marjan, they have only one eye and half their face
has been blown away.  He was imported from a German zoo in the 1970s,
and lived an ordinary zoo life, which in Kabul meant dodging bullets
and rockets, until in 1995 a soldier entered his cage to celebrate a
victory in the Mujaheddin factional wars.  The zoo was so close to the
front line, it just seemed the thing to do, like dropping into your
local for a celebratory drink.  Marjan reportedly left the soldier
alone until he started baiting a lioness.  Unfortunately for the
soldier, she turned out to be Marjan's mate.  Marjan ate him.

The soldier's brother returned the next day looking for revenge.  He
lobbed a grenade into Marjan's cage.

"When Marjan pounced on it thinking it was food, he lost one eye and
ninety-five per cent of his sight in the other," says the zookeeper.

The resilient lion pulled through as the zoo then had to do.  Although
the zoo had survived the rocket attacks of the civil war, the emergence
of the Taliban regime in 1996 posed a more serious threat.  The Taliban
leadership wanted to shut it down because it was un islamic banning
animals along with all other forms of entertainment.  Zookeeper Omar
went to the faculty of Islamic studies at the University of Kabul to
ask them to defend the zoo.  The academics put their lives on the line
for the animals.

"They wrote down everything in the Koran that referred to animals and
the Prophet Mohammed," says Omar.

"I collected them all and presented them to the Ministry of Justice."

The zoo owes its survival to Omar.  Now his struggle is to keep the
animals fed.  There's very little food and the zoo's staff of eleven
hasn't been paid for months.  There's no money left to prepare the
animals' cages for winter.

Omar says the Northern Alliance is providing some food and medicine for
the zoo, but it's not enough.  He goes to the markets to beg for food,
and generous butchers give him their off-cuts.

"But then when I go back two days later, they say "But we gave you food
what did you do with it?"  and I have to explain that Marjan is a lion
and he eats a lot."

Despite the difficulties, Omar sees better times ahead.  The Northern
Alliance has promised it will increase funding for the zoo, and Omar is
happy to take this on trust and borrow money to buy food and other
necessities.  He is living up to the sign outside the zoo: "God created
animals.  People must be good to them."

I know there is interest from foreign zoos in providing assistance, so
I ask Omar about that.

"Yes, a German zoo has promised us to take our bear and cure his nose
and bring us two bears in his place."  Omar looks pleased.

Chris asks if he would give away Marjan the lion if it meant a better
life for him.

"No, no, this is his home, and the people of Kabul need their lion."

"How about a swap?"

"Maybe I would consider a swap .. . but the foreign zoo would have to
bring the new lion here first before I would let Marjan go.  I would
call the new lion Opal.  It is also a precious stone."

All the world's press descends on the zoo.  Omar has a twinkling smile,
a deep, warm storyteller's voice, and an inspiring tale of suffering
and survival, which includes that guaranteed ratings winner: furry
animals.  The Kabul zoo is a magnet to the British tabloids, who are
obsessed with animal stories.

The first story about Marjan leads to 'zoo wars', as my friend Barbara
from Britain's Mail on Sunday puts it.  Her paper has long served on
this furry front line.  It once sent a reporter to Libya to rescue a
rabbit, abandoned by British diplomats fleeing the embassy during a
crisis.  The Mail on Sunday adopts Marjan, providing more than US$5000
to feed him for a year.  A rival London newspaper sends its
correspondent in Kabul to the zoo to check whether the Mail on Sunday
has paid up, and whether Marjan is reclining contentedly after the lion
equivalent of a three-course meal and after-dinner mints.  (No scoop
there.  To the disappointment of its rival, the Mail turns out to be
feeding Marjan royally.) London news desks assign reporters in a war
zone to such ridiculous jobs because of the memory of a ten-year-old
tabloid rivalry over a Spanish donkey called Blackie.  In the early
1990s, tender British hearts ached over reports that "Blackie' (real
name Nero) risked being crushed to death during a fair near Madrid.  A
British animal rights campaigner went to Spain to save the donkey,
hotly pursued by reporters from The Sun and Daily Star.  Not wasting
any time, The Sun reporter bought Blackie, to take her in triumph back
to the UK.  He left her in a local farmer's field, while he went for
lunch another time-honoured tabloid tradition and came back to find
that his Daily Star rival had stolen the donkey from under his nose,
paying for her a second time and spiriting her back to Dover.

So The Sun reporter purchased a second donkey, claiming that she too
was Blackie, and took her to London as well, just a squidge less
triumphantly.  A third journalist, from the London Times, trooped out
to Spain to establish how two rival papers were both claiming to have
rescued the one donkey.

Very amusing but that was mainland Europe and this is Afghanistan
during a war.  It is dangerous to work here and there's an endless
array of other stories to be done.  Soon, however, there is even
infighting within the Mail newspaper itself internal battles over
whether the Daily or the Sunday paper should adopt Marjan.  Things look
bad, with the Sunday preparing to protect its lion from the Daily,
until sanity prevails back in London.  After top-level negotiations,
it's decided that the Sunday Mail can keep Marjan, and the Daily Mail
can adopt the zoo's wretched bear, with his bleeding nose.

Barbara has her photo taken with Marjan and Omar, holding a framed
sponsorship form that says "Adopted by Mail on Sunday readers'.

"Can you believe that this is what I am doing in Kabul?"  she wails.

At least Marjan is being fed, and when he dies in his sleep two months
later possibly from a surfeit of regular meals, but maybe just from old
age his demise is noted in the British parliament.  Six MPs sign an
early day motion mourning his loss and stating that the poor mutilated
creature came to symbolise the suffering of Afghanistan.  They call on
the new government in Afghanistan to honour Marjan's memory by banning
cock-fighting and dog-fighting, which are emerging following the
overthrow of the Taliban.

It seems Barbara's work wasn't all in vain, though I can't help
wondering if the death of an Afghan human would prompt an early day
motion in the British parliament.

It's showtime in Kabul.

For the first time since the Taliban fled, cinemas are being reopened.
The Taliban banned every conceivable form of entertainment not that
there was that much available, limited as it was by war and poverty.
But movies, TV, videos, music, painting, photography, even kite flying
and chess were banned.  Singing and dancing were also banned, including
at weddings, where for centuries they had been the highlight of
celebrations, and this was how hundreds of musicians and dancers made a
living.  The Taliban's Military Chief of Staff, Mullah Mohammed Hassan,
explained what he envisaged people should do for entertainment.

"They can go to parks and see the flowers and from this they can learn
about Islam."

No bread, no circuses in life during Taliban times.  Actually, that's
not strictly true there was one form of acceptable public
entertainment.  You could go to the football stadium to watch someone
being put to death, or having a hand or a foot amputated.  This was
such a breathtakingly bleak vision of life.  The Taliban actually did
not believe in any type of culture.  How extraordinary that they should
have triumphed at the end of the twentieth century, when Western
society was dominated by entertainment.

So the return of movies has great significance, and the Bakhtar cinema
in the town centre is full.  Crowds of excitable armed men in turbans
spill round the corner, waiting for the next session.  Movies will run
during the day, though not at night because of the curfew.

The Bakhtar is showing The Ascension, a film about the Mujaheddin
victory over the Soviets in the 1980s.  But although films, especially
Bollywood love films, were extremely popular here, there are no women
in sight.  This triumphant return to the cinema is for men only.

The cinema's manager explains that this is simply because of the chaos
at the front gate, with all sessions packed out.

"Women used to sit in the balcony with their husbands and children, and
will be welcome again as soon as things calm down."

You have to buy your tickets and then you have to hand in your weapons,
much as we would check in our coats in the West.  Wooden tables are set
out, with weapons sorted according to type.  Kalashnikovs lie on top in
long rows, then pistols.  Knives are on the bottom.

The men file in.  The screen is an old canvas cloth painted white, the
chairs are uncomfortable and the air smells musty.  But all 750 seats
are full, with 250 more customers crammed into the aisles.  They are
here for a wild afternoon reliving their earlier victories.

"I've seen this film before, but that's not important," says one
seventeen-year-old.

"I just wanted to see the first film that was playing after all these
years."

"This is a good day it's too good," says a twenty-five-year-old
Pashtun, waiting in a queue for the next sold-out screening.

"We are all happy, because once again there are movies and music."

"I was beaten by the Taliban religious police because they caught me
with a video," says a twenty-two-year-old.

"They beat me so hard, they fractured my skull."  He removes his cap to
show me a scar on his head.  I am concerned, but his friends are all
smiling.

"And now we can go to the movies again!"  he finishes triumphantly. All
his friends laugh uproariously.

The mood in the cinema is exultant, until the ancient projector breaks
down twenty minutes into the film.  Howls of frustration fill the hall.
Fortunately it's soon fixed, and the crowd's good humour is restored.
After some wild cheering everyone settles back down to enjoying the
defeat of the Soviets.

This movie is one of the few made by the Mujaheddin after the Russian
retreat.  Essentially propaganda, it depicts heroic Afghans fighting in
the desert to defeat a brutal invader.  In many ways it echoes the one
Hollywood hero flick set in Afghanistan Rambo III.  It has the same
storybook quality and bad guys versus good guys set-ups, except that
unlike the Stallone blockbuster, it was actually filmed here.  Going on
the response tonight, the audiences here love this stuff as much as
Western audiences love Rambo as much as I suspect this audience would
love Rambo, too, if they got the chance to see it.

In the 1970s, Pakistanis would go to Kabul to shop and to watch movies
from India and elsewhere.  A Pakistani professor now living in the US
recalls, "For us it meant an escape from the dreary life in Pakistan's
parched plains.  The Afghans traditionally loved commerce, a passion
that has now sadly been overtaken by war-making instincts.  Kabul had a
sprinkling of Sikh traders and shopkeepers, which indicated to
outsiders like us that free trade would ultimately catapult the Afghans
to a Hong Kong-like environment."

Even when war shattered these dreams, there remained fourteen cinemas
that showed Indian movies, and studios that made films imitating the
popular Indian product.  All these vanished during Taliban times.  As
Iranian film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf points out, in a world where
thousands of films are made every year, nothing was produced in
Afghanistan.

Since the Taliban fled last week, the manager of the Bakhtar cinema has
been cleaning away five years of accumulated dust and grime to prepare
for this reopening.  He has also been trying to get his hands on films
the Taliban had locked away in the Ministry of Information.  I wonder
why they didn't destroy them, since they destroyed art works in
museums?  Perhaps the Taliban held some secret showings just of their
favourites, the least corrupting action films, of course.

The Taliban banned films, like they banned so much other entertainment,
on the grounds the activities were un islamic frivolous distractions
that took away from the serious pursuit of religion.  Films and music
'created a strain in the mind and hampered the study of Islam',
according to Taliban Minister for Education Mullah Abdul Hanifi.

On the same grounds, the Taliban regarded all portrayals of the human
form as inappropriate.  Some newspapers, for example, had pictures, but
only of buildings or landscapes -never of people.  However, the Taliban
bent their own rules for the security services, requiring pictures in
passports and other identity documents.

Later, while covering this conflict, a friend goes to the Taliban
stronghold of Kandahar where, despite all the prohibitions,
photographers' studios continued working during Taliban times.  And
they weren't just doing passport shots.  He finds photos of men in
groups of twos and threes, their arms snaked around each other, staring
at the camera.  They are wearing eye make-up.  Their expressions are
'come hither' in an Afghan male-separatist kind of way.  The photos are
black and white, but they have been treated, and printed edged with
colour.  It is eerie, like looking at Taliban porn.

Even with God's uncompromising holy warriors, it seems some rules were
selectively enforced.

"Films are not prohibited by Islam," says the cinema owner at the
Bakhtar.

"The Taliban banned movies for their own political objectives."  He is
laying in a stock of Indian action films.  He has already pulled out
ten old movie posters and plastered them on the walls.  Afghanistan
was India's third biggest market after the US and the UK, and the
Bollywood industry is thrilled at the departure of the Taliban.  Within
days, Indian industry mags are filled with articles discussing the new
political reality and its projected impact on the bottom line.

"People love the action films," says the cinema owner.  He is
interrupted by a roar from the crowd.

"You see!  Love stories too, yes, maybe later."

I tell him that from my experience with young Afghan men, Titanic could
be a money-spinner.

Journalists attend all events that are evidence of the resumption of
normal life: first movie, first football match, first TV broadcast,
first women to return to university.  We see that people who have no
money for food are buying movie tickets.  Sales of satellite TVs are
soaring.  Cosmetics and high-heeled shoes are flying off shelves, along
with DVDs and videos imported from Pakistan.

Halim was right.  The Taliban were boring.  People are rebelling.

Further reports are emerging that atrocities may have been committed by
Northern Alliance troops in Mazar-i-Sharif, after they liberated the
city on 9 November.  Local Taliban soldiers fleeing from Mazar
abandoned a contingent of around 1000 Pakistani fighters.  It's alleged
that Northern Alliance troops trapped the Pakistanis in the Sultan
Razia girls' school on the outskirts of the city and shot hundreds of
them.

"We gave them warnings to surrender," says a spokesman for a militia,
the Hizb-i-Wahdat, fighting with the Northern Alliance.

"They asked us to send representatives over several times, but
unfortunately they shot them.  Finally we gave the order to attack
them.  Some 200 of the Pakistanis have been killed."

Reporters on the spot assess that more than 500 have been killed, but
it remains unclear whether these Pakistani volunteers, many of whom had
only just arrived in Afghanistan, were killed in battle or executed
after surrendering.  It is known that they continued to resist for at
least forty-eight hours after Mazar fell.

There are graphic photographs of the dead lying in the girls' school.
The bodies lie in pools of blood, their limbs thrown out at unnatural
angles amid piles of rubble.  Most have no shoes.  Their clothes are
more brightly coloured than Afghan men's clothes, and the blues and
reds compete with the pools of blood to add a garish horror to the
scenes.

But when the Red Cross enters the city, it says it is unable to shed
any light on the matter.  Head of operations for Central Asia Olivier
Durr says, "We cannot say whether these people had been brutally
executed or whether it was the result of fighting."

He confirms the Red Cross has found between 400 and 600 bodies, but
says he is unable to comment on reports of massacres in
Mazar-i-Sharif.

"Even before our expatriate staff entered the city, our Afghan
colleagues started to collect and bury quite a number of bodies," Durr
says.  He reports that about 180 have already been buried.

When we discuss this story at breakfast at the Intercon the next
morning, English journalist Chris Stephen tells me that during his
first week here, after coming in from the Panjshir Valley with the
Northern Alliance troops, he heard there were still pockets of Taliban
resistance to the north of Kabul.  He went there to see whether it was
true that some of the fiercest foreign fighters were holed up, terror
ising the local population.  What he found were three dead bodies.  The
locals gathered around, and he asked them if they knew who'd done it. 
They confessed immediately and proudly.

"You know how in Bosnia if you found any bodies, and you asked who did
it, the locals would look at the ground, shuffle their feet, and say,
"No, it wasn't us."  Well, here they say, "Yeah man, we killed them!
They were Arabs!"

Chris confirms that the dead soldiers were part of the brigade of
foreign fighters brought to Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden.  They were
abandoned by the Taliban in their hasty retreat from Kabul, and became
trapped north of the city by the rapid Northern Alliance advance.  When
the soldiers snuck out at night, and tried to go south to Kandahar to
rejoin the Taliban, they attacked the neighbouring population on their
way.  The locals weren't having any of that and if they caught them,
they killed them.

Standing around the three dead soldiers, local men started to pelt the
bodies with stones so that Chris would be in no doubt what they felt
about the foreign fighters who took over Afghanistan.

A stone ricocheted off one of the bodies, hitting Chris in the chest.
The Afghans were immediately contrite and concerned.

"Sorry.  Sorry.  Are you all right?  We didn't mean to hurt you.  Are
you sure you're all right?"

The Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital is in the centre of Kabul.  It is
a tall 1970s-era building, and it is remarkably free of the scars of
war, until you get inside.  Doctors have not been paid for four months,
as the Taliban diverted health-care funds to the war effort.  The
Director of the hospital, paediatric surgeon Dr.  Mustafa Zimrai, says
this has led to an increase in the number of children dying, as poorer
patients cannot afford to buy medicines.

"Yes, we have seen an increase of ten to fifteen per cent in the number
of children dying over the past months.  Yes, that's very high.  We
hope now that the NGOs [non-government organisations] are returning,
they will help provide us with medication, food and instruments.  The
government money has not yet returned, no."

I walk up the stairs and three women sweep by, gossiping and laughing.
Their heads are covered with scarves but they are not wearing burqas.
It is a surprise to see women's faces.  The light in the corridors is
extraordinary soft, opaque, like a painting by the sixteenth-century
Flemish artist Breughel.  Framed against a wall, as if she had stepped
out of one of those paintings, is a mother holding a crying child.
Zainab's hair is swathed in an orange scarf, she has broad cheekbones
and was clearly once a very beautiful woman.  Care has aged her.  Her
child Shakrilljah, the size of an eighteen-month-old Western toddler,
is painfully thin.  I am shocked when she says this skeletal boy is
five years old.  He has a bandage on his sunken cheek, where a
naso-gastric tube has been inserted.  His cry is repetitive and
listless.  Though Shakrilljah is very sick, he lacks the energy to do
more than moan.

Zainab carries him back upstairs to the ward where malnourished
children are treated.  She has been referred here by a local clinic
because her son's condition is deteriorating.  Zainab is a single
mother.  Her husband stepped on a land mine soon after Shakrilljah was
born and since then she has struggled to support her son on her own.
The Taliban forbade women from working, so she was forced to rely on
her extended family.  But the drought made it difficult for her family
to support her.

"Often we cannot find food, and we don't have money for rent, or for
the bus to come to hospital."

Like thirty-five per cent of young children in Kabul, Shakrilljah is
suffering from malnutrition and that childhood killer, diarrhoea.
Eighty-five thousand Afghan children under five die from
diarrhoea-related illnesses every year.

Dr.  Asaf has been treating Shakrilljah.

"He has had persistent diarrhoea for three months, due to severe
malnutrition."  He consults the boy's notes.

"He was in the hospital for five months once before, and then for a few
days last month."

Dr.  Asaf is a kind and helpful man in his thirties, wearing Western
clothes.  He speaks in English when he offers the following bleak
assessment: "I rate his likelihood of succumbing and dying at sixty per
cent."

I check with Dr.  Asaf whether this tiny boy could really be five years
old.

"Yes, yes, older.  He is almost five and a half."

Dr.  Asaf questions Zainab, acting as our translator.

"The patient's mother says she was bringing Shakrilljah to this
hospital when the air strikes began.  The bombs were very strong, and
all the windows in their house were smashed, and it was very cold and
dangerous.  So they went north to Najrob in the Panjshir Valley, but
the clinic there has referred the patient back here.  And" now it is
safe to come, but she had trouble to find the money."

The story is punctuated by a cacophony of weak cries from all over the
room, where another six children are being treated.  All are
dangerously underweight and some have had their mouths painted purple
in order to treat one of the side-effects of malnutrition, a Vitamin B
deficiency that leads to swelling of the mouth and tongue.

This hospital took in children injured during the US air strikes, and
Dr.  Asaf volunteers to take us to that ward, too.  I feel a pang as we
leave Shakrilljah and his mother.  It requires great generosity of
spirit to let journalists into your life and to reveal yourself, and it
is difficult simply to walk away from that, especially with a child
you suspect may not survive.

Dr.  Asaf leads the way up the stairs.  He was in Kabul during the air
strikes, which he says were terrifying.

"Every person fears he will be hit and that he is at the last moment of
his life.  I was repeating words from the Koran, which a Muslim must do
before he dies."

"Did you really think you would die?"  I ask him.

"Yes, I was very scared.  I had sent my immediate family away, but I
had my nephews with me and they were very frightened.  They were crying
and I held them to me, and to encourage them I told them that the
planes would deliver apples and sweets for them, not bombs."  He pauses
outside the door of the ward.

"The people of Kabul and Afghanistan are very unfortunate.  All we want
now is for the world to be serious about Afghanistan."

We go into the ward where the three most severely injured children
remain, out of forty who were treated here.  All were injured in
misdirected air strikes.  Two are lying patiently in full-body plaster
casts held together with sticks.  It is a simple, very uncomfortable
form of traction.  They look like chickens on a spit.  The third is a
ten-year-old boy, Mohammed Salem, whose mother and four younger
siblings are playing near his bed.  Before they tell me what happened,
they pull back the blanket to show me his injuries.  One leg ends below
the knee in a white stump, the other is in plaster up to the groin.  I
gulp, not knowing how to react.  Dr.  Asaf says the boy will require
further operations on his good leg, which has been yanked out of its
socket and needs resetting.

"Perhaps he will go to Germany for this operation," says Dr.  Asaf, 'we
have not got the facilities to do it here."

Mohammed Salem was asleep in his bed during a bombardment on the night
of 12 October, the first of five attempts by American bombers to hit a
Taliban house near the Bini-Hisar region of Kabul.  Instead, the bomb
hit the building next door to Mohammed Salem's home and a wall fell on
him, crushing his leg.  His brother, sleeping in the same room,
received minor injuries.  He has been in hospital ever since for more
than a month but despite a succession of operations aimed at saving his
leg, gangrene set in and amputation was required.

"I feel very bad," says Mohammed Salem, 'because now I will not be able
to run and play with the other boys."

His mother, Lailahmah, is understandably distressed, but exhibits an
extraordinary generosity when I ask her about the United States.

"I am very sad because my son is now handicapped.  But on the other
hand, I am a very little bit happy, because we are now free and the
pressure of the Taliban is lifted from us."

I ask Dr.  Asaf if he shares Lailahmah's feelings.  Has the US bombing
at least had a good result, in forcing the departure of the Taliban?

"I hope so, but we don't know.  If the situation improves it is good,
but if it doesn't then it isn't good.  It depends on the results of
these adventures.  Until now it is not clear."

The people of Kabul remain wary.  It is not just that many are
Pashtuns, from the same tribe as the Taliban.  This is the city where
tribal loyalties are weakest.  But the history here has been that every
time they thought it couldn't get any worse it did.  I remember the
terrible images of starvation, public amputations and beheadings, the
burning of books.  People here are braced for impact.

We're driving along one of the main roads south out of Kabul.  In every
pothole there lies a sleeping dog.  The road is mined, of course, and
we have to drive carefully, avoiding both mines and dogs.  Where does
the expression 'let sleeping dogs lie' come from, I wonder, as we
swerve around another mangy bundle of fur lying on its side.  Winter
here is beautiful jewel-bright days highlight a dusting of snow on the
mountains that fringe the city.  The sky is clear, the air is crisp,
and if it weren't for the war-scarred buildings, it would feel
peaceful.  We drive past the royal palace, a grand ruin, perched on a
hill.

I have joined my roommate, Adriana, and her friend, Spanish journalist
Gustavo, on this trip.  Three other Spanish journalists have come, too,
so we are a big group, travelling in three cars to the abandoned
al-Qaeda training camp at Rishkor.

This was al-Qaeda's regional base camp, where thousands of mercenaries
were trained, and it is no more than half an hour's drive from the
capital.  As we get closer the road surrounding the camp is littered
with destroyed vehicles, tanks without turrets, overturned armoured
personnel carriers, and lorries on their sides, dripping petrol.  It's
like a World War I battle scene.  Some ten ruined tanks have ended up
in front of a war memorial, an ugly plinth of the type that you see all
over the former Soviet Union.  Further down the valley there is a ruin
a 'real' ruin for once, a seventeenth-century Persian walled town with
a beautiful tower covered in blue tiles.  The mountains overlook the
scene inscrutably.

The vehicles were destroyed when the camp was bombed during the US air
strikes early in November 2001.

