Northern Afghanistan

As the sun sets in Kunduz on Monday night, an alliance commander, who looked a little like Fidel Castro and gave his name only as Hussein, said the Taliban who would not surrender were chased to the west. A loudspeaker blared, warning of an impending curfew, drowning out the commander's voice. A few Northern Alliance leaders attached to the staff of General Mohammad Daoud Khan approached my translator and me. It's time to go, he said; this street might look safe for now, but foreigners shouldn't be around here after dark.

As the opposition forces edged closer to total victory in the region, tensions actually seemed to heighten. There was no longer an established front line. On the way back to Taloqan in the dark, past a thirty-foot crater in the road and between gangs of fighters, there was only silence.

Previously in Taloqan, children had hawked bread at the bustling bazaar, barefoot merchants lounging in their stalls sold pomegranates and apples by the light of kerosene lamps, men at the local restaurants ate rice and lamb after their Ramadan fasts, with smoke rising from the grilling shashlik, and boys yelled at their mules, thwacking away with sticks. Strangers would look at Westerners and put their hands on their hearts with a slight bow in the ancient Central Asian manner. But this night, victory in hand, there was just dark settling in the streets, and a few armed men patrolling, their allegiance unknown.

That evening, in the city, another journalist was killed, the eighth since this war had started. Western journalists in Afghanistan have been laden with cash, stashed in money belts, shoes and anywhere else it can be hidden. Each one carries enough money to make an Afghan family rich beyond its dreams for life. The journalists carry the most recent laptop computers and satellite phones, powered by generators in a country without electricity, where the mass of the population live in misshapen mud huts.

The latest victim was shot in a house about fifty yards from where I was staying. A Swedish cameraman with two children at home, he had been talking on his satellite phone to his wife earlier in the evening, planning a vacation. Past midnight, four armed men broke into a house where he and his crew were staying. According to the crew's translator, at first the gunmen threatened to kill the entire group. Foreign invaders, they said, would die. The translator begged the fighters to save their lives. It's Ramadan, he said, these men have families; they don't have guns. Three journalists were spared--but the cameraman took an AK-47 round in the chest and died on the way to the city's wretched hospital.

By the early morning, a group of journalists huddled at the rented house of the European Broadcasting Union and smoked anxiously outside. A gracious and experienced gray-haired Swedish television correspondent, who has covered some of the most violent parts of the world, was crying, mourning his lost friend. "Why did they