"They had an army, this was an army, wasn't it?"  says Gustavo, as we
stand looking at the devastation.  The scale of the scene before us is
surprising.  This is what al-Qaeda was amassing in the years the West
turned its gaze from Afghanistan.

We drive for a further ten minutes, up to the gates of the camp itself.
The sprawling camp covers a vast area of 100 square kilometres.  We
leave our cars, and a Northern Alliance soldier meets us at the gate.
As we walk down a long path shaded by two rows of trees, I notice small
garden patches -for vegetables?  fenced off with missile cases.

The Northern Alliance has posted a soldier here.  Abdul Rahman fought
against the al-Qaeda forces in this camp on 15 November.  He says that
despite the bombings there were still many Arabs and Pakistanis left.

"It took our Northern Alliance forces two to three days to clear them
out.  Some fought for only two hours but others resisted for more than
two days before they fled.  It was a fierce battle."

We walk past some partially destroyed buildings into a clearing filled
with rubble.  It is a jumble of destroyed buildings and wrecked
vehicles, as if a fractious child had broken all his toys with one
sweep of his hand.  It covers a vast area, and I can't estimate how
many buildings and jeeps were here, because I can't even see how far it
stretches from this edge.  We clamber over the rubble, and I pick up a
tank manual in Russian, and a military training manual in Arabic.

Abdul Rahman shows us the instructions and the pictures of bombs in the
training manual.  There is a section on defensive tactics explaining
how to set up heavy machine guns, and information about small arms,
grenades, and ambushes.  We look into the few mud-brick rooms at the
edge of this area that were not destroyed in the bombardment.

One room appears to have been an office.  Outside, there is a sign in
Arabic listing the duties of a good Muslim, including "All soldiers
should obey the imam' and "Muslims should not fight with one another'.
We walk in, and everything crunches underfoot.

"Be careful, there could be mines here," Adriana's translator warns me.
I poke my head in to the next room which is small and dark and full of
dusty papers, textbooks and newspapers, all in disarray on the floor.

"Office?"

"Office, office," the Afghans confirm.  I move carefully in case there
are land mines, trying not to take any unnecessary steps as I pick up
documents and books that look interesting to add to my stash.  There is
an invitation from the Cuban embassy, which Adriana and Gustavo are
very interested in.  There is another blank invitation from the
Pakistani embassy, and a third, blank invitation from the British
embassy.  Were they trying to forge these?  There are also dusty
exercise books lessons: maths, science, bombs.  The translator leafs
through one.

"This man is almost illiterate, the Arabic is very bad," he says
disdainfully.

The next room has a huge amount of weaponry and ammunition.  There are
rounds of ammunition in boxes, for a variety of weapons.  We walk
through cautiously.

"Is that a mine?  Be careful," I say to the translator as he steps near
some flat circular metal object.

He and the Northern Alliance fighter laugh.

"No, it is ammunition for machine guns."

I am relieved.

"That's a Stinger missile still in its box."  I gawp.

"Stinger, Stinger," Abdul Rahman confirms.

"But it's still here in its box," I repeat stupidly.

When I tell Abdul Rahman that I am amazed at the scale of this place,
he reminds me that Rishkor was al-Qaeda's main training camp.  Did
everyone in the region know what this was?

"Yes, everyone knew this was an al-Qaeda centre, because no one was
allowed to pass too close and we saw Arabs and their families driving
in.  People were frightened," says Abdul Rahman.  Why?

"Everyone was afraid of al-Qaeda, so every passer-by kept his head down
and didn't dare look up when he was walking nearby.  Al-Qaeda kept up
the pressure on the people of the surrounding area, to keep them
scared."

Abdul Rahman says that during interrogation, a captured al-Qaeda
prisoner told them that Abdul Haq was hanged here at Rishkor.  I
remember reading one report suggesting this was the location for the
rebel Pashtun leader's execution.

"Where was he executed?  Can you show us?"

We drive back to the area where the tanks lie broken, past the
dormitory blocks, and walk up the hill.  I expect a gibbet, but should
have known better since even the last Communist President, Najibullah,
was strung up in the street.  When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, they
hanged Najibullah and his brother from a concrete traffic control post.
There was no trial.  Najibullah was beaten, castrated, and dragged
behind a jeep before being killed.  Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad
Rabbani said the fifty-year-old former President deserved his fate.

"He killed so many Islamic people and was against Islam, and his crimes
were so obvious that it had to happen.  He was a Communist."

This brutal execution was the first political act by the Taliban in
Kabul, and it symbolised all that was to come.

Here at the al-Qaeda camp, it was even more basic.

"Criminals' met their end on a tree.  The noose is still swinging over
a branch.  The rope is white above the noose, brown-red beneath it,
stained with the blood of the men who died here.  It is a chilling
sight and as I am describing it into my microphone, there is a volley
of artillery fire close by.

We are all a little jumpy and ask our translator to find out from the
Northern Alliance fighter what is going on.

"Nothing," he says, 'nothing."

"What "nothing" is that?"  Gustavo and I ask him.

Our translator questions Abdul Rahman again, and comes back with the
gnomic Afghan reply, "He says he doesn't know what it was, or why they
are firing."

This is such a volatile place still.  And I have to admit it is only
standing here, amid its ruins, that I have a sense of the vast scale of
the al-Qaeda network.

We drive home via an adjoining valley where there are dozens of
ammunition depots, in bunkers made of reinforced concrete.  They
contain thousands of mortars and heavy artillery of every size, as well
as rockets and countless bullets.  They were virtually untouched by the
US bombing.  The Northern Alliance has taken over the stockpile.

In Afghanistan, only a desperate group would abandon such a valuable
resource.

It's amazing what you can find in Wazir Akbar Khan, the smart suburb
where the NBC house with the bomb was located.  When Kabul fell,
journalists discovered all sorts of documents abandoned by fleeing
Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, including a flight simulator computer
program and a list of flight schools in the US, as well as documents
concerning chemical, biological and nuclear warfare.  The flight
simulator program is understood to be identical to one discovered in
the luggage of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the September 11
hijackers.

In the same up market street where the NBC house was located, it's
likely there was a chemical weapons plant.  It is next door to the Save
the Children charity, and Chris Stephen and English reporter Tim Judah
are the first journalists to discover it.  This is a big story the
first evidence from here that al-Qaeda and the Taliban were working
towards producing chemical weapons.

Most of the chemicals were removed when the Taliban fled Kabul.  The
Save the Children workers say strangers came to tell them to stay home
that day, warning them that it could be dangerous.  They heeded the
advice.

The guards let us into the building.  It is dusty and dark, and still
smells slightly of chemicals or is that the power of suggestion?  The
organisation that worked here was called Ummah Tameer-E-Nau, or
"Reconstruction of the Muslim Nation'.  It was founded by Pakistani
nuclear scientist and inventor Dr.  Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, an
Islamic scholar who had worked at the Pakistani Atomic Energy
Commission for thirty-five years.  He held many senior positions, and
was also one of the designers of the Khushab nuclear plant in Punjab.
He took early retirement in 1998 to protest moves by the Pakistani
government to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which he strongly
opposed.

After retiring, he founded this organisation to run development
projects in Afghanistan.  Most of its membership consisted of nuclear
scientists and military officers, and it was affiliated to the Al
Rashid Trust, an organisation the US banned for its links with
al-Qaeda.

Ummah Tameer-E-Nau was one of the few organisations permitted by the
Taliban to carry out relief work in Afghanistan, and the Taliban gave
Bashiruddin permission to sign business agreements on their behalf.
This strengthened suspicion that Bashiruddin's 'non-government
organisation' was actually looking for nuclear hardware for the
Taliban.

Chris shows me maps and documents that he found here in the building,
including diagrams of hot-air balloons which suggest the organisation
was investigating dispersing chemical weapons over a city from the air.
There are many documents about anthrax written in English, including US
Center for Disease Control anthrax-immunisation leaflets.  There is a
letter addressed to Abu Khabbab, Osama bin Laden's top chemical and
biological weapons commander.  There is anti-American and anti-Israeli
propaganda.  There is also an inflatable model of an American plane,
like a child's bath toy -strange and strangely chilling in this
context.

Bashiruddin managed Ummah Tameer-E-Nau in partnership with another
Pakistani nuclear scientist, Abdul Majid, who had worked for him at the
Atomic Energy Commission.  Dr.  Mahmood and Dr.  Majid were arrested in
late October on suspicion of developing a nuclear device for the
Taliban and Osama bin Laden.  The arrests by the Pakistani authorities
followed tip-offs from the FBI, linking the scientists to Jihadi
networks.

The two scientists admit they made several trips to Afghanistan, and
met Osama bin Laden, but say they were simply doing charity work.  Both
deny transferring any nuclear-related information to Afghanistan and
say they only ran education programs and helped poor Afghan farmers.
Dr.  Mahmood claims he talked with bin Laden about plans for the
rehabilitation of Afghanistan.

Both men were subsequently released without charge.

In late December, after we leave Afghanistan, the UN Security Council
orders a global freeze on the assets of Ummah Tameer-E-Nau, declaring
it to be a terrorist group.  The assets of the two former nuclear
scientists are also frozen.

There are later reports of the discovery of documents relating to the
building of nuclear weapons, but there is no indication that al-Qaeda's
nuclear work has gone beyond theory.  Creating a nuclear weapon
requires a set of further steps not mentioned in the al-Qaeda manuals.
And I imagine they have to have better facilities and infrastructure
than anything available in Afghanistan like a reliable electricity
source, just for starters.

But all in all, even though I don't think there are nuclear weapons
plants in Kabul, I'm glad I'm living at the Intercon, and not here in
Wazir Akbar Khan, where the houses are large and comfortable, but there
are also chemical weapons plants and unexploded bombs, and huge weapons
stashes in your basement.  On my second visit to the Kabul Women's
Hospital, I go with a man.

Chris Stephen's news desk wants him to interview a female doctor and he
thinks the interview will be easier with a woman present.  I agree to
accompany him, mainly because I'd like to see the hospital's director
again.  Rahima Zafar Stanekzai is a remarkable woman.  She worked as a
doctor throughout Taliban times and in 1998 was appointed by the
Taliban to run the Rabia Balkh Hospital, when she was still only
twenty-nine.  Her staff is almost entirely female and the facility
receives no foreign funding.

We drive into town, past the legless beggars who perch in the middle of
the road in their terrifying, suicidal bid to earn a living.  Once in
the centre, where carpets are on sale, flapping against the fences of
one of Kabul's main streets, we stop near the markets and walk through
the stalls selling bananas, biscuits, nuts and roasted pumpkin and
sunflower seeds, and into the crowded driveway leading up to the
hospital.  Our translator has a word to the man on the gate and we are
permitted to push through a canvas curtain to enter the hospital
grounds.

To our left, women are queuing for treatment outside a small building,
sitting on benches out of the sun.  Fifty women of all ages have their
burqas back over their heads so that they can see, and are chatting to
each other.  It's an ordinary hospital scene, but Chris says he has to
stop himself from staring.  In two months here, it is the first time he
has seen an Afghan woman's face.

Chris is spellbound, and also feels he is doing something forbidden,
which in local terms, of course, he is.  We walk past the queues to the
three-storey building at the front of the hospital complex.  A small,
energetic woman in white, her hair under a white scarf, bustles towards
us.  Dr.  Rahima, as she is called here, does not wear a burqa inside
the hospital grounds.  The proud mother of two daughters, she gave
birth to her second baby four months ago and is still slightly plump.

On this second meeting, Dr.  Rahima is warm and welcoming.  She has a
capable face, which can appear stern until she smiles, and she has a
sharp sense of humour.

"It is good that Osama bin Laden made his base here.  Now the world
knows there is a place called Afghanistan."

There are other journalists here and we follow her on her rounds.  The
hospital is scrupulously clean, but its facilities are simple and it
smells of urine.  Although the stone floors gleam, the sheets on the
bed are torn.  Patients have to bring their own food and buy their own
medicines.  Dr.  Rahima shows us the poorly stocked laboratories, the
operating theatres, and the wards where women are recovering from
surgery.

She explains that the Taliban clamped down on the availability of
women's health care.  By September 1997, only twenty-five per cent of
the medical and surgical hospital beds dedicated to adults were
available for women.  By May 1998 that figure declined to twenty per
cent.  Besides shutting female patients out of the hospitals, the
Taliban also banned female staff, including physicians, nurses,
pharmacists and technicians, from working in any of Kabul's twenty-two
hospitals.  That policy was reversed in 1998, when some women were
allowed to return to their jobs in segregated hospitals.  The doctors
here say the Taliban decided to reverse their ban on women receiving
medical treatment when their own wives and daughters began to fall ill.
It was at this time that Dr.  Rahima was appointed director of the
hospital.

She denies she is a Taliban doctor.  A renowned internal medicine
specialist, she says she did not seek the appointment as director, but
accepted it in order to help other women.

"It's not my decision, it's government decision.  I never prefer to
work as director.  I am a doctor.  I can work everywhere.  My job is to
treat patients."

When we ask her why she became a doctor she responds, "I like it.  I
like to help other people, and it was my father's great ambition for
me, although he died when I was fourteen years old, before he saw me
fulfill it."

As we go into the next ward, she stops the male reporters, translators
and cameramen from following.

"No, no, you can't come in here."

She motions me forward and, uncertain where I am going, I walk into a
delivery room just in time to watch a baby being born.  I could have
caught him.

I am unbearably moved by the sight of this new life, a baby born into
freedom in Kabul, two weeks after the retreat of the Taliban.  This
chance encounter seems to embody so much hope.  His mother is lying on
a trolley with a pillow behind her back, which is unceremoniously
yanked out from behind her the second the umbilical cord is cut.  She
slumps back flat.  No one pays any more attention to her.

I record the baby's first cries as a midwife wipes him down and
swaddles him.  He is lucky to have made it this far there is a high
incidence of miscarriages and stillbirths here.

"Yes, very high," says Dr.  Rahima.

"We have fifteen to twenty deliveries a day, and four patients today
have dead foetuses.  One was five months, and one seven months."

Kabul hospitals report a doubling of the number of miscarriages over
the past three years.  As well, Afghanistan has one of the highest
rates of infant and child mortality in the world 16.3 per cent,
compared to 7 per cent in other developing countries.  A staggering
1700 mothers out of 100,000 die giving birth.

In 1998, the medical charity Physicians for Human Rights interviewed
women living in Afghanistan and women who had fled to refugee camps in
Pakistan, in order to assess the health impact of life under the
Taliban.  The majority reported a decline in their physical and mental
health.  Eighty per cent said their mental health had declined hardly
surprising given that these women had lost one or more members of their
family in the war.  More than two-thirds reported that they or a member
of their family had been detained and abused by Taliban militia, and
that their social activities were extremely restricted.  There was a
stream of Taliban edicts concerning women, new ones coming out all the
time, further restricting their lives month by month.  Initially
make-up and high heels were banned, then shoes that made a noise while
women walked.  Then women were confined to their homes.

These edicts were enforced by the Religious Police, the emphatically
named police for the "Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice'.
They were bands of religious zealots who walked around armed with
whips, long sticks and Kalashnikovs, and went on rampages, forcing
women off the streets of Kabul, even those covered from head to foot
and wearing the correct 'quiet' shoes.  A further set of edicts
required households to blacken their windows so that women would not be
visible from the street.  Women were to spend all their time indoors,
where not even sunlight could penetrate.

Many of the symptoms the women reported to researchers met the
diagnostic criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and
ninety-seven per cent demonstrated evidence of major depression.

Against this background, Dr.  Rahima's job as a physician was demanding
as well as politically complex.  Everyday dealings with the bureaucracy
were challenging, for she could never meet with her bosses directly she
had to send a lower-ranking man instead.

"Oh, no, no.  During Taliban times I never go to the Ministry for
Public Health," she laughs at our misunderstanding.

"My husband, yes, a man could go, but there was no permission for me to
go.  It was not good.  It was a problem, but there was no remedy, so we
should accept it."

In her view, the worst thing about the Taliban was the lack of
education.

"It means we will never escape from this culture of economic
decline."

Dr.  Rahima combines running the hospital with motherhood.  I am
amazed, as juggling work with two small children is difficult enough in
the West, where there is some acceptance of the role of the working
mother.  Dr.  Rahima's husband is an administrator at the hospital.
Chris asks how she finds being the boss of her husband.

"Yes, here I am the boss of my husband, but not at home," she laughs.

Who is the boss at home?

"No there is no boss at home.  We are equals, we consult each other on
every matter, there is no problem."

This hospital is entirely locally funded, and doctors in Afghanistan
are poorly paid.  A doctor at the Women's Hospital received US$30 per
month until April 2001 when the Taliban unilaterally cut that sum in
half, in order to save money.  Then in July 2001, the Taliban ceased
paying salaries altogether, diverting funds to the military instead.
Dr.  Rahima says the number of deaths rose, as patients could not
afford to buy medicines and there was no possibility of provision from
the hospital.  But all the staff has kept working, even the cleaners.

"That is the culture of our people," says Dr.  Rahima, 'we never work
for money.  I am a doctor.  I should help my poor people.  Otherwise
what is my job?  Even in my private clinic that is our rule.  We treat
the patients, no matter if they are poor and cannot pay."

When we ask about the burqa, she is dismissive.

"People here don't hate it, it is part of our culture and it is related
to the situation in our country.  In good times, when conditions are
good, it is not necessary.  In bad times, when conditions are bad, it
is necessary.  The burqa did not make the war, you know.  If we thought
that removing the burqa would bring peace, we would remove it straight
away."

Our interview is interrupted by a nurse who consults Dr.  Rahima about
an emergency patient.  Dr.  Rahima excuses herself and tells the nurse
what to do until she can get there herself.  All her working life has
been spent dealing with the impact of war.  She nominates the two most
difficult periods in Kabul as the recent American air strikes, and the
civil war during the early 1990s.  Dr.  Rahima was then working in a
general hospital, treating the victims of the Mujaheddin attacks.

"It was very sad full for me.  Every day I examined injured people.  We
had no electricity for three years for three consecutive years.  NGOs
helped the hospital and we had electricity during operations and at
night.  But we also had problems with water and with sanitation.  Yes,
sometimes we had no water and no sewerage as well."

Dr.  Rahima is aware that some of the Mujaheddin leaders who were
responsible for the attacks on Kabul in the early 1990s are now part of
Afghanistan's new interim government.  She says she hopes that they
will not repeat the past or that the international community will not
allow them to so that Afghanistan can have a chance for the peace its
people crave after twenty-three years of war.

But when asked to assess the chances for peace, Dr.  Rahima is
cautious.

"We have only a fifty-fifty chance.  It depends on the UN and
especially America.  This is the third time that the UN will make a
decision regarding our country without removing the weapons from here.
You know, Afghanistan is like a laboratory: every country has offloaded
its arms, old and new, for them to be tried out here.  Afghanistan does
not produce guns, they are brought in here by the Mujaheddin, by the
Taliban, by Osama.  It is now up to the UN and America to collect these
weapons."

She pauses reflectively.

"But you know, I have never seen peace.  I was such a small child that
I don't really remember it.  If the UN decision fails, the people are
waiting for the storm after the calm."

We tell her that in English the expression works in reverse.  We have
calm before the storm.

"Many things here are in reverse," she smiles.

She says she does not give in to despair and that being able to treat
her suffering countrymen has given her a sense of purpose.  Perhaps her
most telling response comes when I ask her if she would ever consider
leaving Afghanistan, having stayed throughout all these dark, hard
years.

"I don't want to go overseas to earn more money.  But the education of
my children is my top priority.  It depends what is available here for
them in the future, that is what will determine what I do."

Dr.  Rahima hugs me as we depart.  Once again I am amazed by the women
I have met here, and their courage, humour, strength and
determination, despite all that they have had to endure.

The Taliban leadership imposed the strictest interpretation of Islam
ever seen anywhere in the world, saying they were recreating the
Prophet Mohammed's era, the sixth century.

"We want to live a life like the Prophet lived 1400 years ago and jihad
is our right," an aide to Mullah Omar, Mullah Wakil, explained.

"We want to recreate the time of the Prophet and we are only carrying
out what the Afghan people wanted for the past fourteen years."

But in fact, the Taliban were recreating their own narrow lives in
poor, backward rural villages in Afghanistan.  Mullah Omar was from
such a small village in the south that he had never been to Kabul 700
kilometres away and wasn't interested in going, even when the Taliban
triumphantly captured the city in 1996.

The Taliban's policies on women were also a reflection of their own
narrow lives rather than the prescriptions of Islam, even in the
Prophet's time.  Many of the Taliban recruits were war orphans brought
up in refugee camps, tutored in the madras as the religious schools in
Pakistan.  They had simply never known the company of women.  They had
been brought up in a totally male society where the exclusion of women
became a symbol of manhood and commitment to the jihad.  They felt
threatened by the half of the human race they had never known, and were
more comfortable locking them away.

The Taliban leaders asserted that if they gave women greater freedom
they would lose face with their rank and file, and sexual experience
would weaken the men as fighters.  Their lives had to be devoted to
jihad to the exclusion of all else.  Ahmed Rashid argues that,
ironically, this religious brotherhood, with its hermetically sealed
way of life, was 'a direct throwback' to the Christian Crusaders who
fought Islam during the twelfth century an all-male military order
motivated by religion to fight and to kill.

Soon their oppression of women became the definition of the Taliban's
Islamic radicalism.  They justified it by saying it was what the people
wanted, though it always had to be imposed at gunpoint.  The religious
police would smash TV sets with clubs, close girls' schools, whip women
wearing make-up beneath their burqas, and stand on street corners
measuring men's beards, arresting them if they were not long enough.
Many here say that the Taliban's religious extremism brought people to
a level of misery unparalleled in Afghan history.

After more than a decade of war, poverty and corruption, this was what
the madras as vomited up from the margins of Afghan society.

"My name means gold," says Zarmina, a lively twenty-one-year-old
woman.

"And my sister is Nuriya that means light."

We are sitting on the floor in her family's flat in a Soviet building
on the outskirts of Kabul.  Chris Stephen and I are here to interview
her older sister Fahima - 'her name means knowledge!"  who is a doctor.
But Zarmina is quick and clever and cheeky, and she has taken over the
morning.

She has a twin bother, Mohammed, who is studying medicine.

"When the Taliban ran away I shaved off my beard, but now it is cold
and I am a little bit sorry.  According to your opinion, is it well?"
he asks, offering us his chin from all sides.

Zarmina also wanted to study medicine, but the Taliban came to power
just as she finished her high school studies in 1996, and she was
unable to go to university.

"I was very sad because for so many years I sat together in the class
with my brother, and I was in the first place and Mohammed was in the
second.  Afterwards, when I have to leave school, I help him, so that
he will do well, and I study myself maths and English at home."

She's done a thorough job of teaching herself.  Her English is of a
high standard and she translates for all the family in the room.  Once,
when she interrupts her twin brother, he looks up at the ceiling in
frustration, and Chris says he sympathises with him.  He knows exactly
how he feels as he also has a cleverer sister who used to drive him
crazy.

Since the departure of the Taliban there has been a rumour that medical
schools may now open to women in the new term.  Zarmina would like to
resume her studies and the life that was interrupted by the Taliban's
ban on the education of women.  Like her older sister Fahima, she says
she wants to help people.

"And in Afghanistan, being a doctor is a prestige job."

Chris tells her that in England doctors are also rich.

"Then I want to come to London!"  she laughs impishly.

I suggest she should come and work as my translator.  A female
translator would send shock waves through this place.  She is very
enthusiastic, but says she has to consult her father.  We agree that
she will come to the Intercontinental Hotel the following day at 9.30
a.m. I am surprised when she doesn't turn up.  Later, after I make
enquiries through various drivers and translators, I learn that she did
come with her sister Nuriya, but the guards at the gate turned them
away.  Two unaccompanied females can't just walk into a hotel.  And
naturally no one checked with me.

The first small steps are so hard.  Zarmina lives far away and by the
time I make contact with her again, the momentum is lost.  Her father
has persuaded her that working for me would be too much for her to take
on.

I am still living at the Intercontinental Hotel, my first accidental
meeting with Adriana having turned us into permanent and happy
roommates.  Our room is freezing and I am once again sleeping under my
Northern Alliance sleeping bag, though on a bed this time.  Each of the
hotel's six floors has an Afghan version of the dezhurnaya, only the
floor lady here is a man, of course.

He's in charge of important things like providing water and unlocking
doors, essential for rooms with only one key and multiple occupants.
Every morning he brings a steel pail full of water, so that we can
wash.  Sometimes when we are lucky he will bring two pails, one filled
with warm water.  One day I look into his room and see him heating
water in small pots on a two-bar radiator.  After that, I don't expect
warm water every day.

The view from our room is stunning, looking out over the city to the
tawny mountains surrounding Kabul.  Adriana is fun, hardworking, and
determined.  She is tiny, with red curls, an irresistible smile and a
beguiling Mexican accent.  When her cameraman refuses to work any
longer in the difficult conditions here, she remains, filming sequences
herself with a borrowed Digi-cam, and training her translator to shoot
her pieces to camera.  She does three people's work, and finds good
stories through a combination of determination and that other
journalistic necessity luck.  When Adriana goes places, things happen
in front of her camera.

The heavy hitters are also here; CNN's Christiane Amanpour is
broadcasting with her signature calm and fluency from the roof of the
Intercontinental.  Soon CBS anchor Dan Rather will be here.  John
Simpson, head of the BBC's World Affairs Unit, has been here from the
start.  He has been reporting from Afghanistan for more than twenty
years, and until recently was a hero of mine, for his signature pieces
are big, bold and thoughtful, always delivered with a flourish.  But I
am shocked that coming into Kabul with the Northern Alliance troops, he
broadcasts that 'the BBC has liberated Kabul'.  He does it in both his
radio and TV stories so it's not accidental.  His declaration on radio
is followed by an interview with the British Home Secretary, David
Blunkett, who says, "I'm still reeling from the news that the BBC and
John Simpson have taken Kabul."

In the ensuing uproar in the UK, Simpson says he regrets the statement,
explaining that he became over-excited in the heat of the moment.  He
tells BBC TV interviewer David Frost, "What I should have said, of
course, was that we brought the news to people in Kabul that they had
been liberated.  I kind of shortened it down from the first word to the
last word of the sentence."

Acknowledging that four or five of his BBC colleagues had been walking
alongside him at the time of the 'liberation', he says: "What can you
do?  I regret it.  But I don't regret being there a long way in
advance."

The next day the headlines scream Simpson sorry for liberating Kabul.

Since she was one of the first journalists into Kabul, my friend
Barbara Jones has the best room in the Intercon, with a double bed, a
working toilet and running water cold, of course.  Other rooms on the
first floor have some of these advantages, but none is as impressive as
Barbara's, which has everything, plus a heater, cheese and biscuits,
and sometimes even gin.  Barbara has collected an eclectic group
around her, and I particularly enjoy spending time with Ajay Shukla, a
former Indian army tank commander, now defence correspondent for
India's Star TV.

"That guy has the biggest audience here.  He must broadcast to 500
million people," an American reporter tells me, awestruck.

In addition to the best conversation in the Intercon, Ajay's major
asset is having a cameraman who cooks.  Narindra makes mouth-watering
curries in the Intercon kitchen, while the cooks and waiters look on
grumblingly, and brings them upstairs to Barbara's room.

This is a blessing, since the food at the Intercon is usually tasteless
and always expensive, tending to dry, overcooked chicken flanked by
small portions of grey cauliflower.  Perhaps this is what Westerners
wanted to eat in 1979, Luckily for me I am at the confluence of two
groups whose cameramen whip up fabulous meals at the end of a long
working day.  Alberto, a Spanish cameraman who sometimes shoots for
Adriana, is one of the 'waifs' for whom we provide floor space in our
room.  He cooks delicious Spanish feasts, with tortillas and chicken
enchiladas, and paella.  In Kabul!  At the Intercon, renowned for
inedible food, I eat superbly.

Life here is easier than in Khoja Bahauddin, even though very little at
the Intercon actually functions.  But it is such an improvement on what
came before that we're thrilled.  The hard work is that the thin air at
this altitude makes it difficult to run up the eight floors to the
roof, where the feed points are.  Just reaching the fourth floor where
NBC has its offices is memorable.  I sometimes find myself leaning
against the doorjamb, with my breathing constricted, unable to keep
climbing.  Just as well I don't have any ambitions regarding Everest.

The hotel is at the top of a hill, and our cars usually drive up
through two checkpoints to the front doors, but suddenly one day, with
no explanation, we are prevented from doing this any more.  We have to
stop at the first checkpoint and walk up the last 300 metres.

As we are grumbling about lugging our gear up the hill in this thin
air, someone explains the new policy was initiated after a car tried to
enter the hotel with a trunk full of explosives.  We grumble a bit less
after hearing that.

The following week I'm driving up with Sabi, the sweet, funny teenager,
obsessed with the Titanic soundtrack.  He's a Panjshiri from Massoud's
village, with a radiant smile and an almost female prettiness.  He's
unhappy about not being allowed to drive to the top of the hill.  He
gets out of the car and, without warning, grabs one of the guards by
the throat.

The driver and I rush to pull him off.  The guard has a gun, and I
don't want Sabi murdered in front of me.

People here are so volatile.

The second NBC crew is inching its way from Khoja Bahauddin, bringing
more than ten tonnes of TV equipment across the Hindu Kush to Kabul. My
friend Jonathan has put off his return to the States and is doing the
journey with about ten NBC guys, including his cameraman Tom, producer
Karl Bostic and the saintly satellite engineer Hans.

Personally, this is not a journey I think they should undertake in a
huge Russian truck, reversing up and down those narrow mountain paths.
If I were NBC management I'd have them wait until the siege of Kunduz
is lifted and the highway becomes clear, when they can do the trip in a
day and a half in relative safety.  But it's not up to me, so the boys
are on the trucks, and I'm worried about them.

At this time we hear desperate rumours that four of our colleagues have
been killed on the road driving in from Pakistan.  After twenty-four
hours, the deaths of four journalists are confirmed Reuters cameraman
Harry Burton, and his Afghan colleague Azizullah Haidari, Spaniard
Julio Fuentes and Italian Maria Grazia II Cutuli.  They were taken out
of their cars and shot by the side of the road.  The Intercon heaves
with pain and grief.

There is a sense of community here, and even people who did not know
the journalists personally mourn their loss.  There is also a stab of
cold fear: Next time, it could be me.  Alcohol is procured and
consumed, but it takes some time to dull the reality of our colleagues
meeting such a brutal end on an Afghan roadside.

Even worse, after they're killed their bodies lie where they've fallen
for three days because no one dares to go thirty kilometres outside
Kabul to collect them.  It's a measure of the lawlessness of a country
when even the ruling troops won't go to pick up corpses.

I talk to Maria Grazia II Cutuli's colleague Andrea, from Italian
newspaper Corriere delta Sera.  Once Maria's body finally is picked up
off the side of the road by Northern Alliance troops, he has to go and
identify her.  This place makes many demands on you that are not
strictly part of the job description.

I find myself thinking again about luck, and fate.

I did not know Australian cameraman Harry Burton personally, but
everyone who did says he was a top bloke, funny, brave and caring, as
well as being a great professional.  Harry did everything right he
drove in during the day, not at night, in a convoy along a road that
had been regarded as relatively safe.  But he died, and another
Australian journalist, who broke the rules by driving in at night,
unescorted, along the same road, is here to tell the tale.  In fact,
Harry begged this Australian journalist to join his convoy, to do it
properly, not to take stupid risks.  But it was Harry who died, and
it's his friend who is alive, telling me this story in Kabul.

At its daily briefings, the UN says it's no longer safe for us to drive
in and out along the road where the ambush took place.  This is a
significant restriction as it is the main road in and out of Pakistan,
and there is no other means of transport at the moment.  When the UN
says it will put on flights for us, you can almost hear the sigh of
relief in the packed room.  Then we learn that the UN will charge
US$2500 for the one-hour flight to Pakistan.  Up front, in cash.  This
same flight cost US$500 a year ago.  People who don't have that kind of
money or don't have a big news organisation that will put it up for
them feel trapped.

Road convoys out to Pakistan slowly resume, despite the danger.  The
notice board downstairs at the Intercon makes painful reading as
Reuters writes a letter reminding people that they have lost two
beloved colleagues and begging other journalists not to take such
risks.  There is a reply signed "The Crazy Press', explaining that
journalists have to get in and out to cover such stories, even if they
don't have the huge sums the UN is demanding for the flights.

Two Israeli journalists who are 'in hiding' in the Islamic state of
Afghanistan, working under false names, decide that they will solve the
problem by leaving together on the local bus to Jalalabad.  I admire
their ingenuity and daring, and they make it out safely.  But later in
the month two bandits board that same Jalalabad bus.  They turn out to
be former Taliban, and force all men without beards off the bus, and
cut off their noses and ears, leaving them bleeding in a ditch by the
side of the road.

It never stops.

But what shakes me, and almost sends me home, is the murder of Swedish
cameraman Ulf Stromberg in Taloqan.  He is shot during a robbery when
bandits enter his room at night.  His death deprives me of my "I'd have
done it differently' fig leaf  We stayed in a house in the same area in
Taloqan, also in a locked compound, without armed guards.  It could
have been us.

Ulf Stromberg was a father of three children, devoted to his work.  His
Swedish colleagues leave a letter downstairs at the Intercon,
describing him as a great cameraman and a wonderful human being, always
prepared to go the extra mile for the story and for his friends.

"We cannot describe our loss, or how much we will miss him."  I cry as
I'm reading it, and seeing how upset I am, a friend says, "No, you
don't have to go home.  Think of it as a drive-by shooting it could
happen anywhere.  Here, LA, London."

In Afghanistan, that's comfort.

The other side of this is that danger is an aphrodisiac.  Surviving
dangerous situations with someone you find attractive enhances every
feeling.  Relief at surviving is immediately swamped by desire for the
person you survived with.  When your colleagues are dying around you,
it makes life and love more precious.

It's something the male correspondents have known for a while.  But
they don't talk about it because many of them are married, with a wife
worrying and waiting at home.  Some men speak to their wives twice a
day on satellite phones from trenches in the middle of battlefields.
Others simply have a good time, with whoever is around: journalists,
aid workers, refugees or prostitutes.  Some men, of course, do both.

There are women who know about this front-line buzz, too.  The guys
describe them as 'war groupies'.  Women who do ten days in Afghanistan
following fashion week in New York, and bring hair dryers and
bust-firming creams to places where the bombs are dropping and there's
no electricity.  Well, not the type that you can plug a hair dryer
into.

And in Kabul there's another factor that heightens sexual tension. This
is still very much the Taliban's city, where sex was forbidden and
women were stoned to death for adultery.  Simply the idea of sex here,
in this city, is so illicit as to be irresistible.

So it's dangerous, it's forbidden, it's alluring but unfortunately it's
also impossible because there is no privacy anywhere.  People are once
again crammed three or four to a room, once again in sleeping bags. For
example, Adriana and I are the two permanent occupants of our room, but
there is a floating population of needy journalist refugees we take
in.

In order to arrange accommodation for friends and colleagues coming in
to Kabul, Adriana becomes like a property developer at the Intercon
acquiring rooms as they become free, with no reference to the front
desk.

"We'll put the Spanish guys in room 301, and we'll move to room 243,
which has a ceiling.  Afterwards, when my new cameraman comes, he will
move in and they will move out.  I am looking for a room for them."

Every extra space is immediately snapped up by newcomers in need of
somewhere to stay, so there's little chance of engineering a night
alone with anyone you might fancy.  Everyone tries though.  You hear
snatches of conversation as you pass people, dodging drips in the
lobby, or emerging from the daily UN press briefing.

"I've done a deal where we get room 131, which has a working toilet,
when that journalist goes.  I'll be alone there."

It's amazing that anyone has time for reporting.  And then one
miraculous day, it happens.  We organise three rooms and four sets of
journalists, so that the right combinations can be on their own.

One English reporter says she is going for the "I did it Kabul' T-shirt
and bumper sticker.  And a redoubtable Eastern European journalist even
has two lovers on the go concurrently, a mind-boggling feat of
organisation and stamina, given the hours that she works as well as
everything else.

The second NBC crew calls in to say they have completed half of their
journey down the mountains.  It is taking them even longer than it took
us because of the large amount of gear they are hauling, and they are
finding it hard going.  They've celebrated Thanksgiving on this
journey, and are spending the night outside in the open, on the
snowline near the summit of the Hindu Kush, because one of their trucks
has burst a tyre.  They are patching the tyre past midnight in the
freezing dark, and tomorrow they will see whether snow has blocked the
Hawaq Pass, and if they can cross down into the Panjshir Valley, or
whether they have to unload all their gear onto donkeys.

One of the engineers describes this trip as the craziest thing he has
been asked to do in twenty years at NBC news.  I am very worried about
them during their dangerous snail's pace ascent, but in only a day or
two more, ins hallah they will reach Kabul.  Chapter 20 Bini Hasr is a
typical Afghan village thirty minutes west of Kabul.  The paved road
has petered out, there are mud-brick houses, and chickens, goats and
children scatter in front of us on the gravel path.  The mountains look
down benignly from their great height.  This is "Anywhere,
Afghanistan', and this inaccessible ordinariness was just what al-Qaeda
was looking for.

They wanted an unremarkable house in an unremarkable village, for a
small camp and safe house.  When they found it, the Taliban 'persuaded'
the owner to give it up.  Now it's empty and in ruins.  Osama bin Laden
was allegedly staying here in late October, and the building was
destroyed by an American cruise missile just hours after he left.

We walk into the yard.  I am with Adriana and Chris Stephen.  A massive
blast has destroyed the main building, tearing off its roof and
scattering debris and timber everywhere.  The owner describes how in
September the Taliban came to him and ordered him to give up this
house.  Initially, he refused.

"They ignored this and they beat me with cables for two weeks."  He
shows us fading bruises on his arms.

He fought them, obtaining an eviction notice, which he shows us.  It
has the thumbprints of his illiterate neighbours, as required by law.
But it made no difference, and in the end, when he couldn't endure the
beatings any longer, he gave up his house to the Taliban.  He says that
twelve men came here.

"Six were Arabs and six Afghans.  I knew one of them, Mullah Mahmud.
They built a large gate in the wall to make easy access for their
vehicles."  The owner shows us the new wooden gate in the mud-brick
wall surrounding his compound.  It is large enough to take jeeps and an
armoured personnel carrier.

"They said they wanted it because it was a decent size and had such a
high wall, and then they built a gate," he grumbles.

I am surprised to see that they also built what looks like a sauna, a
small, carefully constructed wood-panelled room.  For al-Qaeda's
Swedish brigade perhaps?  It stands apart from the main building, near
the standard-issue Afghan outhouse, and it doesn't look as if they had
a chance to use it.

Officially, this became a regional office for a charity called WAAFA,
which delivered aid to the poor in Afghanistan, and was also possibly
used by al-Qaeda as a cover organisation.

"We helped them at the start," says the owner.  He wanted to keep an
eye on his property.

"They were distributing rice and oil, along with the Taliban, but then
they pushed us out.  A guard who worked here, Amin, saw bin Laden here.
He says they came in the night, with extra bodyguards."

Amin is not here now, but Chris Stephen spoke to him on an earlier
visit.  The guard was a twenty-three-year-old who had come to Bini Hasr
in late September, one of fifteen Talibs sent to work at the compound
in order to release the Arab soldiers based here-for military duty.

Amin told Chris that bin Laden arrived on 26 October, almost three
weeks after the start of the bombing campaign -and the night before the
attack that destroyed this camp.  However, there was so much secrecy
that the men were not even told it was bin Laden until after he left.
All they were told was that they had to secure the entire village.

"He arrived at night, it was after eight, and he came in a big convoy
of jeeps with 120 bodyguards," Amin said.

"When he came into our camp he was completely surrounded by a wall of
very tall men.  They were so close together you could not see him at
all they were arranged so they could fire in three different
directions."  Amin said that he heard bin Laden talking to the camp
commander, telling him that he would leave at eight o'clock the next
morning to go to Kabul.  Amin's understanding was that bin Laden
planned to spend two days at the compound, using it as a base for
visits to Kabul.  But instead he left early the next morning, within
hours of his arrival.

"He just got up at five, said his prayers, then left."

Amin told Chris that just before 8 a.m. everyone in the camp was
ordered to leave because a cruise-missile strike was coming.

Minutes later, two missiles hit, smashing the house in the centre of
the camp compound.  This chain of events sparked an immediate
investigation by the al-Qaeda camp authorities who suspected there must
be a spy in the camp.  However, said Amin, they never found one.

The owner of the house corroborates part of the story.

"We heard that bin Laden left before the bombing that destroyed my
house.  Seven Taliban died in the bombing, they buried them in the
cemetery here.  One lost an arm.  Then they loaded up the car and drove
to Kandahar."

Most of the property is now destroyed, and the compound is full of
rubble.  There are documents and stickers from WAAFA.  Crunching
through the debris, we pick them up and other documents, including more
exercise books and letters written in Arabic.  Last time he was here,
Chris found ripped-up plane tickets, which he has pieced back together.
They show that some of the operatives had flown into Iran in late
October and made their way here after that.

I am standing in the rubble, looking at a WAAFA sticker if it is true
that this aid agency is a cover for a terrorist organisation, it seems
to me to be horribly cynical.  Aid work is difficult, demanding, poorly
paid, at times heroic.  It is the opposite of terrorism, and it can
only make aid delivery more difficult if it is being used as a front by
terrorist organisations.  I trawl through the rubble wondering if the
story can be true and if bin Laden really was here and avoided being
killed in an air strike by a matter of hours.  It is one person's
account and very difficult to corroborate.

I find a bottle of medicine for ulcers in the rubble.  So terrorists
take Zantac, too?  You don't think of a terrorist with indigestion.
Although I suppose it is a pretty stressful job.

I'm thinking through all the implausibilities in the story -doesn't the
property owner's version partly contradict the guard's version, because
if they had a warning to get out, why did seven Taliban soldiers die in
the missile strike?  when my eye alights on an empty birdcage.  You
don't think of a terrorist with a birdcage, either.  Bin Laden's
birdcage.  I kneel to touch it.  But the bird has flown.  Something
about the dusty rickety cane cage takes my fancy.  I bring it back to
the hotel along with the WAAFA and al-Qaeda documents.

Over time I become quite attached to my unusual al-Qaeda loot.  It sits
dustily in my room at the Intercon, a symbol of all the things I don't
understand about this conflict soldiers who swap sides, a society where
women are confined, and terrorists who have ulcers and bird cages

Over the next few days, Adriana and I go through the documents,
wondering, as with the stuff we lifted from the Rishkor training camp,
where the security services are.  Why are journalists able to collect
all these documents?  Journalists will take information wherever they
find it, but why are the CIA and MI5 letting us do this?  Why haven't
they been in and cleared these places out?  This appears to be another
Intelligence failure, following the American security services' failure
to act on warnings about increased terrorist activity prior to
September 11.

At the al-Qaeda headquarters at Khost, a series of terrorist training
camps 1-50 kilometres south-east of Kabul, there is another interesting
stash of al-Qaeda papers.

Once again they are found by a journalist.  In late November British
reporter Jason Burke becomes the first Westerner known to have visited
Khost in five years.

After the Taliban captured the dusty east Afghan city in 1996, they
virtually ceded it to Osama bin Laden and it became the base for the
'international brigade' operating in Afghanistan.  Almost all of the
thousands of Islamic militants trained in Afghanistan since bin Laden
returned in 1996 have been through Khost.

The main training camp there is called Khaldan.  It's where the men who
carried out the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in East Africa were
trained and selected.  The FBI believes that at least two of the
September 11 hijackers, possibly including the group's leader, Mohammed
Atta, also trained there.

The al-Qaeda operatives cleared the main camp when they departed, but
in the corner of a room where a bank of computers once stood, they left
a small stack of documents.  Jason Burke picks them up.  They reveal
that militants were being instructed in every aspect of terrorism. They
include photocopied pages in English, apparently from manuals
circulated by far-right extremists in the United States.

"This book may seem controversial and dangerous, but such information
may someday be the lifeblood of freedom fighters," explains one
manual.

Another forty-one-page document, entitled Assorted Nasties, is a 'how
to' guide to chemical weapons, detailing how to make biological and
chemical weapons from household items.  The chemical weapons range from
mustard gas to sarin, and the manual also details a variety of
different delivery mechanisms.

In the cellar of a house set aside for foreign recruits, Jason Burke
sees barrels of chemicals.  The entrance to the cellar is surrounded by
dead birds, which seems to imply that operatives were using this
building as a laboratory and experimenting with the manufacture of
chemical weapons.

Burke discovers other manuals covering explosives manufacture,
including car bombs and the favourite bomb designs of Middle East
terrorists, as well as personal letters.  The letters are fascinating.
Several mention bin Laden by name.  One, written to Khaldan instructor
Abu Said by Yemeni trainer Abu Ziad, refers to orders received from bin
Laden.

"I have sat and spoken to Sheikh Osama .. . and he has made
arrangements for me to travel to Eritrea.  I am going to stay there for
a month and a half, then I am going to travel, and then I am praying to
God that I will be martyred."

The letters reveal that the recruits are eager to progress to
assassinations and more advanced operations.  One is from an Iraqi Kurd
sent to Eritrea to train other militants.  It says, "Thank you Abu
Said, for showing us how small people with faith can defeat the big
people with equipment and power, who have no faith."  It is the Suicide
Bomber's Hymn.

At the same time, in late November 2001, one of my Moscow colleagues,
Alan Cullison from the Wall Street Journal, buys two computers at a
Kabul computer store for US$1100.  The laptop and the PC he buys have
been looted from an al-Qaeda compound which was destroyed in a bombing
raid in early November before Kabul fell.  Alan went to the Kabul
computer shop in the first place because his laptop had been smashed on
the drive through the Hindu Kush.  Usual story his jeep lost its brakes
and crashed into a truck.  This actually saved his life, though it
destroyed his gear.

"I was looking for one, and was much more interested in this laptop and
the hard drive when I heard it was used by al-Qaeda."

He tells me that he was also aware that because he arrived in Kabul a
week after it fell, all the best al-Qaeda documents had already been
snapped up by the journalists who had come in from the Panjshir with
the victorious Northern Alliance troops.  Two forms of necessity
therefore drive him to find a great scoop.

It appears the hard drive he buys belonged to Mohammed Atef, a leading
al-Qaeda commander killed in the raid.  It contains material linking
al-Qaeda to the September 11 attacks and to the murder of Ahmed Shah
Massoud, as well as revealing efforts by al-Qaeda to obtain chemical
weapons.

Alan's bosses at the Wall Street Journal back in New York instruct Alan
to hand over the computers to American government authorities, for
authentication and in case they contain any information that could
prevent further terrorist attacks.  I find this puzzling why let Alan
pay for the computers if you are simply going to hand them over?

Before the US government officials show up, Alan and fellow Wall Street
Journal reporter Andrew Higgins copy as many of the files as they can.
This turns out to be everything from the hard drive, but nothing from
the laptop since they can't get past its password.  They hand both
computers over to the government officials in Kabul.

The government authenticates the computers.  The Wall Street Journal
has access to some 1750 files text, audio and video detailing
everything from housekeeping and internal squabbles to active
missions.

There is also an outline of an al-Qaeda project to develop chemical and
biological weapons, code named al-Zabadi, Arabic for curdled milk.  Top
al-Qaeda commander Ayman al-Zawahri, who survived the bombings that
killed the owner of the hard drive, appears to be the author of one
memo.

"The destructive power of these weapons is no less than that of nuclear
weapons," he writes, adding, 'we only became aware of them when the
enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that
they can be produced simply."

A video file made after September 11 uses television footage of people
fleeing the World Trade Center, combined with a soundtrack of mocking
chants and prayers in Arabic.  Another video file contains a
twenty-three-minute clip of Osama bin Laden denouncing the United
States and enthusing over the September 11 attacks.

It just goes to show that even a car accident can lead you to a
fantastic story.  You can never tell where the news is lying in wait
for you.

A convoy of huge dusty trucks lumbers into the Intercon one night in
late November.  I am standing on the balcony looking out from the NBC's
fourth-floor offices, and we excitedly agree that this could be the
second NBC crew, arriving from the treacherous drive across the Hindu
Kush.  Of course the lift is not working, so I take the stairs.  Three
dusty men are walking in as I reach the lobby.  I am very relieved to
see that it is my friends, tired and filthy, but safe.

"I've been so worried about you," I say throwing my arms around
Jonathan, whose black hair is grey with dust.  He smells of dirt and
danger, and I look up to see a camera rolling.  Tom has been filming
their entire trip.  I receive dusty hugs from Hans and Tom just as
NBC's chief producer comes down to greet them.

"Welcome to Hell."

Delirious with tiredness and the joy of survival, they describe the
terrible drive and their near misses.  Jonathan says he found himself
praying for the first time in years.

"The worst moment was when the truck was reversing up a mountain road
at night.  It was a ninety-degree hill, it was pitch dark, and I could
hear rocks slipping beneath our wheels, falling off the mountain and
down that endless, pitiless cliff into the dark water below."  Jonathan
shudders.

"And we drove right into a minefield our driver made a mistake, and we
had to reverse out when he realised, along the exact same track, real
slow," Hans says.

Jonathan adds, "We told our drivers that we wanted to reach a town we
nominated but what that meant was that they drove all night, without
eating, and we'd arrive as the sun was rising so that they couldn't eat
all day again, because it was Ramadan, and they were all stoned, so I
really didn't trust their judgement or their reflexes."

"Ah, it was nothing .. ."  says Tom.

There are many reunions in Kabul.  NBC has brought my favourite driver
Shah Mahmood down from Khoja Bahauddin.  Here in the big city he is
even more "Snoop Mahmood', with the sunglasses he borrows from the
American boys, and his shiny new van, bought with the money he's earned
working for NBC.

Jonathan says Shah Mahmood wasn't meant to come.

"We'd said goodbye to him, he was taking one of the engineers back to
the border crossing with all the gear.  But Shah Mahmood just dumped
the engineer there at the Pyang River.  He didn't stay to help him load
two tonnes of gear onto the barge or negotiate for him in Dari, he just
headed straight for us.  So we are standing at the bank of the Kokcha
ten kilometres away and we see a figure crossing the river on
horseback, he's riding towards us through the water and he has an NBC
dust mask over his face.  After a while, we realise, it's Shah Mahmood.
He says, You.  Me.  Go.  Kabul.  We had to take him."

I am very happy to see NBC producer Babak Behnam.  I last saw him two
months ago, in that field outside the airport in Dushanbe, while I
waited for Chopper Number 3. Babak was on the list for the 'fixed-wing'
plane to the city of Faizabad.  He fills me in on what he did next:
driving across the Hindu Kush down into the Panjshir Valley, where he
stayed without a break until the fall of Kabul.  He accompanied the
Northern Alliance troops into Kabul, and has set up an NBC empire at
the Intercon.

Babak has a wonderful older man, Mr.  Haidari, working for him.  We all
call him Joe, which is what he was called when he worked in the US in
the 1950s, studying to be an air traffic controller.  He returned to
Afghanistan and worked in his profession until 1980, but when the jihad
against the Communists began, the airport and its facilities were
destroyed.  The following two decades of war limited air travel in and
out of the country.  Planes landed and took off without using air
traffic controllers.  Joe was out of a job.

Joe is sweet, courteous, and dignified, with a grey beard and glasses,
and a ready smile.  He always wears an embroidered cap, not a turban,
and speaks delightfully formal old-fashioned English Philadelphia,
circa 1955, right down to the speech patterns and the accent, which he
has retained.  It's like listening to someone from Philly, not a
Kabuli.  They should put him in a language lab, to record American
English 'frozen' in the 1950s.

Joe works as Babak's fixer and 'local knowledge'.  Strictly, Babak
doesn't need a translator since he speaks Farsi, which means he can
communicate in Dari.  But while getting things done is first and
foremost about language, it is also about influence and pulling strings
and knowing a place.  Joe provides all that, and still manages to go
home for a sleep in the afternoon.

When Kabul TV station resumes transmissions for two hours a day, we
pile into a car to have a look.  I go with Babak and NBC reporter Jim
Maceda.  Joe sits with us in the back seat.  He speaks to Babak in
Dari, then turns to us, clearly concerned.

"I don't know what to do," he says.

"Mr.  Babak exhorts me not to stand upon ceremony with him."

We savour this wonderful phrase, and Jim Maceda responds, "Well, if he
exhorts you then you mustn't stand on ceremony.  Just tell him he's an
asshole."

Joe would never do that, trading insults is not his style.  When he
tells me about his life it reinforces the difficulties people at all
str atas of society have faced here.  Joe is middle class and educated,
and once held a professional job, but he has lost contact with his son,
who fled Afghanistan for Europe.

"We last heard from him seven years ago, and his mother is very
worried," Joe says gravely.

"Can you think of any way I could track him down?  He was last in
Germany, I believe."

Seven years.  It is so pitiful to have lost a child and not to know
whether he is dead or in prison or simply unable to contact you because
of the parlous state of everything, including communications, in your
country.

"His mother is very worried," Joe repeats, clearing his throat,
sadly.

I want to write a story entitled "We are the new Taliban', as we are
living in their homes, driving their cars and eating in their
restaurants.

The Herat restaurant is doing a roaring trade, packed every lunchtime
during Ramadan, jour nos only, of course.  This was the Taliban's
favourite eatery, and was obviously a lucrative spot more beggar women
patrol outside here than anywhere else in Kabul.  The restaurant is a
large room with fifty aqua steel tables and benches.  There's a narrow
steel sink along one wall, with many taps, like a kindergarten
bathroom, where you wash your hands.  The mirror above the sink has a
prayer stencilled on it in Arabic.  The only decoration is faded
tourist posters of Afghanistan.  In a backroom there is a poster of the
Buddha statues at Bamian.  I don't know how the posters survived the
Taliban when the statues didn't.

A man stands on the street outside the front of the restaurant,
whipping up the Herat's specialty: shashlik, kebab and kofta, meatballs
with cardamom, over hot coals.  There's lamb and, of course, the
ubiquitous goat.  My favourite.  In Afghanistan, Goat is the new Lamb.
The Herat also makes great chips, and a tasty salad, but it's lucky I
learned to eat meat in Khoja Bahauddin.  This is food for your meat and
potatoes kind of terrorist.

We try other restaurants, but like the Taliban we always come back to
the Herat.  Later there are conspiracy theories that an al-Qaeda
movement that tries to infiltrate the Northern Alliance is code named
Herat.  Named for the Afghan city or for this restaurant?  Barbara
from the Mail on Sunday will soon be leaving the Intercon for a house
previously owned by bin Laden's third wife.  A British journalist is
turning it into a media compound, having cleared out all Mrs.  bin
Laden's videos and al-Qaeda documents first.  She left in a hurry on 12
November with all the rest of the Taliban leadership.  It's revealing
that even bin Laden's wife was not better prepared, and didn't know the
Taliban collapse was imminent.  While Barbara writes a piece about the
documents and tapes found in her new home, I decide to do something
more frothy.  I plan to go to a hairdresser and incorporate that into
my "We are the new Taliban' piece.  I'm hoping to go the whole hog and
have a Taliban facial that would make a good headline!  but it turns
out this word is simply not in the Afghan vocabulary.

Finding a beautician/hairdresser is not easy.  These women's services
were 'underground' during Taliban times, prohibited as frivolous and
punishable by beatings from the Taliban religious police.  We make
enquiries and finally hear about a beauty parlour in a suburb called
Micro-Rayon.  When I hop in the car I don't realise that we have to
drive for more than an hour across Kabul to find a hairdresser.

There is no shop front, so we ask at the address we have been given. In
classic Afghan fashion, our initial discussions are with a six-year-old
boy.  This is judged more appropriate than an adult woman speaking to
us.  The small boy directs us to a house at the back of his street,
from which a shy seventeen-year-old girl emerges.  Yes, she has a
secret salon, but she has never coloured anyone's hair or done any
facials.  She opens a drawer to show me her make-up collection.  A few
lipsticks, some mascara and rouge.  She put this on women.  Is that
what I mean?

I decide that I need something more for a story, after all even
soldiers wear make-up here, so we drive for another hour and a half
back across Kabul.  We stop at a second house, in an area that looks
rural.  A woman comes out to speak to us and, with chickens scratching
at our feet, she tells me that her beauty parlour only does make-up. No
hair and no facials.  Even in an Afghan context, this doesn't really
look like the spot for a ritzy salon.

Disappointed, we are almost back at the Intercon, when the taxi driver
enters into the spirit of the search, and says that he knows of a
possible beauty parlour right here.

We stop outside a nondescript house, climb through a door in the wall
and walk up a path and around a corner.

A man opens the front door and, after the translator explains what we
want, he unleashes his family of six beautiful women, like Afghan
goddesses.  They are tall and dark-haired, with bright faces and
welcoming smiles.  They are thrilled to be interviewed as they operated
a secret beauty parlour throughout Taliban times.  We sit in a room
empty except for a dressing table and a chair.  This is clearly where
business is conducted.  They too have not heard of facials, and I never
really succeed in explaining the concept.

"Face cream?"  they ask, puzzled.  But they did do make-up and, of
course, hair.

The middle sister, Massouda, is the hairdresser.  She has a long face,
clever almond-shaped eyes and is startlingly lovely.  There are no
clients here at the moment for me to interview, but I am so taken with
Massouda that I decide to let her colour my hair, just to see what the
experience will be like and for the chance to talk to women in this
most ordinary, non-political context.  She looks at my hair.  Yes, she
can match the colour.  If I come back tomorrow she will have some dye.
Where will she find it?  In the markets, she knows where.  I agree to
return tomorrow at 3 p.m. and her fourteen-year-old brother who speaks
some English will be my translator.  She gives me a radiant smile as we
depart.

When I return the following day, the five girls crowd around as
Massouda shows me the hair colour she has purchased.  During the night
I was wondering if this impulsive idea was such a good one how far do
you have to go for a story after all?  At home I am very particular
about which hairdresser I choose, but Kabul changes the rules for
everything.  Here it seems to be enough that the colour is made by
L'Oreal, although the instructions are in German, which neither
Massouda nor I can speak.

How bad can it be?

Massouda sits me in the chair in front of the mirror.  Her sisters and
mother sit on a bench nearby while she colours my hair with this home
colour kit.  I could have done it myself really, and so could the other
women who come here.  But I suspect that there is something about the
conversation and the time out of your day, and the pleasure of having
someone else attend to you that is as irresistible here as it is in the
West.  Even if the Taliban will punish you if they find out.

The electricity dies suddenly, a frequent occurrence in Kabul.  It's
quite dark inside, but Massouda is careful and professional.  We are
soon all discussing our personal lives, with everything translated by
the fourteen-year-old brother, the only boy in this bevy of girls.

Massouda is twenty-four and she is not married.  I say that seems very
old to remain single in a place where girls are married at fifteen. How
did she manage it?

"I simply told my father that I didn't want to."

We all laugh.  In fact, of the five girls aged between seventeen and
thirty, only the oldest is married.  There is much giggling when I tell
them that their father must be desperate by now.

"And you why are you not married?"  they ask me.

I tell Massouda that I simply didn't want to either; only in my society
I have a bit more freedom to act on my decisions.

"But you are so beautiful, you should be married," Massouda says.  Her
brother translates earnestly.

"No, no, you are so beautiful you should be married," I reply, to peals
of laughter from all the sisters.

Two of Massouda's sisters were at university, but the arrival of the
Taliban meant the end of their studies.  One was studying medicine and
she now seems sad, as if life has passed her by.

"You could go back to university, the faculty of medicine is being
reopened to women," I suggest.

"No, I can't, my studying days are behind me.  I don't have enough
memory to keep learning."

Even though it is Ramadan, they bring me tea and sweets and oranges. It
is only by strenuously protesting that I stop them from cooking me a
meal while they are fasting.  I ask Massouda how she started doing this
work, and she tells me that initially she did it for her friends and
then it became a business.

"Then other women came to see me, secretly, as this was forbidden by
the Taliban.  It was dangerous for women if the religious police found
out."

I tell her that in the West this is incomprehensible, and she looks
down, serious for the first time since I have met her.

"Yes, here too."

When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, they shut down beauty, hair and
make-up parlours, and women's bath houses the only place where hot
water was available.  So many small cruelties.  Tailors were ordered
not to measure women for clothes.  They learnt to keep their customers'
measurements in their heads.  You couldn't get fatter or more likely
here -thinner.  And tailors couldn't measure new customers a woman
couldn't bring along her fifteen-year-old daughter for new clothes for
the first time.  Even fashion magazines were destroyed.

The Taliban prohibited the painted faces and hair that are so much a
part of female culture throughout the Islamic world.  These were deemed
to be un islamic and bands of armed zealots patrolled the streets to
punish any women they caught breaking these rules.

Sometimes women would meet in secret and put on makeup for themselves,
for each other, and then wash it off before they went home, so that
they would not be beaten by the religious police.  In this warm room,
with these lovely, happy women, that image makes me want to weep.

Massouda pauses.

"You know, I wanted to be a journalist like you."

I offer her my career advice.

"You should try to learn some English, like your brother and maybe some
computer skills.  If you get a chance to do a computer course at an aid
agency you should grab it.  That is the future."

They are as fascinated with me and my life as I am with them.  There is
lots of laughter, and I enjoy this very warm, very female exchange.

"Will you come to have dinner with us?  What present can we get for
you?"  they ask me.

I tell them that I don't want any presents, but I would like to come
and have dinner.  As we plan the most convenient time for them, taking
into account the daily Ramadan fast, it occurs to me that the NBC guys
might like to meet this family of amazing women.

"Could I bring a male friend with me to dinner or would it be more
difficult for you?"  I ask.  Saturday afternoon, blowing himself up
and killing two other prisoners and General Dostum's police chief,
Nadir All.  A second prisoner, detonating another hidden grenade, kills
a senior Hazara commander.  Despite these two attacks, the Northern
Alliance guards are not reinforced.

Sunday 25 November is a big news day.

"The marines are now on a piece of Afghanistan," the US announces,
having landed 1500 troops in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.  The
marines are ferried in by helicopter to a base just outside Kandahar,
on a hunting lodge owned by a Saudi prince.  Their first task is to
secure the base and to set up landing lights so that fixed-wing
aircraft with more troops and equipment can land.

This is an incredibly bold move, taking it right up to the Taliban.  It
appears Washington doesn't trust the predominantly Tajik Northern
Alliance in the Pashtun south, especially for the job of hunting down
Osama bin Laden.

As we are busy reporting and analysing this new phase of the war, there
are the first reports of a riot in Mazar.  It erupts when the foreign
fighters are brought in for interrogation at the Qala-i-Janghi fort.

The prisoners fear they are about to be shot, apparently because they
are being tied up.  Some 250 prisoners are bound by their guards,
before the rest rebel.  The second problem is the presence of two TV
crews.  The prisoners believe that the two crews, from Reuters and
Germany' sARD are soldiers, there to film their execution.

The riot starts among prisoners being interrogated by two CIA
operatives.  One is known to be thirty-two-year-old Johnny Spann, one
of the agents active in Afghanistan since the war's beginning.  The
other is known by his code name, Dave.  The two CIA agents are in an
open area outside the cells.  A group of prisoners is brought to meet
them.  The agents want to know where the prisoners are from and whether
they have any links to al-Qaeda.  The prisoners crowd around them.

"Why are you here?"  Spann asks.

"To kill you," comes the reply as one lunges at him.

Spann draws his pistol and shoots the man dead.  The second agent
shoots another Taliban soldier, then grabs an AK-47 from an Alliance
guard and opens fire.  According to eyewitness accounts given to one of
the German TV team, the Taliban fighters wrestle Spann to the ground,
kicking and beating him.  Spann kills two more with his pistol before
he disappears under the crush.

The Taliban soldiers then overpower the Alliance guards, killing them
with their own weapons.  The second agent, Dave, kills three more men,
and then sprints to the main building along the north wall, where two
Red Cross workers are meeting with the prison governor.

"He burst in and told us to get out of there," says Simon Brooks, a Red
Cross staff member.

"He was really shaken up.  He said there were twenty dead Northern
Alliance guys, and the Taliban were taking control of the fort."

Dave stays behind to try to rescue Spann, while the two Red Cross
workers climb up to the fort's parapet, hoist themselves over the wall
and slide twenty metres down the other side.  The TV crews run to find
Dave, and are pinned down in the ensuing firefight.  Dave uses a
satellite phone belonging to a German TV journalist to call the US
embassy in Uzbekistan and ask for reinforcements to storm the prison.
This phone call is filmed by the German crew, and when it is seen in
Germany, it causes a storm of protest.  The journalist is accused of
'crossing the line' from observer of the war to participant, a notion
that I find ludicrous, for when your life is at risk you will do
whatever you can to save it including call in the marines.

In the prison block, the Taliban free their comrades.  They overcome
the guards at the fort's weapons store, and clear out Dostum's arsenal
of Kalashnikovs, grenades, mines, rocket launchers, mortars and
ammunition.  Now they are armed -and cornered.  Bitter fighting with
the Northern Alliance troops inside the fortress begins.

Two Northern Alliance tanks start firing into the Taliban area.  The
first international reinforcements arrive: around fifteen American and
British Special Forces officers, based at the airport just outside the
fort.  They begin an assault.

An American officer in a Harley-Davidson cap and mirrored sunglasses
raises Dave on the radio.  Time magazine's Alex Perry is with him.

"Shit..  . shit..  . okay .. . Shit... okay.  Hold on, buddy, we're
coming to get you," the officer tells Dave.  After explaining the
crisis to his commander, he points to the sky and says, "Tell those
guys to stop scratching their balls and fly."

That night, American bombers pound the fort.  A siege begins.  After
seven air strikes the British SAS commander re-establishes contact with
Dave, still penned in with the TV crews.  They are filming everything
that happens.  Dave has established that Johnny Spann is dead the first
American to die in combat in Afghanistan.  Later during the night, Dave
and the journalists escape over the north wall, bullets whizzing past
them as they climb down.  Their footage goes all around the world.

The American and British teams stay in position over night.  Northern
Alliance soldiers work with the Americans to pinpoint missiles into the
fort.  Fighting is constant.  Throughout the three-day siege at least
thirty bombing attacks are carried out by US warplanes and helicopter
gunships.

On Monday morning, an American bomb goes astray, hitting a Northern
Alliance position on the castle's outer wall.  At least six soldiers
are killed.  Several American officers are also badly injured.

The air strikes continue all day.  By nightfall, it seems that the
number of surviving prisoners has fallen to around 100.  An American
soldier checks his night-vision goggles, and tells Time magazine, "You
don't want to leave here tonight, there's going to be quite a show."
The soldier uses a reporter's satellite phone to call his wife and tell
her he might be on the TV news.

"Tape it all day, will you?  Okay.  Love you, babe."

Explosions sound through the night.  The blasts blow open doors fifteen
kilometres away.  A Taliban fighter who escapes is caught by local
residents and hanged from a tree.

Early on Tuesday 27 November, the Northern Alliance estimates there are
only about fifty survivors from the original 500 or so in the fort, and
that they have no water or ammunition left.  Their only food is horse
meat from Dostum's cavalry.

Trucks carrying 200 Northern Alliance troops arrive at the fortress, as
US warplanes circle above.  American and British Special Forces troops
position themselves along the parapets, and around 100 Northern
Alliance soldiers scale the south-west tower, firing on the Taliban
below.

According to one report, Northern Alliance soldiers go room to room,
killing anyone left alive, including the wounded, and firing bullets
and rockets into corpses.  The fighting ends Tuesday afternoon but the
mopping up goes on for days.  The dismembered corpses of hundreds of
prisoners are strewn among rubble and dead horses, with buildings
burning in the background.  This battle in the War Against Terror a new
type of war ends with these age-old images, and with the blood of men
and horses mingling in the dust.

Reporters enter the fort from Wednesday.  They are shocked by these
images, but find the local soldiers unrepentant.

"We don't think the Pakistanis should have come here.  We would be
delighted if America dropped its bombs on Pakistan next," a policeman
tells a British reporter.

"If we had allowed the Taliban to surrender they would simply have
started fighting again.  We had no alternative but to kill them."

The policeman is asked whether those who had their hands tied behind
their backs were shot before they had been able to take cover.

"Many of them were concealing grenades.  They could explode them and
kill us.  We are sorry that they were killed, because they were
Muslims.  But you also have to remember that they were terrorists."

The Northern Alliance assesses that it has lost forty men in the
battle, including three top commanders.  Another 200 have been
wounded.

"I'm very upset that my commanders have been killed," says General
Dostum.

"They all had children and families.  We tried to treat the Taliban
humanely.  We gave them a chance to wash and to pray.  But they
attacked us.  We could have tied their hands and legs but we didn't."

Rashid Dostum was away, supervising the surrender at Kunduz, but he
denies his forces ill-treated the foreign POWs.  He is already under
investigation for the battle earlier this month when Mazar-i-Sharif
fell, where it's alleged that Pakistani fighters were massacred.
Reports are also surfacing of his troops mistreating captured Taliban
soldiers in Kunduz after the siege ended, closing them in containers
without air and water for transport to prison in Sheberghan.  It's
alleged that hundreds may have died.  General Dostum denies all the
allegations.

At the ruined fort, Northern Alliance soldiers start looting.  They
take guns and ammunition and search the pockets of the dead for money.
But it is the Taliban's new-looking sneakers that prove the biggest
draw.  Within minutes, the Northern Alliance fighters are throwing away
their shoes and yanking the sneakers off the Taliban dead.

They have to be careful many bodies are booby-trapped, including that
of CIA agent Johnny Spann.

As late as Thursday, those removing bodies are still being shot at by
Taliban fighters who have survived in the basements beneath the fort.
First burning petrol is poured down into the basement to try to smoke
out the survivors, then on Saturday it is flooded with freezing water.
The stench of rotting human flesh at the entrance to the basement makes
it almost impossible to breathe, and no more than five or six Taliban
are thought to be alive inside.  But eighty-six prisoners emerge,
filthy, hungry, their faces black with smoke.  They are given clothing
and food bananas, apples and pomegranates and loaded onto trucks for
removal to Sheberghan prison.

One of the prisoners says he's an American.  The twenty-year-old, who
has been wounded in the leg, does not give his name but says he is a
convert to Islam from Washington.  He spent time at a madrasa in
Pakistan, and then came to Afghanistan to help the Taliban build a
perfect Islamic government.

He turns out to be John Walker Lindh.  He is dubbed the American
Taliban, and charged with treason for his role in this conflict.

The US quickly finds itself on the defensive for its role in the Mazar
fort siege.  Kenton Keith, chief US spokesman, says at his daily press
briefing in Islamabad, "We are sorry that so many people did die in
Mazar-i-Sharif."  He insists the bombing was 'not a massacre, not a
reprisal .. . What happened in Mazar-i-Sharif was a pitched battle'.

However, this response fails to satisfy human rights groups who believe
the US may have breached international law by bombing the Taliban
forces, many of whom were tied up and unable to move.  Keith says that
when the Taliban soldiers stole weapons inside the fort, their status
changed from prisoners back into combatants.  Human rights lawyers say
any response to an armed revolt by prisoners of war should be
proportionate.

Amnesty International calls for a full investigation, a request
endorsed by UN HCR  These calls are ignored, but then earlier UN
inquiries into massacres in the same place didn't make a blind bit of
difference.  In 1997 some 2000 Taliban prisoners were murdered in
Mazar, including the 1250 men left to bake to death in containers.  In
1998 when the Taliban retook Mazar, they retaliated by massacring some
6000 people, including civilians.  There were investigations by various
human rights organisations, and at least we have a better idea of what
happened, but these investigations never prevent the next massacre.

That's why I have little faith in the efficacy of UN inquiries, and I
fear I've also been brutalised by this place into thinking it's kill or
be killed.  From my vantage point here, it seems that if you don't
massacre the troops in the fortress, they will massacre you.  Given the
bloody history of the past five years in Mazar-i-Sharif, is any other
outcome likely?

After all these brutal events, I feel I need some inspiration.  I find
it unexpectedly doing a story on land mines.

The Italian aid agency hospital is like no other in Kabul.  It's in a
compound in the centre of town, visible from far away because of the
huge 'no guns' mural painted on its wall a gun with a line through it
like a no-smoking sign.  Inside is a series of low buildings painted
white.  Clean, spacious, well-stocked wards surround gardens with roses
and a children's playground.  It is neat and peaceful and utterly
unexpected.  It's a world-class facility, providing free food, medicine
and treatment for all emergency patients, from war injuries to car
crashes.

When all the major international aid agencies were leaving Afghanistan
on 12 September, one was negotiating to return Emergency, the Italian
medical aid agency which treats victims of war.  Over the past seven
years Emergency has founded hospitals in Cambodia, Sierra Leone and
northern Iraq, but nowhere was it more difficult to set up a hospital
than in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Surgeon Gino Strada established Emergency in 1994, along with three
colleagues.  He is Director of the aid agency, and a working surgeon,
and I catch him between operating lists.  Strada is an outspoken man in
his fifties, with a wild shock of silver-grey hair.  He is feisty and
funny and reminds me of a bird of prey.  Walking out of theatre in his
green surgical uniform, he looks for a cigarette.  I tell him I am
stunned by his hospital, I've seen nothing like it anywhere in
Afghanistan.

"It shouldn't be a surprise.  It should be like this all the time," he
says in his musically accented English.

"If you come to the third world, or so called third world, you cannot
come here and provide third-world services.  Then you better stay home.
If I consider this hospital is not good enough for my daughter or my
sister, then this hospital is not good enough for the Afghans, who have
the same rights as my daughter or my sister."

The chain-smoking Gino Strada is a breath of fresh air.

"I think this type of hospital is a different sign that you throw into
this shuttered society.  It's a place where you can slowly start to
rebuild human relationships.  It is quite strange, but the overall
atmosphere in this hospital is quite joyful, which shows that every
time you treat people with kindness and dignity, every kind of dialogue
is possible, there are no more enemies.  We have civilians here side by
side with Mujaheddin and Taliban and if we learn how to communicate and
how to look each other in the eye, in the end there will be no need for
Kalashnikovs, or B-52s."

He gives me a piercing stare.  Since setting up Emergency, Gino Strada
has become a cult figure in Italy.

"Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi attacked me in the Senate after I
debated him on the television," he chortles.  It is like watching an
eagle laugh.

Gino Strada is a hero for our times, direct, passionate and
world-weary.  He has spent five out of the past ten years in
Afghanistan, risking his life in a war zone, in order to save the lives
of victims of war.  I am finding three months here gruelling.  Five
years would be unimaginably demanding, even with the spectacular
Italian pasta feasts which he and colleague Dr.  Marco Garatti are
renowned for cooking.

Strada had previously worked for the Red Cross until it wound back its
provision of this type of surgery.

"We felt there was a big black hole for war victims, that there was no
speciali sed agency geared towards treating them."

Initially in 1994 a dinner with 150 friends in a restaurant in Milan
funded a team and equipment to go to Rwanda.  The genocide was at its
height.  They arrived in the shattered capital Kigali and reopened the
surgery and maternity wards.

"During the day it was okay, there was a hole in the roof, and that let
in enough light to allow us to operate.  But at night Rwandan boys had
to hold up torches, powered by car batteries.  There was no water, no
electricity, no nothing," says Dr.  Gino, as he prefers to be called,
in the Afghan fashion.

"We saw Rwanda at its worst.  But the plus side was that we got
fantastic coverage, and US$300,000 came in, and the organisation was
really born.  Today we have eighty-five groups in Italian cities and
50,000 regular subscribers.  It's a big cultural movement."  Dr.  Gino
looks satisfied.

"We've treated 210,000 people worldwide."

Here in Kabul this November, despite the heavy US air strikes, most of
the patients being treated at the Emergency hospital are mine victims
and most are children.

"We had fifteen mine injuries here and twenty to twenty-five in our
hospital in the Panjshir, so that's more than one a day," says Dr.
Gino.

I follow him into the I.C.U ward.  Intensive care here has none of the
sophisticated machinery of such wards in the West.  Instead,
monitoring- is delivered via round-the-clock nursing.  Dr.  Gino says
studies have found the health outcomes in this simpler form of I.C.U
are much the same, for a fraction of the cost, making it ideally suited
to conditions in the developing world.  The nurses in the ward are all
Afghans.  Three children and one adult are patients in the ward.  The
adult was injured in a car crash.  All three children stepped on land
mines.  Dr.  Gino checks on the patients, and sends me on my own to the
children's ward across the way.

There are ten patients all land-mine victims, too.  Most are too sick
to talk.  The nurse takes me from bed to bed.

"This boy is nine years old.  He is from Kabul he has a fractured left
leg and right hand.  This boy in the next bed is simpler form is eight
years old.  He was admitted on the same day."  He consults the chart.

"They played together.  He has a fractured pelvis and has lost his
right foot."

The litany of injury continues.  The children look small and vulnerable
in their beds, their truncated limbs wrapped in bandages, and I find
myself unable to meet the eyes of the mothers sitting by their sides.

Hamed is the oldest child in the ward.  Even though he is fifteen he
couldn't resist picking up a brightly coloured object on the ground
near his home and trying to open it.  It blew up in his hands.  He lost
fingers on both hands, his arm is fractured and he has wounds in his
leg.

"I stood and fell and stood and fell three times," he says, 'and then
they brought me to this hospital.  I try not to think about my lost
fingers there's no point thinking about things you have lost."

But that's not an option for Gino Strada.  When I return the next day
he has failed to save another child who stepped on a land mine when
playing near his home.  The nine-year-old boy was one of the patients I
had seen in the I.C.U ward.  He died despite a lengthy operation.  I
catch Dr.  Gino outside afterwards, smoking, looking defeated and angry
at the same time.

"How do I feel?  I feel like I always do when a child dies, and for
what, for nothing."  He exhales smoke.

"Dr.  Marco and I have operated on thousands of land-mine victims,
thousands, and I can hardly remember three or four combatants."  He
gives a derisory snort.

"All the rest are civilians."

"It's not a weapon, it's a form of terrorism against the civilian
population.  People are maimed or killed today by land mines which were
laid months or even years ago.  The problem with land mines is that
they don't discriminate, they don't have a target, they are just thrown
like this' he mimes the action 'in the fields, knowing that nine out of
ten of the people who will be affected will be civilians, and probably
a child, stepping on them."

Land mines have taken a terrible toll here.  Since 1979, 400,000 people
have been killed, and another 400,000 injured.  If no more are added
from today, it is estimated that it will take fifty years to clear the
country of mines.  Crossing into Afghanistan from Iran, a sign warns
visitors about strange looking items: "Every twenty-four hours seven
people step on mines in Afghanistan.  Be careful not to be one of them
today and tomorrow."  A Canadian charity that came to defuse mines
found the tragedy simply too vast, lost hope and went home.

Gino Strada looks out over the rose bushes to the small memorial to a
kindergarten that was on this site.  It was destroyed in a rocket
attack in 1994 during the civil war.  Now there is a doll's house, some
broken playground equipment and some other shattered relics of the
child care centre, and a small sign telling you what you are looking at
and how many children died here.

"You can do what you like with peace agreements," Dr.  Gino says
bleakly, 'but if you have ten million land mines on the ground, they
will kill or maim hundreds of thousands of people, regardless of
whether the country is at war or at peace."

I follow him under a covered walkway.  There is a crack in the path.

"This is new.  It's a result of the air strikes.  Of course, we didn't
expect such mammoth bombing when we designed this," Dr.  Gino says
dryly.

We go to the laundry, peeking through a curtain of green sails,
hospital bedding hanging out to dry.  Fifteen widows are working here,
washing and ironing.  They crowd around to show me that they are
washing sheets and surgeon's gowns by hand.

"Machine nay', they explain, but despite the difficult work these jobs
are highly sought after.  Emergency hospitals give priority of
employment for non-medical positions to the handicapped, poor widows
and mine victims.

"There are six million refugees, one million maimed and even more dead
over the past twenty years.  I am not aware of one family that has not
been touched by the war," says Gino Strada.

Jonathan stands on the balcony outside my room at dusk, during a break
in our filing schedules.  The mountains are turning from brown to pink
in the sunset, and the streetlights are just coming on.

"These are the city's skyscrapers," he says, with his New York
perspective.  We look at the houses scattered all the way up the
nearest mountain face, a few teetering above the rest.  How do the
people get up there, where there are no roads?  And how did they build
them?  Perhaps it is a festival as there are small bonfires all the
way up the mountain and in the surrounding streets.  People are burning
pine cones.  The fires and smoke add to the otherworldly atmosphere.

"We're in Kabul," we say in disbelief, after all this time.

Jonathan has spent the day at the Ghazi sports stadium.  Its
refurbishment was paid for by the United Nations when the Taliban
lifted their ban on football in 1997.  But no aid agency workers were
invited to the inauguration.  No football match was scheduled.  Instead
it was used for public executions.  Now it is once again to be used for
sport.

Jonathan says there is still blood on the concrete wall at the entrance
to the stadium.

"The blood has handprints in it, as if someone was being dragged along,
and tried to hold onto the wall."

Most of the executions were by shooting and there are shells on the
grass.  He says he looked under the stadium, too, where there are
rooms.  Their windows had been smashed, and he could peer in through
the broken shards.  He saw interrogation rooms, with chairs and
hospital beds with ropes tied to them.

"I couldn't get the image out of my mind, of women tied to those beds
and accused of being whores, and being beaten till they confessed.  And
do you know the most chilling thing?  Outside, the Olympic rings are
still there, still intact, from when the UN built it."

To cheer him up, I show him bin Laden's birdcage.  He laughs.

"That's a great idea.  And when you get sick of it, you can make some
money selling it on E-Bay."

E-Bay is too much of a visitation from a different world for me to
comprehend here.

The anthrax documents Chris Stephen found at the chemical weapons plant
have the same effect on Jonathan.  He is spooked as he sits on my bed
reading them.

"Have you read these?  This is terrible.  Do you think they are the
source of the anthrax attacks in the States?"

I'm lying on the floor, writing a news report by hand in my battered
blue exercise book.  I often do this since my laptop has never really
recovered from the dust of Khoja Bahauddin.  For quick radio news
reports, I don't bother to plug in.  Adriana is editing a TV news story
with Alberto, on our only table.  I look up at the crowded, messy room
and think how much this demanding environment is sweetened by
friendships with people who care about you.  Newfound friends. Adriana.
Barbara.  Jonathan.  I don't know if I could have survived so long
without this sense of connection.  Freelance, but not alone.

Maybe being here on my own forces me to reach out to people in a
different way than I ever had to when I worked within a large
organisation, with my own cameraman and producer.

We climb the stairs to the roof to file.  One journalist has set up an
outdoor office with a table, a chair and a light bulb shielded by an
upside down red bucket.  It gives his cold eyrie a slightly seedy,
romantic air.  Rick's cafe on a freezing concrete roof.

After I've fed my report, I climb between the satellite dishes and TV
cameras to the NBC spot.  Jonathan, Tom and I look out over the city,
with the lights of Kabul shimmering below in the cold black night, and
a carpet of stars above.  We are comparing the gleaming night sky here,
in the lower reaches of the Hindu Kush, with the stars above Khoja
Bahauddin.  It's what passes for entertainment when you're waiting for
a 2 a.m. live shot.

Life is simpler here.  I haven't seen a magazine or a movie in two
months if you don't count the Mujaheddin victory flick when it was
showing for the first time, which I don't.  There's no TV, no videos,
no gym.  There's Coke from Iran but no ice.  No worries about
'administrivia' either have I paid my mobile phone bill, do I need to
move house, has the car insurance lapsed?

But soon it may be time to go back to the real world, with its
sophistication and its problems, and to say goodbye to Kabul, and its
gleaming sky, carpeted with stars.  21 We work until the last moment
before we leave.  Russia is returning to Afghanistan, a little over a
decade after its army was chased out by the Mujaheddin in the Soviet
Union's most crushing military defeat.  This is a moment in history I
never thought I would see.  Perhaps it is no more stunning than some of
the other volte-faces that September 11 has wrought, but standing here
in Kabul it seems literally incredible.

I go to the former Soviet embassy compound in the centre of Kabul.  It
is a vast complex with a series of more than ten tower blocks, as well
as other communal buildings, all utterly wrecked.  It sits on a former
front line, not far from the zoo.  Though almost every building is
destroyed, it is teeming with people.  The families dispossessed from
the Shomali plains have been squatting here for three years, ever since
the Taliban set their farms and villages alight, burning them to the
ground.  An estimated 20,000 people live here in unspeakable
conditions.  The ruined tower blocks are filthy, overcrowded and
desperate.  It goes without saying that the compound has no
electricity, but it also has no water or sanitation.  International aid
agencies deliver water.  We see the truck drive in, and people lining
up with plastic containers to collect their water rations.

The only areas that haven't been destroyed are two empty patches of
concrete ground, which were once a large basketball court and an
amphitheatre for outdoor films.  For rigidly protected Russian embassy
staff, this was probably the extent of entertainment in Kabul.  Ah, the
glories of Soviet diplomatic life.

It seems that Moscow wants to reclaim this compound, though God knows
why it would probably be better to nuke it and start again than attempt
any repair job.  But yesterday Russian officials came and held a
meeting in the former school building to tell people to leave.

"But we have no place to go.  The Taliban burnt our houses," says a
twenty-five-year-old father of four.

"Last year when one of our neighbours died we returned to our village
at Karabach in the Shomali plains.  We wanted to bury him near his
home, but there is nothing there, every building has been destroyed,
there is not even water, we had to bring water from Kabul for our
stay."

Sixty-five-year-old Wallamschi has grey hair, broken teeth and a filthy
turban.  He is one of the men crowding around me, and his story of
dispossession is typical.  At 3 a.m. one autumn day three years ago,
Taliban rockets started raining down on Karabach.  Within hours the
village's 2000 people left, abandoning crops ripe for harvest.  Most
walked to the nearest village.  They walked through the night.

"The women were crying, the children were cold and hungry.  We'll never
forget that night."

The following day the Taliban bombed that village, too, forcing the
refugees to flee again until they slowly made their way south to
Kabul.

"Now the Russians just say to us "Please leave here" and we say we are
not ready, we have nowhere to go," Wallamschi says.

"Did they offer you somewhere else?"

"No and we remember them from twelve years ago.  They did nothing for
us then.  They are non-Muslims, and we don't accept them coming back to
Afghanistan."

Wallamschi wants to go back to the Shomali plains to rebuild his home
in his village.  When I ask him and the others their reaction to the
Russian edict, they say they are surprised, "But what can we do?"  The
idea that they are citizens with rights who cannot just be uprooted by
the returning Russians, in the same way they were originally uprooted
by the Taliban, has not penetrated here.

I am pleased when I learn that one of their leaders has gone to see the
Minister for Immigration in the new interim administration.  Perhaps
the rules will change.  Perhaps we are witnessing the embryonic
beginnings of civic awareness and a negotiation process that will allow
the people to return to their villages when help is available to
rebuild them, and the Russians to repossess their compound without
further dispossessing thousands of disadvantaged people.

At the end of November, leading al-Qaeda figure Ahmed Abdul Rahman is
captured.  He is a son of the blind Egyptian cleric said to have
inspired the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and a mentor to
Osama bin Laden.  Washington says its bombs have killed six out of the
top thirty-five al-Qaeda leaders almost twenty per cent of the
leadership.

But Osama bin Laden remains at large.  When the CIA sent in its first
agent, Gary, six weeks ago, he had two assignments: to talk the
Northern Alliance into supporting the United States, and to capture and
kill bin Laden.  According to American journalist Bob Woodward, the
head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre told Gary he wanted bin
Laden's head in a box, so that he could take it and show it to the
President.

"Well, that couldn't be any clearer," was Gary's reply.

The failure to capture Osama bin Laden hangs over America's military
operation.  Now, in late November, there are reports that he has been
sighted in the mountains near Tora Bora.

"Yeah, he was seen saying where the fuck's my birdcage?"  says
Jonathan.

We check on the map to see where Tora Bora is.  It sounds like
something out of the musical South Pacific, but we locate it in the
east of Afghanistan.  Tora Bora is in the White Mountains above
Jalalabad, in the Nangarhar province, where Abdul Haq was ambushed. I'm
trying to decide if I should go there or go home.

When it becomes apparent that the Taliban will soon surrender Kandahar,
Jonathan says I should go there instead.  Tom and I look at him in
disbelief.

"You?  You telling me I should go to Kandahar?  You didn't want me to
go over the Hindu Kush.  What's come over you?"

"Yeah man, what's come over you?"  Tom looks interested.

"I think she'd never forgive herself if she didn't go."  We investigate
the possibilities of reaching Kandahar.  At this stage, the road from
Kabul is considered too dangerous.  It's safer and easier to get in
from Pakistan.  The town of Quetta just on the Pakistani side of the
border is actually closer to Kandahar than we are, which means less
distance travelling inside Afghanistan.  And then a rookie journalist
who goes in from Quetta is captured, kyboshing these plans.  The first
reports (later dispelled) suggest that he has been sodomised by his
Taliban captors.  We look at each other, frozen in horror, make some
half-hearted black jokes, and decide to put off our trip to Kandahar
for the moment.

Ever since we woke up to the bomb in our kitchen on our first morning
here, I've been interested in the work of the UN Mine Action Program,
one of the first international agencies to return to Kabul following
the collapse of the Taliban.

Deputy Director Ross Chamberlain is in charge of its most urgent task:
locating and defusing the bombs that did not explode during the US air
strikes.  He has surveyed about ten sites so far.

It seems I'm not the only one interested in this story.  The UN has had
so many requests for interviews that Ross takes about forty journalists
in a group to the three safest sites.

We stop in front of a house in the city centre that has been reduced to
rubble.  Outside soldiers have piled up all the hardware that was found
in the wreckage, including anti-tank weaponry and machine guns.
Although this is a civilian suburb, Washington claims these weapons are
proof it was a legitimate target a Taliban commander's home with an
enormous quantity of arms.  The next-door house wasn't hit but was
abandoned on 12 November by fleeing Taliban commanders.  It has an
arsenal in the basement, a room five metres by seven metres stocked
floor to ceiling with weapons Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade
launchers, missiles.  Boxes and boxes of grenades and ammunition.  A
Northern Alliance soldier stands guard over the booty.

"One of the major reasons we brought you here is to show you this
target.  If you look behind you there is a hospital, so they had to be
spot on to hit this because if they got it wrong there was going to be
a big problem," says Ross Chamberlain.

"So we brought you here just to see that they did this one right."

The 500-pound bomb accurately hit a building only hundreds of metres
from Kabul Children's Hospital.  I think of the children I saw there,
including malnourished five-year-old Shakrilljah, the size of a Western
toddler, and Mohammed Salem who lost a leg in the bombing and will
never again run with the other boys, and don't even want to calculate
the 'what ifs'.

The bombs have a computer guidance system on the front directing them
to their targets.  But Ross Chamberlain says that in the city of Kabul
many of the bombs went astray.

"There are more bad sites here in Kabul than good sites," he says.

"Outside of Kabul they probably hit what they meant to, but there are a
few errant bombs in Kabul."

He estimates that thirty civilians lost their lives.

"It's thirty too many, but it's not a great number."

One of the bombs fell far from its intended target of a military post
on a hill in Kabul's north.  Instead it hit a home down the hill in
Kabul's equivalent of tenements, housing the city's poor.  There is now
nothing but rubble where a home once stood.  Eight people died here.

A woman stands in the rubble wailing.  Forty-three-year-old Arifa lost
her husband and seven-year-old son that night, along with six members
of her extended family: her husband's second wife and their five
daughters.

"What should I think about America now?"  says Arifa.

"My husband hoped that following the air strikes we would lead a
peaceful life.  Now he is dead and there is no one to support me or my
remaining children."

She stands with tears coursing down her cheeks, and then, as if she has
suddenly become aware of us, she pulls her veil over her face and sobs
uncontrollably.

Though the site appears to be completely destroyed, the Mine Action
Program is checking in the rubble for any unexploded bombs, to ensure
there will be no further casualties when people start rebuilding.  If
Ross Chamberlain locates any more bombs, he has to quickly co-ordinate
their safe removal.

Four bombs have to be defused as a matter of urgency, two at the
airport, and two within the city.  One bomb has buried itself under the
runway at Bagram air base and until it's defused, the airport cannot be
reopened.  Peter Le Soeuer is a consultant working with the Mine
Agency.  He says it is a particularly complex and difficult job.

"It's deep, and it's twisted, and it could take about two weeks to do.
We hope that we can locate it and destroy it so that they can repair
that section of the runway and get the airport operational as soon as
possible."

One of the urgent jobs is in a residential district of Kabul.  At a
press conference Ross explains it was one of three dropped in a line
targeting Taliban commanders' homes.  But the computer guidance units
in the bombs appear to have failed, and all three went astray.  One
bomb destroyed a vehicle, another levelled a shop across the road from
a Taliban commander's house and a third landed in the kitchen of a
house owned by an Afghan businessman, where it failed to explode.  As
he's talking I realise he means 'our' bomb, in the NBC house, and it
makes me a little queasy to realise it is one of Ross Chamberlain's
most urgent tasks.  It has proved more difficult to remove than was
expected, which is why it hasn't been defused until now.

The owner of the house is less perturbed.  The UN sealed off the
premises after NBC left, but the owner has been letting TV crews in to
film the bomb ... for a US$100 fee.  He tells everyone we knew all
about the bomb when we rented the house, whatever we might pretend now.
They pay their hundred bucks, get their shots and get out as quick as
they can.

It's funny to stand in that street again, outside the house with the
bomb in its kitchen, being interviewed by my colleagues, responding to
the standard journalistic question "How did you feel?"  The boy selling
balloons is at the other end of the street.  I haven't seen him since
our first day here.  His balloons gleam pastel in the wintry sun, like
lollipops.  I watch him, feeling carefree, as Ross Chamberlain explains
the difficulties involved in defusing our bomb.

"The bad news about this bomb is it turned itself over in the air and
it's gone through the roof tail first, so the tail, where the fuse is,
is in the ground and we have the head, the pointy end of the bomb,
sticking out of the ground.  So what we are going to have to do is get
the bomb out of the ground and get the fuse out," he says.

"There are going to be a lot of people down here with a lot of
sandbags, protecting everything around here, and then we go inside and
cut the bomb out from the ground."

He gives a slightly manic bomb defuser's laugh, and I suddenly realise
that Ross has always reminded me of a laid-back Australian Jack
Nicholson.

Soon the process is completed.  This is one story we've seen all the
way through.  Everyone is kept well away when the bomb is cut out of
the kitchen floor.  But once this delicate manoeuvre is completed the
bomb is deemed too dangerous to remove to a safe detonation spot, and
it's detonated right here.  The explosion is massive, shaking the
entire street.  I'm sure the boom can be heard on the other side of
Kabul.  The size of the explosion even surprises the professionals.

When this task is finished, the UN agency can go back to its main job,
clearing Afghanistan of the ten million land mines which contaminate
this country.

I go back to the Emergency hospital to finish my story on land mines.
When I listen to Dr.  Gino Strada, I am amazed at how hard you have to
work to give away money.  From 1999 Dr.  Gino has been here setting up
two hospitals, one in the Panjshir, and this one in Kabul.  This
facility was completed in November 2000, and then sat idle for five
months while the Taliban refused to grant permission for it to open.
The US$750,000 hospital, with US$1 million allocated and available for
running costs, couldn't treat patients while Gino was negotiating with
the Taliban over his right to run it independently.  Gino was a tough
negotiator and found himself paying the price.

"They wanted to run the hospital, to appoint the staff None of this was
acceptable.  It took two to three months' negotiations before it opened
in April, only for it to be shut down in May after armed aggression by
the religious police of the Taliban.  They climbed the walls armed with
Kalashnikovs, and came in beating staff, national and international,
arresting staff."

His colleague, the softly spoken surgeon Dr.  Marco Garatti was here on
the night.

"It was very frightening.  They were beating staff for about an hour, I
think.  We couldn't get them out, they left when they decided to leave.
We didn't know what was happening or why.  I still don't understand it.
We were the only NGO [non-government organisation] providing free
medical care and free food for patients," Dr.  Marco looks at me
wryly.

"And the only kind of NGO without any mullah on top of us, which was
probably not acceptable."

After this setback, Dr.  Gino shut the hospital and transferred the
international staff out of Afghanistan.  He says this was a necessary
protest against the Taliban's attack.

"You cannot have humanitarian agencies treated this way.  But we
commenced negotiations for reopening the hospital almost at once.  I
think I had met every minister in the Taliban government ten times and
the negotiations were still ongoing on September 11."

Following the attacks in the US, Dr.  Gino contacted the Taliban and
said he was willing to reopen the hospital immediately.

"I felt there was a humanitarian disaster on the horizon.  It was not
difficult to predict."

The Taliban agreed.

Dr.  Gino was in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, and at that time on
12 September the United Nations and the Red Cross were flying their
staff out of Afghanistan.  He asked for a seat on one of the empty
planes flying in to evacuate them.  He says that both the UN and the
Red Cross refused, for 'security reasons', and because it 'would look
contradictory'.

Instead Dr.  Gino had to undertake that dangerous five-day journey over
the Hindu Kush, by jeep and on horseback to get back into Afghanistan.
He crossed in from Pakistan via the Khyber Pass, and reached the
Northern Alliance front lines in the Panjshir Valley.  There he spent
weeks negotiating with the Taliban to organise a front-line crossing
into Kabul.  This was further complicated by the start of US air
strikes at the very same spot, around the Bagram air base, where he and
his staff needed to cross.

"So, having negotiated a supposed cease fire so that we could cross
from the Panjshir down into Kabul, with staff from our Kabul hospital
risking their lives to come up to Bagram to meet us, there was fighting
and US bombing at the exact time when we were crossing."  He sits
back.

"Still we made it."

Dr.  Gino and his staff reached Kabul on 8 November.  Within two days
the hospital reopened, when the air strikes were at their fiercest, a
time which he admits was very frightening.

"Bloody hell' How he sings this English expression in his Italian
accent 'it was terrifying!  But our worry wasn't the very heavy
rocketing and shelling, our worry was the real threat of being taken
hostage by fanatics.  On 12 November it was obvious something big was
happening.  Armed people were coming here, some Taliban and some Arabs,
and someone stole one of our cars.  I had given instructions to leave
all the cars ready, with their keys in the ignition and filled with
petrol, because it's better to lose ten vehicles than one person." That
day the Taliban fled Kabul.  After reciting this extraordinary tale,
Gino Strada is scathing about the decision of the major aid agencies to
leave Afghanistan.

"I think it remains a shame for many humanitarian aid agencies, the UN
the first, what they've done in this country.  Because it will be
difficult for them to claim a humanitarian role when they left here
between the 12 and 13 of September.  It was obviously a political
decision taken at a high level in New York, which doesn't surprise me,
and just proves once again that these agencies have nothing, absolutely
nothing, to do with humanitarian work ... It doesn't mean that
individuals are not committed or professional, a few are, but the
institution as such is not designed for humanitarian reasons,
otherwise, if there is one day when the NGOs should have come back to
Afghanistan it was September 12th."

Dr.  Gino explains his decision for Emergency to stay.

"It gives a sign to your national staff that when a situation is
dangerous, you don't leave them alone, pretending from the roof of the
Marriott Hotel in Islamabad that all the programs are going on
regularly despite the absence of international staff, which is a fairy
tale no one believes."  He looks at me sternly.

"You are telling your staff that if there is shit going on, let's share
it."

It is a refreshing experience to interview Gino Strada.  So much
journalism is about reporting on deal making, and compromise, and
interviewing smooth, often venal 'organisation' men and women.  Gino
Strada is utterly different.  He is so uncompromising and so
unselfconsciously heroic, that it is a paradigm shift to be here in his
abrasive, amusing company, in the most impressive medical facility in
Afghanistan.

More amazing than his principled personal courage is the stand that he
has taken on funding.  Emergency turned down US$4 million from the
Italian government as soon as Italy joined the International Coalition
Against Terror, committing money and men to the fight in Afghanistan.

"That money is the money of politics and of war so we cannot accept it.
We cannot accept money to look after Afghans injured by bombs dropped
by the same people who are donating the money.  So we would not accept
one dollar from the US or British governments.  We have a lot of Afghan
friends, and we are here to help the Afghans not to bomb them, not to
kill them.  I would feel shamed to get one dollar from the pockets of
those who are sending soldiers here."

Flabbergasted I ask him how he will make up this huge shortfall.  He
says that he has already received US$1 million from ordinary Italian
citizens, who donated the money as soon as they heard about Emergency's
decision to refuse the government funding.  He is Convinced that he
will find the rest.

In the meantime, the Emergency hospital continues to treat all patients
including Taliban prisoners.  I meet two of them, brought from Kabul's
main prison where they were not receiving treatment.  Dr.  Gino went on
a prison visit and asked for them to be brought here.

"They are young men with wounds, and they have to be treated, no matter
who they are."

The prisoners lie in bed in a ward with two guards, and I am amazed as
always by their ordinariness.  No one can speak to them as they speak
no Dari.  One is a Pakistani, the other an Arab.

"I had many meetings with the Taliban military commanders, and they are
normal people, very normal.  But they don't have stealth bombers, so
they use terror weapons, and bacteriological and nuclear weapons if
they can get their hands on them."

If peace will come to Afghanistan, the Emergency hospital will stay, to
treat land-mine victims.  But Dr.  Gino will be off in search of
another war zone in which to work.

In early December, Northern Alliance President Burhanuddin Rabbani
tells a press conference that Taliban who 'are not criminals' can take
part in a future Afghan administration.

"Taliban authorities and officials can participate in the interim
government as individuals, not as the Taliban party, if they are
selected through the Loya Jirga," he says.

In the ballroom at the Intercon, a Taliban minister sweeps in wearing a
stylish cream and gold outfit, adjusts his matching turban, and defects
to the Northern Alliance in front of our cameras.  He is Deputy
Interior Minister, the man responsible for the secret police, and can
bring the Northern Alliance practical information that might be useful.
But we are not sure what to make of this piece of theatre.  The
Northern Alliance thinks it's important it has staged the defection for
the world's press yet it's not clear what it means in terms of the
collapse of the Taliban leadership.

Perhaps the most significant feature of this defection is the failure
to punish the Taliban leader.

There's a party at the NBC house.  I'm due to file a feature for Irish
radio, but they say they'll take it tomorrow.

"Och, Irris, go to the party, we won't have room for it tonight anyhow.
If you file it tomorrow, we can do an interview with you afterwards as
well."  They are so understanding and so delightfully Irish.  If
there's fun to be had, why would I consider filing?

So I go to the party with a clear conscience.  The NBC house, like all
the others in Wazir Akbar Khan, has the feel of 1960s suburbia.  The
main room downstairs is low and dark, separated from the dining room by
a divider.  It has a dingy orange sofa, and someone has made banana
smoothies and a birthday cake.  I feel I'm taking part in a teen
sitcom, pre-Friends, more like a re-run of Leave it to Beaver.  There
is a changeover and a new lot of NBC crews are coming through, and
there are also some newly arrived aid workers.  There are introductions
Irris, do you know Sally?  as though we were in New York.  But Kabul
reasserts itself, because at 9.30 p.m. we have to leave just as the
party is getting into full swing, and race to the Intercon, to make it
back before the curfew.

The city is dark and empty.  Shah Mahmood drives quickly through the
checkpoints.  No one stops us tonight.  One night last week he was not
so lucky.  He got the journalists to the Intercon in time for 10 p.m."
but as he was speeding back to the NBC house, he was stopped.  Because
he was out after curfew without a permit, he had to spend the night in
a Kabul gaol.  Apparently there's a password that will avoid a night
behind bars, but he didn't know it, so it was off to prison for him.
Fortunately while he was there, the other prisoners told him the
password, so he says it was a night well spent.  We pester Shah Mahmood
to tell us the password.  But he won't.

Tonight we make it back to the hotel by 9.45, and best of all, Shah
Mahmood drives all the way up the hill.  We don't have to get out and
walk.  It seems there's another password which you learn on payment of
a five-dollar 'fee' to the guards at the Intercon gate.  It's as bad as
remembering all your different pin numbers.

Our time in Kabul is coming to an end.  It's already December, and I've
been covering this conflict from the start, and need a rest.  A long
rest, actually.  In our last hours, we go shopping.

Unbelievably, the shopping is fantastic.  The main shopping area is the
wonderfully named Chicken Street.  You can buy food, including luxury
items like chocolate, dates, cheese, crackers, tuna, and olive oil.
Here, too, there is hand cream, and those strange piles of fat that are
the staples of female beauty.

There are also the famous Afghan rugs, sheepskin coats, leather bags,
silver jewellery, silk scarves, engraved brass water jugs and teapots,
glowing with the mystery of the Orient.  The 1970s was the last time
Western tourists were in Afghanistan in any numbers.  Mazar-i-Sharif
was a hippy hangout, then.

"The DJs were fantastic," Bruno from EBU tells me and I suppose being
known for the best hash in the world had nothing to do with it?  Near
the intersection of Chicken and Flower streets there is a tiny
second-hand bookshop, crammed full of books in English, German and
Russian.  The English selection is small and highly idiosyncratic,
stopping abruptly in the mid-1970s.  There is nothing post 1976.  No
one came here after that.

So the store owners are thrilled to see us Westerners with cash in our
pockets.  I go with the NBC boys, who turn out to be much better
shoppers than me.  I tell them it's genetic, and their being American
trumps my being female.

We all buy rugs at a shop that Jonathan has scouted out.  There is a
wonderful array of carpets in wool and silk, and kilim rugs so delicate
and finely woven that they can only be hung on the wall.  The colours
are beguiling, rich reds, and cool creams, blended together in
intricate patterns.  The owner, Nairn, welcomes us, and we climb steep
stairs to sit in a small alcove while rugs are thrown down in front of
us.  I love the theatre of this extolling the virtues of every rug,
turning each over to scratch its back to make sure it's woven by hand
and not by machine.  I fall in love with more carpets than I need or
can carry.  This is one of the few times when it's just as well that I
have so little cash left.

When I explain to Nairn that, in a land without credit, I don't have
enough money with me for all the purchases I would like to make, he
generously offers to allow me to take the rugs, and pay the next time I
come back.

"I couldn't do that."

"But you will be back soon!"  he exclaims.

I tell him there are no guarantees.  It's money or nothing.

Jonathan is a tough bargainer, which I am not.  He talks me out of a
kilim and into a beautiful cream silk rug and a more practical red
woollen one.  We buy silk scarves and pakuls, the Tajik berets.  Do you
think they have fleas?

Tom is also a canny shopper who has great taste.  Along with kilim
rugs, he has bought some very snappy leather bags, and I follow him to
the leather shop.  We carry our carpets tied up in sheets, like bundles
the stork brings.  Next door, at Agmal's, I buy Afghan jewellery ornate
engraved silver earrings with lapis lazuli, which look antique, and a
sleek silver choker, with strands of lapis in it, which looks modern.
It contains so much silver that back in the real world it will set off
the alarm every time I go through an airport security check, making
sure I never forget Afghanistan.

In a dark, crowded store in Chicken Street, among a jumble of silver
ornaments, I find an engraved tea pot that looks like Aladdin's lamp.
It glows magically among ewers, water jugs, bowls, candle sticks,
hanging lamps and embossed mirrors which sit in higgledy-piggledy piles
beneath silver picture frames, nargilehs, daggers, and ivory-handled
duelling pistols.

The light barely struggles in through the window.  Motes of dust dance
in a beam of slanted sunlight.  Standing in this captivating treasure
trove, scented with cardamon, candles and dusty silver, I actually find
myself believing that if you rubbed the teapot, all your wishes would
come true.

I give it to Jonathan as a memento of Kabul.

"Does this mean we will get out safely?"  he asks.

Once again it is proving difficult to leave Afghanistan.  Maurice and
Stan from NBC have been trying for a week.  We've had four farewells
for them, but after driving for five hours up to the Panjshir Valley,
and waiting all day, they return more and more dejected each time
because the helicopters don't fly.  After the fourth day NBC puts its
producer in Dushanbe onto it and, even though she is working full time,
so far she has not been successful in getting them out.

A large NBC contingent forms to leave with Stan and Maurice, Tom and
Jonathan included.  I decide that as no one is bribing full time to get
me out of Afghanistan, I will join them if there's room.  Jonathan says
he'll stay with me if I don't get on the plane.

I say a sad farewell to the Intercon, and especially to Adriana and
Barbara.  We pack our possessions, but even with all my new shopping I
still have fewer bags than the guys.  I gather up my Afghan rugs and
bin Laden's birdcage for the drive to the military air base at Bagram,
where we hear that a fixed-wing aircraft is coming in.

Kabul's Soviet buildings peter out behind us.  This final drive is
probably the most beautiful we do in Afghanistan.  The paved road cuts
through a bare desert valley ringed by grand, forbidding mountains.  To
Jonathan it looks like Colorado.  The road is almost empty, apart from
the occasional bus crammed with refugees, some sitting on the roof
with the luggage, returning to Kabul.  This is still relatively rare
because the millions of refugees in Iran and Pakistan don't yet trust
the prospects for peace.  It feels as if the road is ours, the land is
ours.

There is a checkpoint, a building of mud stones, with a ragged flag on
top.  I never make out what flag it is, but it's colourful and a
soldier is lying near it, sun baking  The scene has a psychedelic feel
and the soldier looks more like an American GI in Vietnam, or a Soviet
soldier here in Afghanistan, than a local Islamic warrior.  One of his
comrades in arms tries to hit us for a bribe, but only half-heartedly.
We drive on to find the road littered with the twisted carcasses of
Soviet tanks.  They are such a regular feature of the landscape they
are almost part of the scenic beauty of Afghanistan.  We reach a river,
its bridge blown out during the bombing.  It sits cut in two, a tank
without a turret resting near it.  We drive through the water, circling
both.

The road ends at the utterly destroyed air base.  As one of the few
legitimate military targets in this country without infrastructure,
Bagram was bombed heavily during the American air strikes.  Many of the
wooden shacks and mud-brick houses along the avenue leading to the base
have been flattened.  A house at the gates of the base took a direct
hit, and has been cut in half, so everything inside it is visible, like
looking into a doll's house.  Colourful paintings lean at right angles
on the wall.  Was it a kindergarten?  Could there be a child care
centre so close to a military base?  Maybe, if the Russians built it,
since in Soviet times every large work place had a kindergarten
attached.

Once we arrive, we wait outside for hours, in the finest Central Asian
tradition.  There is a battered plane on a stick above the gates, a
1970s Soviet symbol that survived the bombing, but not much else is
intact.  Men wrapped in blankets stand around, though it is not clear
what planes they are waiting to catch.  Maurice looks at a sailing
magazine, dreaming of his boat and hoping that today he will finally
leave.  I talk to the security chief at the base.  He is a Tajik who
fought by Massoud's side for twenty-four years.  He is a tough, feisty
taste kwon do expert, but his eyes fill with tears when he describes
Massoud's death, and he looks down at the ground, suddenly lost.  He
says that in the old days, if he'd found a Russian or American here at
Bagram, he'd have killed them -he passes his finger across his throat
srazu, straight away.  Srazu, he repeats in Russian, for emphasis,
frowning.  But now that Massoud has gone, he sighs heavily again, these
foreigners are traipsing all over Bagram and he does not know what to
do.

He speaks to me in excellent Russian much better than mine that he
learnt without formal lessons from the Russian prisoners of war he
captured.  He polished it up after the Soviets left, at international
taste kwon do competitions, talking to the Russian competitors.  Truth
is always stranger than fiction.

I have been translating for Tom and Jonathan, however when our Tajik
friend tells me that I am attractive but that Jonathan is extremely
attractive, 'like a woman', code in these parts for liking it both
ways, I decide not to translate that bit.  Who knows what they get up
to at those taste kwon do meets?  I'm saved by the fact that there is
suddenly movement, and we are allowed inside the airbase.  We feel we
are getting closer to Dushanbe, but in fact there is only more
waiting.

We sit in rubble, planning our holidays.  Tom says that the problem
with being in Afghanistan is that you save all this money, and then you
reward yourself with long, expensive holidays because you've been in
Afghanistan.  We are sitting in front of a bombed-out building, with no
roof.  It has a mural drawn in black charcoal on one of its two
remaining walls.  It is a military scene are there any other kind here?
depicting a tank, and men shooting each other.  One man is being shot
although he has his hands up.  You can see the bullets coming out of
the rifle towards him.  The figures look at once child-like and
apocalyptic.

At around three o'clock we hear that our plane is not flying today, but
a Russian military helicopter that arrived delivering aid will take
some journalists back out.  We go onto the tarmac, where Russian
Special Forces soldiers in blue overalls are waiting by a huge chopper.
There are also Afghan customs officials, Afghan soldiers, and US
Special Forces soldiers milling about.  It's hard to know who to
negotiate with.  Some journalists are already loading their stuff onto
the Russian chopper.  The blades are starting up and the Afghan customs
official says that we have too much stuff to make it onto the chopper
in time.  To me this is a sign that he wants a backhander, but Tom says
we couldn't bribe Afghan officials in front of American soldiers. Maybe
that's how you have to play it, but it does mean we don't get to fly.

I don't mind so much, because there is plenty to file on since
Kandahar, the Taliban's last remaining power base, is falling.  But
Stan and Maurice are devastated.  The drive back, even more beautiful
as the sun is setting, is not a happy one for them.  The light is clear
and the mountains glow pink.  Jonathan can't stop taking photos.

It is a slightly more tense group that repeats the trip out the next
morning.  I leave bin Laden's birdcage behind, and one of the
translators runs up to the car with it.

"Don't forget this."  Once we are inside Bagram again, everyone is more
cheerful following a call from Dushanbe.  NBC's wonderfully efficient
producer, Judy, says our plane is on the tarmac, with thirty
journalists who are flying into Kabul already on board.  We have lunch
in the sun, in front of our apocalyptic mural.  Rummaging in my bag, I
discover a forgotten tin of caviar that someone had asked me to bring
in to Afghanistan.  We eat Russian caviar on American crackers in the
warm winter sun at a military air base in Afghanistan, where the roads
are so heavily mined that Tom says it's too dangerous to take a leak by
the side of the road.  Perfect.

American soldiers drive by on vehicles that look like military beach
buggies and stop to say hello.  Some are air force and some are Special
Forces, and all have that naivete that seems to characterise American
soldiers abroad.

We chat with them, but the afternoon wears on and there is no sign of
our plane.  At four o'clock Judy rings to tell us the tragi-comic news
that the plane's wheel fell off as it was taxiing and there will be no
flight tonight.  The boys are very dejected.  Jonathan is cool and so
is Hans, but Tom is starting to lose his sense of humour, and Stan and
Maurice are increasingly desperate.  Tomorrow will be their tenth day
trying to leave Afghanistan.  The drive back is even more beautiful
than yesterday.  At sunset the mountains flame pink, looking like huge
slabs of rose quartz, before fading to amethyst and then brown.

At night, I file on the disappearance of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed
Omar following the surrender of Kandahar, and the search for Osama bin
Laden in the mountains above Jalalabad.

"Thanks for that, will you be there tomorrow if we need anything?"  the
Voice of America news desk asks.

"I don't know I wasn't meant to be here today," I reply.  In Dushanbe,
Judy switches to plan B hiring a Russian emergency services helicopter
that is flying in to Kabul with aid, for its return flight to
Tajikistan.  On our third day at Bagram, we see a huge double-rotored
Russian chopper flying in and our hearts skip a collective beat.  Then
Judy emerges, a tiny figure, from the helicopter's huge belly, and
we're thrilled.  A customs officer appears on the tarmac "Any rugs? 
"and after paying the requisite bribes, we load our gear into a chopper
so vast it's the size of a jet.  Most of the interior is taken up by
two huge fuel tanks which look like bombs, and we perch around them as
the chopper lifts into the air.

Hans pulls six tiny bottles of Scotch out of his pocket.  He was given
them by a steward on his flight out of Chicago, and has kept them for
more than two months in a 'dry' country, waiting for the flight home.
It's a remarkable combination of forethought and discipline, and very
stylish.  He shares them around.  What a guy.

The Russian aircrew offers us coffee, and I pour in my Scotch, drinking
sweet, strong Irish coffee as I watch the mountains of the Hindu Kush
rising to meet us.  We barely skim them, the helicopter chugging
between the peaks.  The mountains are white, covered in deep falls of
snow, beautiful and austere, like the cold folds of a robe on a marble
statue, and I remember that they were bare and brown when I first flew
in almost three months ago, sitting in Massoud's armchair.

We look down, trying to pick out the track we drove over when we
crossed these mountains overland.  From up here it is even more
terrifying to think that we did that drive.  The chopper is so noisy
that we have to write each other notes on the only paper we can find
huge denominations of worthless Afghan currency.  This flight is
impossibly romantic and exhilarating, but it is also dangerous that
characteristically Afghan combination.  The next helicopter out will
crash with the loss of all on board.

I finish scribbling a message on a grimy blue 10,000-afghani note, and
look up at the NBC boys, perched around the windows of this old Soviet
aircraft.  We've been through so much together I feel bonded to them. I
understand war vets now even if we never see each other again, it
doesn't matter, I will always hold them in my heart.  Though at this
moment I remain focused on survival the lesson of Afghanistan is that
you can't exhale, and we haven't landed safely yet I'm aware that this
has been an extraordinary experience.  I flew in with the Northern
Alliance, and I'm flying out with the Russians, following the defeat of
the Taliban.  They say that journalism is the first draft of history. I
was here before the ink dried.

As the helicopter travels slowly between the mountain peaks, images of
Afghanistan imprint themselves over these snowy scenes.  In my mind's
eye I see laughing warriors sitting barefoot, and the radiant smiles of
young men enraptured by the soundtrack of Titanic.  I see soldiers in
trenches fixing their mascara.  I remember an ancient capital city in
ruins, and casual violence and bloodshed a Taliban prisoner tethered
like a goat, and children with truncated limbs in hospital beds, the
victims of land mines.  I think of a nine-year-old girl so beautiful
she made me catch my breath, living in the dust and surviving on boiled
nettles.  I remember the wonderful women I have met: a brilliant
doctor, a hairdresser in a gold wedding dress, and I wish they and
their daughters will have better lives, full of dignity and
opportunities, the lives they deserve, not the cramped, forlorn
existences, hidden away, that have been forced on them.

I pray that Farahnaz Nazir will be safe and that her family will
receive asylum in the West, and that she won't be hunted down and
killed for trying to make small improvements to the lives of destitute
women.

But Afghanistan herself remains unrelenting and extreme to the very
last.  Will she have leaders capable of pulling the population out of
this terrible situation, or will they continue to show the contempt for
ordinary people that has reduced this mountain kingdom to the status of
a failed state?

Nothing is predictable in this poverty-stricken slaughterhouse, with a
bloodthirsty past, a troubled present and a precarious future.  Flying
away from Afghanistan, I can only put my faith in hope for a better
future.  What did the poet sing?  May Allah protect such beauty from
the evil eye of man.  Postscript Women's activist Farahnaz Nazir
succeeded in leaving Afghanistan with her family in January 2002. Their
first stop was a refugee camp in Iran.  While they were there, Laura
Bush, the wife of the US President, gave the International Women's Day
address at the United Nations on 8 March 2002.  She quoted Farahnaz on
the need for change in Afghanistan, saying: "As Farahnaz Nazir, founder
of the Afghanistan Women's Association said, "Society is like a bird. 
It has two wings.  And a bird cannot fly if one wing is broken."

The journalists from CBS-TV and I wrote letters supporting Farahnaz's
claim for asylum, but her application was made more difficult because
the warlord who threatened her life was from our allies in the Northern
Alliance rather than the Taliban.  Nevertheless, after Farahnaz and her
family spent three difficult months in Iran, I received the wonderful
news that Canada would give them asylum.  They moved to Ontario, where
her children have started school and are adapting to Canadian life.
Farahnaz and her husband are looking for work, while she continues to
struggle for women's rights.  Now that she is living in a peaceful
country once more, Farahnaz says she sometimes blames herself for the
dangers she inflicted on her family, but they're never angry with her
"They love me and I am lucky."

On her first Thanksgiving in Canada, Farahnaz wrote to tell me that she
prayed for me and everybody 'who helped us to be safe here in Canada'.
I was in tears.  It seems part of the miracle of reporting from
Afghanistan that a Muslim woman should pray for me while celebrating a
Christian festival and building a new life.  Farahnaz's rescue and the
hope that she and her children will now be able to spread their own
wings is my greatest joy from the past year.

Sources

PROLOGUE

I have read a number of accounts written in different eras by visitors
to Kabul, including recent accounts by my colleagues.  Jon Lee
Anderson's article "City of Dreams: A peace of sorts comes to Kabul' in
the New Yorker magazine (24 December 2001), was particularly helpful.

I had long discussions with NBC sound recordist Jonathan Mossek about
what we saw in the city, and I am grateful to him for sharing his
visually precise memories.

British travel writer Robert Byron travelled in Afghanistan in the
1930s, and wrote a book called The Road to Oxiana.  He took a stunning
collection of photographs, which are now held in the Conway Collection
of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, London, and are
available on their website:
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/sub_index/herat_mazar/herat.html.

CHAPTER ONE

The murder of Paul Tatum occurred while the ABC TV bureau was in the
Slavyanskaya Hotel My producer, Slava Zelenin, and my predecessor, ABC
TV correspondent Eric Campbell, were there on the day of the murder
when Tatum's body was found.  On arrival, they were greeted by the
cleaners saying, "Don't go upstairs, there are men with Kalashnikovs
everywhere."  These events have been covered extensively in the Russian
press, including the Moscow Times, Moscow News and exile newspapers. On
7 November 1996 American senator Don Nickles called for a State
Department investigation into the murder of the Oklahoma businessman.
In August 2000, exile reprinted an article from Russian newspaper
Stringer called "Death Wish 1996: Paul Tatum's last letter to the
Russian prosecutor' by Aleksei Fomin, which covers this in depth. There
is also coverage on websites, including:
http://gangstersinc.tripod.com/PaulTatum.html
http://www.megastories.com/russia/economy/dead.htm.  I consulted
various websites for facts about Tajikistan.  If you want to read more
about Dushanbe, useful sites include:
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/Dushanbe/Dushanbe.html
http://www.ceroi.net/reports/dushanbe/eng/city.htm
http://www.somoni.com/

CHAPTER TWO

I conducted interviews with UN HCR in Tajikistan about the Pyang River
refugee crisis.  Prior to arriving I had read an excellent article by
my colleague Robin Dixon from the LA Times, who had been there in the
summer of 2001 when the crisis was at its height.  Since returning from
Afghanistan I have read articles from aid agencies working with the
Pyang River refugees, including the United Nations website, the Human
Rights Watch website, and a religious aid organisation called the
Adventist Development and Relief Agency.  I have also read reports from
Radio Free Europe such as "Tajikistan: No end in sight to Afghan
refugees' misery' by Bruce Pannier (Prague, 12 January 2001), and "In
Dust and Despair They Await Aid' by English journalist Alice Thompson
(31 October 2001, reprinted in The Age).

The article "Limbs of No Body: World's indifference to the Afghan
tragedy' by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, which appeared in The Iranian magazine
(20 June 2001) is possibly the single most interesting, insightful and
moving piece I have read on Afghanistan.  The quote about the refugees
at the Tajikistan border is on page 2 of the article, and the quote
about the Buddhas at Bamian on page 19.  It is also available on the
Iranian director's website: http://www.makhmalbaf.com.

I know some Tajik history from my own trips along the Silk Road, but a
useful website, which I cited for Chapter 1, is
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/Dushanbe/Dushanbe.

html.  Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium was also a very useful source
material for this section, particularly on Tajikistan in the 1960s.

Northern Alliance allegations about the Taliban and Osama bin Laden
being behind Massoud's assassination were put to me first by embassy
staff in briefings in Dushanbe.  Saleh Mohammed Registani, at that time
the embassy's military attache in Moscow, was very helpful on this.
Later there was a wealth of US intelligence to support the contention,
as well as information from the hard drive of an al-Qaeda computer that
the Moscow correspondents of the Wall Street Journal purchased in
Kabul.

CHAPTER THREE

I have relied on a number of sources for the account of Ahmed Shah
Massoud's assassination, including interviews I did in Dushanbe and
Khoja Bahauddin with Northern Alliance figures.  Among them were
Massoud's former Chief of Security and Nasrine Gross, an
Afghan-American woman who was living in the Foreign Ministry compound
at the time of Massoud's assassination.  I have also read widely on the
subject, including: a reactive piece by Jon Lee Anderson called "A
Lion's Death' in the New Yorker (21 October 2001); an investigation by
the LA Times called "Slowly Stalking an Afghan "Lion" by Craig Pyes and
William C. Rempel (June 2002); and an unpublished account by NBC
cameraman Tom Streithorst, which he has called "In Afghanistan', and
which he has been kind enough to let me read.

As for a more general history, Massoud is the world's most photographed
Islamic warrior, and there are websites devoted to pictures of him.  He
was media friendly, and so his life and views are well documented.  I
have read newspaper articles over the years, including those by Anthony
Lloyd in The Times and Robert Fisk in the Independent, and Marcus
Warren's account of Massoud's funeral entitled The Hope Terrorism's End
Will Start Here' in the UK Daily Telegraph (18 September 2001).  ABC
TV's "Foreign Correspondent' program broadcast stories about Massoud,
including one by Mark Davis in 1999, which was especially useful.  For
general information the BBC Online political history of Afghanistan was
informative, as was the official Northern Alliance website
Afghan-infocom.

I'm indebted to Jon Lee Anderson for the detailed description of Khoja
Bahauddin in his article "The Warlord' (New Yorker, 22 October 2001),
which jogged my memory.

Accurate statistics about Afghanistan are difficult to establish, given
the difficulty of collecting information in this chaotic war-ravaged
country.  I have relied on those quoted by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and also
those quoted by Ahmed Rashid in his seminal book Taliban: Islam, Oil
and the New Great Game in Central Asia, particularly for statistics on
the population of Afghanistan and its refugees.

The quote from Taliban Planning Minister Qari Din Mohammed was in an
article entitled "Taliban Reject Warnings of Aid Pull-out' (Agence
France-Presse, 16 July 1998).

CHAPTER FOUR

There is an enormous amount of material on the Mujaheddin trafficking
in opium throughout the 1980s.  Drug trafficking funded the purchase of
arms from the CIA, and this explosion of drug trafficking in armies
backed by the US government was a pattern that was apparent in Central
America and South East Asia as well as Afghanistan.  Much of the
research has been done by Alfred McCoy and is in an article he wrote
entitled "Drug Fallout', which appeared in Progressive Magazine in
1997.  It was also the subject of a documentary series called "Dealing
with the Demon' in 1996 by ABC TV.

The figures on heroin exported from Afghanistan were quoted by Ustina
Markus, Senior Analyst for the Brussels-based International Crisis
Group.  The report is available on ICG's website www.crisisweb.org and
is entitled "Central Asia: Drugs and conflict' (Report 25, 26 November
2001).

The quote from Mark Galeotti linking the Northern Alliance to drug
smuggling is from "Drugs Fund War' (World Today, Volume 57 Issue 12,
December 2001, published by The Royal Institute of International
Affairs).  The World Today website is www.theworld-today.org.  Dr. Mark
Galeotti is Director of the Organised Russian & Eurasian Crime Research
Unit at Keele University, England.

The aid worker who said that the Taliban and the Northern Alliance
continued drug trafficking across the front lines was quoted by Jon Lee
Anderson on page 8 of "In the Court of the Pretender: Who has the right
to rule Afghanistan?"  (New Yorker magazine, 5 November 2001, Jon Lee
Anderson 2001, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency
Inc.).

CHAPTER FIVE

Farahnaz Nazir's International Women's Day charter began with a demand
that schools for girls and boys should reopen immediately.  It also
included a call for women to be respected and accorded basic human
rights, with society creating conditions favourable to the development
of women's minds, education, health, discipline, culture, spirit and
economic wellbeing in accordance with national and international norms.
It went on to demand that women be invited to participate fully in both
government and in society.

The statistics on female health are from Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban:
Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, and also from a
Physicians for Human Rights report, published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association entitled "Women's Health and Human Rights
in Afghanistan' (Vol.  280, 5 August 1998).

As to the contention that the best times in Afghanistan were during the
Soviet era, in addition to my own interviews with educated women in
Afghanistan, in 1987 the General Secretary of the Afghan Red Crescent
Society told the New York Times that "Women are the strongest
supporters of the revolution.  For the first time, our women have been
given equal rights at the level of education, work, salaries and other
areas."  She was a member or the Communist Party, but even Western
diplomats conceded that rights for women were one of the few
achievements of the 1978 revolution, although many women moved into
higher jobs because so many men were away fighting the guerrillas.  For
more on this read "Afghans Mix Sovietisation and Free Market' by Steven
R. Weisman (New York Times, 15 May 1987).  See also the Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan website: www.rawa.org.

CHAPTER SIX

The article "Limbs of No Body' by Mohsen Makhmalbaf was useful when
writing this chapter.  Makhmalbaf is very interesting on the position
of women in Afghanistan, and the history of polygamy and the
perspective of family as harem.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The history of Ai Khanoum can be read in more detail in Tim Judah's
article for the New York Review of Books entitled "With the Northern
Alliance' (15 November 2001).

The front line at Puze Polihomri was visited several times by Montreal
Gazette reporter Levon Sevunts over a period of weeks, including living
in the trenches with the soldiers.  It was Levon who first told me to
look out for soldiers wearing mascara.  I have read all of his
excellent reports for this period, and am indebted to him for making
them available to me.  He is a brave journalist and a generous
colleague.  For this section, I read his long interview with General
Yusuf Muhammad entitled "Bombs Focused on Hills: Northern Alliance
expected to launch offensive on Mazar-i-Sharif soon' (Montreal Gazette,
5 November 2001).

The tribal history of Afghanistan, which is so critical to
understanding its modern day politics, is explained at length by both
Mohsen Makhmalbaf in "Limbs of No Body' and Ahmed Rashid in Taliban.

Tim Judah quoted Chris Stephen's quip in "With the Northern Alliance'
(New York Review of Books, 15 November 2001, NYRB 2001, reprinted with
permission).

I have read wire reports from the Associated Press and Reuters on the
Taliban's Grand Council to consider the US demand to hand over Osama
bin Laden.  I would like to pay tribute to the work of Kathy Gannon
from the Associated Press, one of the few Western journalists to have
lived in Kabul during the air strikes.  She has reported from there
over a period of more than fifteen years.  The refutation of Taliban
claims that Osama bin Laden had left Afghanistan was made by Northern
Alliance Foreign Minister Dr.  Abdullah at a press conference in Khoja
Bahauddin, September 2001.

For the history of Osama bin Laden covered here and later in the book I
have referred to Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great
Game in Central Asia and John Cooley's Unholy Wars Afghanistan, America
and International Terrorism.

CHAPTER EIGHT

General Bariolai made comments about relations with the US to a number
of journalists, including Levon Sevunts who refers to it in his article
"Alliance Looking for US Respect' (Montreal Gazette, 1 November
2001).

The celebrity profile of Mamur Hassan by Jon Lee Anderson appeared in
the New Yorker on 22 October 2001, aptly titled "The Warlord' ( Jon Lee
Anderson 2001, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency Inc.).
Quotes from Hassan throughout this chapter are from his interviews with
me, or with Jon Lee Anderson.

Since the defeat of the Taliban, Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
has returned to Afghanistan, so all this history is once again
painfully relevant.  I have read what has been written about this
controversial figure in Unholy Wars by John Cooley and on two websites:
RAWA (www.rawa.org) and
http://www.comebackalive.com/df/dplaces/afghanis/index.htm.  The latter
has an entertainingly written work by brave gonzo journalist Robert
Young Pelton.  I have also consulted a series of investigative articles
from the late 1980s, including: "Will the Afghan Regime Remain or
Fall?"  by Rone Tempest (Los Angeles Times, 31 May 1988); "Westernised
Women Dread Return to a Veiled Existence' by Christina Lamb (Financial
Times, 23 June 1989); "Exiled and Excluded' by Lucy Mathen (Guardian,
30 August 1988); "Kabul Women Shun Veils, See Rebel Threat to Status'
by David B. Ottaway (Washington Post, 4 May 1988); and "The Heroes With
Tarnished Haloes' by George Arney (Guardian, 5 January 1988).

The allegation that Hekmatyar and his followers threw acid in women's
faces is now part of Afghan political folklore, having been played up
by the Russians before they withdrew in 1989.  However, it also has a
basis in fact.  In 1988 Shafika Razminda, vice-chairwoman of the
All-Afghanistan Women's Council, who was at university with Hekmatyar
told the Guardian newspaper, "In 1971, when women came out in public
with no veil, Gulbaddin's supporters sprayed acid in their faces.  When
women wore stockings, they shot at their legs.  Women more than [any]
other hate this man' (George Arney, The Heroes with Tarnished Haloes',
Guardian, 5 January 1988).  See also "Afghans mix Sovietisation and
Free Market' by Steven R. Weisman (New York Times, 15 May 1987).

I have also read Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know by Scott Burchill,
lecturer in international relations at Deakin University, Melbourne.  I
would like to thank Scott for his assistance with this section of the
book.  All the history about Hekmatyar the CIAs favourite warlord was
known during the 1980s.  In March 1990, the US House Republican
Research Committee of the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare, severely criticised the CIA and Pakistan's
Inter-Services-Intelligence for their gross negligence in covering up
the misconduct of Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami faction during the Afghan
civil war.  The report also canvassed whether the ISI had propped up
Hekmatyar as an ideal Muslim choice, while knowing that he was actually
working for the Soviet KGB.  Now, there is the ultimate conspiracy
theory!

There are also allegations about Hekmatyar's involvement in drug
trafficking.  In May 1990, as the CIA operation in Afghanistan was
winding down, the Washington Post published a front-page expose
charging that Hekmatyar was a major heroin manufacturer.  The Post
argued that US officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin
dealing by its Afghan allies 'because US narcotics policy in
Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence
there'.

In 1996, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles
Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the
Cold War.

"Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets.
We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an
investigation of the drug trade," he told ABC TV.

"I don't think that we need to apologise for this.  Every situation has
its fallout..  . There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes.  But the
main objective was accomplished.  The Soviets left Afghanistan."
(Interviews for "Dealing with the Demon', ABC TV, 1996.) "You can rent
an Afghan, but you can never buy one' Britain's relations with the
Afghans in the nineteenth century, and their war for influence with
Russia, are enthrallingly covered in The Great Game On Secret Service
in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk.  His wife Kathleen Hopkirk has also
written a wonderful book on the history of the region entitled A
Central Asian Companion.

On the money trail, there is an enormous amount to read, both on the
web and in print.  I have read "Operation Blowback' by Bob Fitrakis
(Columbus Alive e-mag, October 2001).  I have also read the famous 1998
interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski by William Blum from French
newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur (the interview has been translated and
reissued by the author via email).  William Blum is the author of the
books Killing Hope: US military and CIA interventions since World War
II and Rogue State: A guide to the world's only superpower.  The
follow-up interview with Brzezinski, post-September 11, was by David
Corn in "Anthrax, Mujaheddin and the CIA' in Alter Net (19 October
2001).  David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and a regular
columnist for AlterNet.org.

I have also found a 1992 investigation of the CIA's role by the
Washington Post invaluable (see "Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's covert up
HekmaAfghan war' by Steve Coll, 19 July 1992).  Another interesting
and useful resource is the 1992 book The Bear Trap: Afghanistan's
Untold Story by former Pakistani ISI General Mohammed Yousaf, which
includes a detailed account of his role and that of the CIA in
Afghanistan.

Ahmed Rashid covers the CIA's role, and in particular William Casey's
stand, in Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords (p.  129).  The
training of international Muslim volunteers by the CIA was first
revealed by John Cooley on American television.  See also page 71 of
John Cooley's Unholy Wars.  I have also consulted two articles by Norm
Dixon in Green Left Weekly: "Taliban: Made by the USA' (10 October
2001) and "How the CIA Created Osama bin Laden' (October 2001).  There
is a fascinating article from Jason Burke in the UK Observer newspaper
called "Frankenstein the CIA Created: Mujahadeen trained and funded by
the US are among its deadliest foes' (17 January 1999).

The rise of the Taliban is most carefully documented by Ahmed Rashid in
Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, and the
quote about Mullah Omar being like Robin Hood comes from page 25.

I covered the drought and the plight of the refugees in Khoja
Bahauddin, and the quote from the ACTED aid agency comes from my
interviews.  I interviewed Dr.  Aini and General Hassan about the
possibility of the Taliban participating in any national government.
General Bariolai's opinion comes from his interview with Tim Judah,
quoted in the New York Review of Books, 15 November 2001 ( NYRB 2001,
reprinted with permission).

Mohsen Makhmalbaf's terrible experience with starving Afghan refugees
in camps inside Iran is described on pages 11-12 of his article "Limbs
of No Body' (see Bibliography).  British journalist Christina Lamb also
visited refugee camps on the Afghan side of the Iranian border.  In an
article entitled "They call this "the slaughterhouse" (Financial Times,
9 December 2001) she describes these forgotten camps, where 800,000
people were starving, as the most terrible she had ever seen anywhere
in the world.

CHAPTER TEN

The drops of US food aid were controversial at the time.  The response
of Eric Le Guin from ACTED is from my interview with him in October
2001 in Khoja Bahauddin.  I interviewed Edward Artis, as did others
including Jim Maceda from NBC and Levon Sevunts from the Montreal
Gazette.  Neil Barrett made a longer film for National Geographic
Television, spending a week with Ed as he delivered aid to refugees at
Choyab, four hours west of Khoja Bahauddin.  I have also read the
publicity about the modern day Knights of Malta whom Artis brought with
him to Afghanistan.

On the strategy of the war I have referred to a long article by Tim
Judah for the New York Review of Books entitled "With the Northern
Alliance' (15 November 2001).  On the controversial figure of Rashid
Dostum, I have read "The Treacherous General' by Patrick Cockburn
(Independent, 1 December 2001), which is where the quote about not
submitting to a government where there is no whiskey and no music comes
from.

On the vexed question of verifying information about defecting Afghan
generals, journalist Tim Judah spoke to Rashid Dostum about Kazi Abdul
Hai's side switching, but stresses that none of Dostum's claims could
be confirmed as General Dostum was in a region inaccessible to
journalists.  See "War in the Dark' by Tim Judah (New York Review of
Books, 29 November 2001).

The tale of the chopper crash landing was told to me by two of the
survivors.

For me, one of the greatest thrills from this entire journey was
realising that I was standing at the same spot and having the same
experience as Fitzroy Ma cLean in the 1930s.  I'd highly recommend his
book Eastern Approaches.

For background about the gulag at Vorkuta I read Colin Thubron's travel
book In Siberia and Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium.  I received
additional information about the labour camps at Vorkuta from Anton,
who took me to Dushanbe.  He worked for the BBC and was very well
informed about the history of the gulag due to his own bitter family
experience.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The effect of negative reporting about the war on Washington
powerbrokers was covered in Bush At War by Bob Woodward.  I read the
preview serialised in the Washington Post called "A Struggle for the
President's Heart and Mind' (17 November 2002).  He reports that by the
end of October, Condoleezza Rice and others in President Bush's inner
circle were on edge as the administration was being 'murdered' in the
media.  Even leading conservatives, Bush's usual allies, were blasting
the war effort.

The general justification for the bombing campaign, including fears of
al-Qaeda chemical and nuclear weapons capability, was covered in an
article by Matt Kelley entitled "U.S. Hits Suspected Weapons Plant'
(Associated Press, 12 November 2001).

The Red Cross warehouse was bombed twice, first on 16 October 2001 and
then again on 25/26 October.

"Bombing the Red Cross' by William M. Arkin (Washington Post, 4
November 2001) is an excellent summary of all the issues and concerns
being raised in the US at the time.

Like everyone else I heard Rear Admiral John Stuffelbeem's comments on
World Service Radio on 25 October 2001.  It was also reported by Agence
France-Presse, in a report by Jim Mannion entitled "Pentagon official
"surprised" at Taliban's cling to power' (25 October 2001).

The exact text of George Bush's famous quote in the week after the
September 11 attacks is: "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a
two million dollar missile at a ten dollar empty tent and hit a camel
in the butt.  It's going to be decisive."  This was quoted on CNN, 16
September 2001.

The account of soldiers spending their day in the trenches comes from
Levon Sevunts' article "Life in the Trenches' (Montreal Gazette, 8
November 2001).

I have read a variety of material about Abdul Haq, including an
interview he gave to Anatol Lieven in Peshawar some two weeks before
his death ("Voices from the Region', Carnegie Endowment for Peace,
Washington, 11 October 2001).  Haq had also done an interview for the
BBC shortly before his death, which I have seen.  Jason Burke wrote an
excellent piece from Peshawar after Haq's death ("Desperate Call From
the Valley of Death: "Help us .. .", Observer, 28 October 2001), and
there was an obituary in the Guardian newspaper entitled "Veteran
Afghan Leader Seeking Post-Taliban Consensus Rule' by Lawrence Joffe
(29 October 2001).

I have read a range of American commentators on the relationship
between Abdul Haq and the CIA: "First, the Bad News, Then .. . The Bad
News' by Eric Margolis (Toronto Sun, 4 November 2001 see also
Commondreams.com); "The Abdul Haq Fiasco' by Robert Novak (Sierra
Times, 1 November 2001).  The right-wing commentators describe a sense
of grievance at the US 'abandoning' Abdul Haq, ascribing his death as
partly to American 'deceit, arrogance and ignorance'.

The official US position that Haq received US assistance before his
death was reported by CNN on 28 October 2001.  Rumsfeld would not
specify what kind of assistance Haq received, saying it was not from
the US military but another branch of government.

CIA allegations that Haq was a 'cowboy' are reviewed by Barbara Slavin
and Jonathan Weisman in "Taliban Foe's Death Sparks Criticism of US
Goals' (USA Today, 31 October 2001).

Mazar-i-Sharif: the history of the bloodiest episode of the Taliban's
wars in Afghanistan is superbly covered by Ahmed Rashid on pages 72-73
of Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia.  The
hanging at the shrine in Mazar is described by Liam Pleven in "War,
Death Are Their Neighbors' (Washington Post, 2 December 2001).

The role of the CIA in this conflict has been revealed by Bob Woodward
in Bush At War.  I read the previews serialised in the Washington Post
on 18 November 2002 entitled "CIA Led Way With Cash Handouts'
(additional reporting by Mark Malseed).

CHAPTER TWELVE

Rob Schulteis is the author of Night Letters: Inside Wartime
Afghanistan.

Regarding the BBC budgetary crisis, this was frequently discussed in
Khoja Bahauddin by BBC staff from Moscow and London.

There is information about Afghanistan's new leader Hamed Karzai on the
country's official website (afghan-infocom), but perhaps most
interesting and useful is an article called "The Lawless Frontier' by
Robert D. Kaplan (Atlantic Monthly, September 2000).  Kaplan wrote a
lengthy series of articles in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Baluchistan,
which included an interview with Karzai before he became Afghan leader.
(Kaplan is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and the
author of Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East,
and the Caucasus.) I have also read a series of articles by my
colleagues who were in Pakistan and Afghanistan during this conflict,
among them: Torture, Treachery and Spies Covert War in Afghanistan' by
Jason Burke in Peshawar (Observer, 4 November 2001); "Who Can the
Taliban Surrender To?"  by Tim McG irk (Time magazine, 1 December
2001); "Li'l Big Chief Has Lost His Sheep: He's the West's big hope,
but the Afghan chairman has little say in his own backyard' by
Rahimullah Yusufzai (Indian e magazine, December 2001); and "Wondering
If This Man Can Pull it Off by Marc Kaufman (Washington Post, 17
February 2002). There is a dispute over the amount of American
assistance Karzai received after he was surrounded by Taliban forces. 
Karzai acknowledges that American troops saved him and his men, and
allowed his anti-Taliban mission to continue, but in November Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reported that a US helicopter rescued Karzai
and flew him to Pakistan.  Karzai denied that he was ever whisked
across the border, insisting that he stayed inside Afghanistan the
whole time.  General Yusuf Muhammad's comments about the US bombing at
Qala Qata are quoted by Levon Sevunts in his article "Bombs Focused on
the Hills' (Montreal Gazette, 5 November 2001).

Masood Khalili's account of his last night with Ahmed Shah Massoud is
described in "Slowly Stalking an Afghan "Lion"' by Craig Pyes and
William C. Rempel.  CHAPTER THIRTEEN John Steinbeck's perspective on
men and pocket knives comes from A Russia Journal.  NBC cameraman Tom
Streithorst's perspective on Afghan men comes from his unpublished
piece in Afghanistan'.  British diplomat Mountstuart Elphinstone's
nineteenth-century view comes from An Account of the Kingdom of CaubuL
The interview with Taliban Mullah Mohammed Hassan about the punishment
for gay men is quoted in an article entitled "With Sugared Tea and
Caustic Rules, an Afghan Leader Explains Himself by John Burns (New
York Times, 24 November 1996).

I have read two articles by my friend Levon Sevunts as background for
the advances on Mazar-i-Sharif, the battle that signalled the collapse
of the Taliban: "Afghan City Ripe: Anti-Taliban Forces Advance to
Within 8 Kilometres of Mazar' (Montreal Gazette, 9 November 2001) and
"Bombs Focused on Hills: Northern Alliance Expected to Launch Offensive
on Mazare Sharif Soon' (Montreal Gazette, 5 November 2001).

Information about the CIA's role in this battle, and the contribution
made by direct payments to commanders come from Bob Woodward's book
Bush At War.  I read the preview serialised in the Washington Post on
18 November 2002 ("CIA Led Way With Cash Handouts', additional
reporting by Mark Malseed).  The CIA calculated that it had spent only
US$70 million in direct cash outlays on the ground in Afghanistan, and
some of that had been to pay for field hospitals.  Woodward quotes
President Bush as saying in an interview "That's one bargain', and
wondering aloud what the Soviets had spent in their disastrous war in
Afghanistan that had contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The massacres at Mazar-i-Sharif are comprehensively covered by Ahmed
Rashid on page 72 of Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in
Central Asia, and the quote about Mullah Omar giving Taliban soldiers
permission to kill for two hours comes from page 73.1 have also
consulted the 1998 UN report by special rapport eur Paik Chong-Hyun,
who investigated the deaths of the Taliban.  There are also two Human
Rights Watch reports: The Massacre in Mazar-e-Sharif, 1998, and
Afghanistan: Crisis of Impunity, 2001.

In March 2002 the Sydney Morning Herald reviewed all this information,
and I found that article very useful.  See Paul McGeough's report on
the fallout from the tit-for-tat massacres ("Too slow: UN Digs its Own
Grave in Mazar', Sydney Morning Herald, 2 March 2002).  Paul McGeough
refers to a 65-page report critical of the failure of UN HCR to
investigate these massacres.  It was commissioned by the Afghanistan
Research and Evaluation Unit, an independent humanitarian advisory body
run by members from governments that donate to the Afghan relief effort
and aid agencies working in the country.  It was set up in 1999 in a
bid to improve the humanitarian operation in Afghanistan.

In writing about Rashid Dostum I referred to Ahmed Rashid's Taliban:
Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, and Patrick
Cockburn's "The Treacherous General' (Independent, 1 December 2001).

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The soldiers at the front line at Qala Qata as the battle began were
quoted by Levon Sevunts in "Exchange in Trenches, Afghan Rebels Take
Key City' (Montreal Gazette, 10 November 2001).

I have read the accounts of Paul McGeough and Levon Sevunts about the
night the three journalists died.  Levon went on to win an award for
his article about that night, which I first read as he was writing it
in the NBC house in Khoja Bahauddin: "Journalists die, I was thinking,
"We're fried"' (Montreal Gazette, 11 November 2001).

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Taloqan: I have read with great interest the interview with the Taliban
mullah in Taloqan by my colleague Jon Lee Anderson (The Surrender:
Double agents, defectors, disaffected Taliban, and a motley army battle
for Kunduz' (New Yorker, 10 December 2000).  I also referred to
"Stallholders Selling Out of Afghanistan's New Must-have Hat' by Justin
Huggler in Taloqan (Independent, 26 November 2001).

Crossing the Hindu Kush once again, my experience mirrors Fitzroy Ma
cLean from Eastern Approaches.  I also found that I had similar
impressions of the majestic Panjshir Valley to Mohsen Makhmalbaf.  The
reference to the role of the mountains in defeating Afghanistan's
enemies comes from page 9 of his article "Limbs of No Body' (see
Bibliography).  Many of the images at the end of the chapter can be
seen in the RAWA picture gallery some are ghastly and extremely
distressing, so be warned if you're going to look:
http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/gallery.html

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I have read a number of accounts of visitors to Kabul from different
eras, as well as my colleagues' accounts from today including Jon Lee
Anderson's "City of Dreams' (New Yorker, 24 December 2001, copyright
Jon lee Anderson 2001, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie
Agency Inc.). His wonderful observation about comparing the layers of
destruction in the city to the rings of a dead tree trunk comes from
page 3 of this article.

British travel writer Robert Byron wrote of Afghanistan in the 1930s
"Here at last is Asia without an inferiority complex' (The Road to
Oxiand).  This still rings true today.

There are also interesting photos of Kabul at
http://www.afghan-network.net/Photography/kabul/ This website includes
some of the sad photographs that are on sale as postcards in Kabul they
show the sites as they were in their heyday, with insets of them as
they are today in ruins.

The UN special investigator for Afghanistan compared Afghanistan to an
'infected wound' in an interview with Ahmed Rashid on 14 May 1998.

In addition to going to the Kabul zoo myself, I have read articles in
the wire services and for MS-NBC online by producer Kevin Sites, who
was in the group that crossed the Hindu Kush with me.  I have also read
a number of pieces on the Newspaper Zoo Wars, including Stephen Moss's
piece in the Guardian newspaper on 29 November 2001 entitled "Mail
Mauls Rivals with Lion Coup as Tabloid War Rages'.  Similarly, with the
movies, I went myself and have read wire copy on the return of the
cinema to Kabul, as well as "Limbs of No Body' by Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
All of Makhmalbaf's insights are fascinating, but as a film-maker who
tried to work here during Taliban times, his views on Afghanistan's
film culture are particularly pertinent.  The Taliban minister
explaining that entertainment should be limited to going to the park
and watching the grass grow came from the Associated Press wire story
"Taliban Restrict Music', December 1996 (quoted on page 115 of Taliban
by Ahmed Rashid).

The contrasting memories of Kabul in the 1970s come from Pakistani
journalist and academic Javed Nazir ("A Pakistani Perspective
Afghanistan: Past, Present, Future', journal of the International
Institute, University of Michigan, volume 9 number 2).  Javed Nazir is
a Michigan Journalism Fellow from Pakistan and former editor of the
Frontier Post, a nonconformist newspaper in Lahore.  He left Pakistan
after a letter published in his paper angered religious extremists, and
he is writing a book about religious minorities in Pakistan.

The "Taliban porn photos' were obtained by my friend and colleague
Craig Nelson who filed for the Sydney Morning Herald from Afghanistan.
I am indebted to him for showing them to me, along with the talcum
powder container he took from the bedroom of Mullah Omar's favourite
wife wife number three in Kandahar.  Definitely a memento to rival bin
Laden's birdcage!  I am also indebted to him and my friend Margaret
Coker for all their assistance and support in the writing of this
book.

The atrocities in Mazar during this conflict have been widely covered.
I referred to Andrea Catherwood's report for ITN (16 November 2001), as
well as the Associated Press report of 22 November 2001 ('600 Bodies
Discovered in Mazar-i-Sharif: ICRC').  The spokesman quoted is Mohammed
Muhahaiq, from the Hizb-i-Wahdat militia, fighting with the Northern
Alliance.

After my own visit to the al-Qaeda training camp at Rishkor I read "For
Taliban, Many Losses' by Scott Peterson in Christian Science Monitor
(26 November 2001).  There are presently reports that al-Qaeda is
returning to Afghanistan and re-establishing bases there.

I am indebted to Chris Stephen for all his help on the chemical weapons
plant story when we were in Kabul.  He is knowledgeable, and always
generous about sharing what he knows.  I have also read the following
articles: "Kabul Paper Trail Damns al-Qaeda' by Jason Burke in
Jalalabad, Tim Judah in Kabul and Peter Beaumont (Observer, 18 November
2001); "Arrest of Second Pakistan Expert Exposes Jehadi Bomb Trail'
(HTC and Agencies, Islamabad/ Moscow, October 25); "Pakistani Nuclear
Scientists Questioned Over Chemical Weapons', Rory McCarthy (Guardian,
29 November 2001); "UN Orders Sanctions On Pak Group' (Associated
Press, 27 December 2001); "U.S. Pinpointed Al-Qaeda Chemical/
Biological Sites', Phil Brennan (NewsMax.com, 12 November 2001).

The extent of al-Qaeda chemical and nuclear weapons capability has also
been widely covered.  The Times reported in the second week in November
that it had discovered partially burned documents in an abandoned
al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul, used by Taliban leaders, foreign fighters
and reportedly by bin Laden himself.  The notes, written in Arabic,
German, Urdu and English, had graphic designs for missiles, bombs and
nuclear weapons.  One set of notes, written on headed notepaper from
the Hotel Grand in Peshawar and dated 26 April 1998, said: "Naturally,
the explosive liquid has a very high mechanical energy, which is
translated into destructive force.  But it can be tamed, controlled and
can be used as a useful propulsive fuel if certain methods are applied
to it."  Other documents included descriptions of how the detonation of
TNT compresses plutonium to a critical mass, sparking a chain reaction,
and ultimately a thermonuclear reaction.  The design suggested bin
Laden might be working on a fission device, similar to Fat Man, the
bomb dropped on Nagasaki.  However, it must be emphasised that it is
extremely difficult to build a viable warhead.

Information relating to the issue of al-Qaeda chemical and nuclear
weapons capability continued to emerge after I had left Afghanistan,
including the following fascinating reports: "Terrorist Group Placed
Heavy Emphasis on Developing Nuclear Device' by Mike Boettcher and
Ingrid Arnesen, additional reporting by Sheila McVicar (CNN, 25 January
2002); Tapes Shed New Light on Bin Laden's Network' by Nic Robertson
(CNN, 18 August 2002).

A large archive of al-Qaeda videotapes obtained by CNN in Afghanistan
shed new light on Osama bin Laden's terror network, revealing images of
chemical gas experiments on dogs, lessons on making explosives,
terrorist training tactics and previously unseen images of bin Laden
and his top aides.  The archive includes 64 videotapes that span more
than a decade but it is the puppy being killed with nerve gas that is
the most memorable image.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Some statistics on women's health were provided for me at the Robia
Balkh Women's Hospital in Kabul by Dr.  Rahima Zafar Stanekzai.  I also
consulted "Women's Health and Human Rights in Afghanistan' by Zohra
Rasekh, MPH; Heidi M. Bauer, MD, MPH, MS; M. Michele Manos, PhD, MPH;
Vincent lacopino, MD, PhD.  See the Journal of the American Medical
Association, Vol.  280, pp.  449-455, 5 August 1998.

UNDP country development indicators for 1995 are quoted in Chapter
eight of Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia by
Ahmed Rashid.  Mullah Wakil's explanation that the Taliban were trying
to recreate the times of the Prophet more than 1000 years ago is quoted
on page 43 of Rashid's book.

I heard and saw John Simpson's coverage of the fall of Kabul, and it is
on the BBC website (14 November 2001).  As it became a cause celebre,
there was also much written about it, and he appeared on the BBC's
"Parkinson' program to explain his stance.  Reports include "Media
Monkey: Simpson liberates Kabul single handedly' by Jessica Hodgson
(Guardian, 13 November 2001); "Simpson Sorry for "Liberating" Kabul',
Lucy Ward (Guardian, 19 November 2001).  The BBC news team, including
Simpson, went on to win an Emmy for their coverage of the war in
Afghanistan, and especially the fall of Kabul.

The deaths of the four journalists driving in to Afghanistan from
Pakistan were widely covered.  In Kabul, I interviewed some journalists
who were caught up in the same attack and survived.  I have read wire
copy, including from the Associated Press and Reuters who lost two of
their people in this tragic incident.  Pamela Constable wrote two
excellent pieces for the Washington Post: "On Perilous Road to Kabul,
Gunmen Kill 4 Journalists' (20 November 2001); and a follow-up on the
next day (21 November 2001).

CHAPTER TWENTY

I am indebted to Chris Stephen for his assistance in Kabul on this
story of Osama bin Laden narrowly avoiding a US air strike.  I have
since read the feature piece about this incident in the Observer (The
Chase: He can run but can he hide?"  Chris Stephen and Tim Judah in
Kabul, Ed Vulliamy in Washington, Paul Harris in Quetta, James Astill
in Mogadishu and Peter Beaumont in London, 25 November 2001).

The al-Qaeda training camps at Khost were first visited by Jason Burke,
who told me about them in Kabul.  I have since read his piece in the
Observer ("Bin Laden's "varsity of terror" uncovered', 25 November
2001).

I have discussed the al-Qaeda computer find with Wall Street Journal
correspondent Alan Cullison in Moscow.  I have also read widely,
including articles that he and his colleague Andy Higgins wrote, such
as "PC Apparently Used by Al Qaeda Leaders Reveals Details of Four
Years of Terrorism' by Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins (Wall Street
Journal, Kabul, 31 December 2001).  Other useful articles were "Kabul
Computer Reveals Files of Top Al Qaeda Officials' by D. Ian Hopper,
Associated Press, 31 December 2001; "Al Qaeda Computer Found Contains
No Mention Of 911 Plot' by Reed Irvine (Accuracy In Media, 1 January
2002, based on Reuters report AFP REPORT 2 January 2002); "How the
Journal Got Al Qaeda's Computers' by Dan Kennedy (Boston e-mag the
phoenix.  com 3 January 2002).  I have also read all the reporting
about the shoe bomber Richard Reid, as I was in London when his attempt
to blow up a plane was foiled.

I went to the hairdresser in Kabul and read about the Taliban's
restrictions on women in "City of Secrets' by Carla Power (Newsweek, 13
July 1998) and Chapter 8 of Ahmed Rashid's book, Taliban, especially
pages 113-115.  Mohsen Makhmalbaf's thoughts about women wearing
make-up under their burqas is on page 24 of "Limbs of No Body' (see
Bibliography).

I have been heavily reliant on the work of my colleagues who were in
Mazar-i-Sharif at the time of the siege at the fortress: "CIA agent
possibly dead in Mazar-i-Sharif revolt' by Jim Wolf (26 November,
Washington Reuters); "Allies Direct the Death Rites of Trapped Taliban
Fighters', Luke Harding in Mazar-i-Sharif (Guardian, 27 November 2001);
"A Tank Roared In.  It Fired Four Rounds.  Then There Was Silence in
the Fort', Luke Harding in Mazar-i-Sharif on the last stand of the
Taliban (Guardian, 28 November 2001); "Dead lie crushed or shot, in the
dust, in ditches, amid the willows', Luke Harding (Guardian, 29
November 2001); The Castle of Death' by Justin Huggler (Independent, 30
November 2001); "Errors revealed in siege of Afghan fort', Luke
Harding, Nicholas Watt, and Ewen Macaskill (Guardian, 1 December 2001);
"Smoke-blackened and Wounded, Yet Lucky to be Alive, the Survivors of
Qalai Janghi Emerge', Justin Huggler (Independent, 3 December 2001);
"Inside the Battle at Qala-i-Jangi' by Alex Perry (Time magazine, 10
December 2001, Volume 158, No.  23, 2001 TIME Inc."  reprinted by
permission); "SAS Role in Fort Deaths Questioned' by Richard
Norton-Taylor (Guardian, 15 December 2001); "Captured Taliban
Suffocated on Trip to Jail', Carlotta Gall (New York Times, 12 December
2001).

Nine months after the siege, Newsweek detailed the findings of a
Physicians for Human Rights inquiry into the deaths of Taliban soldiers
transported by containers from Kunduz to Sheberghan prison.  See "The
Death Convoy of Afghanistan' by Babak Dehghan-pish eh John Barry and
Roy Gutman (Newsweek, 26 August 2002).  More than 1000 men are alleged
to have died of asphyxiation.  The forces allegedly responsible were
under General Dostum's command.  General Dostum's spokesperson,
Faizullah Zaki, conceded to Newsweek that many people did die of
suffocation, but he put the total at 'between 100 and 120 people, a few
from each container'.  He added that some of them 'were seriously
injured and died en route'.  He suggested that the uprising at
Qala-i-Jangi prison, just three days earlier, might have affected their
treatment.  If the incident at Qala-Jangi hadn't happened, it's
possible that the prisoners would have been transferred more
peacefully.  There would have been less irregularities," he said,
adding: "They suffocated.  Died, not killed.  Nobody killed anybody."
Zaki also said that General Dostum was not there when the prisoners
were loaded into containers.

"The technical details of the transfer were left to lower-level
commanders."  He added that 'there was a handful of American soldiers
that didn't leave Dostum's] side' during the period in question.

The US response to criticism of its role in Mazar came from Kenton
Keith at a daily US press briefing in Pakistan, quoted in Karachi News,
1 December 2001.  Paul McGeough's article in the Sydney Morning Herald
("Too slow: UN digs its own grave in Mazar', 2 March 2002) details the
failure of earlier UN investigations into the tit-for-tat massacres
around Mazar.

The Emergency hospital for the treatment of victims of war has a
website containing information about their hospitals in Afghanistan and
throughout the world:

http://www.emergency.it/eng/index.html.

Statistics about land mines were provided by the UN De-mining Agency in
a series of interviews I conducted in Kabul.  I also referred to Ahmed
Rashid's Taliban (Chapter 9, p. 126), and to Mohsen Makhmalbaf's "Limbs
of No Body' (p.  1, see Bibliography).

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I reported from the Russian embassy and also referred to wire copy,
which made me realise that the Russians returned to their embassy on
the same day that the first movie was screened in Kabul.  See the
Associated Press report of 19 November 2001: "Russia to Open Embassy in
Afghanistan' by Arun Mohanty in Moscow.

With UN support, refugees from the Russian embassy compound did start
returning to the Shomali plains from the end of December and rebuilding
their villages and their lives.  See "The Long March Home Begins' by
Rory Carroll (Guardian, 29 December 2001).  However, the UN said it
would take several months before the bulk of the Shomali's 200,000
refugees returned: "The major obstacle is the presence of mines.  Mine
clearance is very time consuming and the place is basically now a
desert."

Catching the elusive Osama bin Laden: the quote from the CIA
counter-terrorism chief about wanting bin Laden's head in a box, and
the agent's response are both from Bush At War, by Bob Woodward.  I
read the preview serialised in the Washington Post entitled "CIA Led
Way With Cash Handouts' (18 November 2002, additional reporting by Mark
Malseed).  Bibliography Anderson, Jon Lee, The Lion's Grave, Grove
Press, 2002 Byron, Robert, The Road to Oxiana, Jonathan Cape, December,
1966 Cooley, John, Unholy Wars Afghanistan, America and International
Terrorism, Pluto Press, London, 2002 Elphinstone, Mountstuart, An
Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, London, Longman Hurst and Murray,
1815 Hopkirk, Kathleen, A Central Asian Companion, John Murray
Publishers Ltd, London, 1993 Hopkirk, Peter, The Great Game On Secret
Service in High Asia, Oxford University Press, 2001 Kapuscinski,
Ryszard, Imperium, Granta Books, London, 1998 Ma cLean Fitzroy, Eastern
Approaches, Jonathan Cape, London, 1949 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, "Limbs of
No Body: World's Indifference to the Afghan Tragedy', The Iranian
magazine, 20 June 2001.  Also available on his website:
www.makhmalbaf.com Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great
Game in Central Asia, I.B. Tauris & Co, London, 2000 Schulteis, Rob,
Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan, Orion Books, New York, 1992
Steinbeck, John, A Russia Journal, Penguin Books, 1999; first published
in the US by Viking, 1948 Thubron, Colin, In Siberia, Penguin Books,
London, 2000 Woodward, Bob, Bush At War, Simon & Schuster, 2002 Yousaf,
Mohammed, The Bear Trap: Afghanistan's Untold Story, Pen &c Sword
Books/ Leo Cooper, 1992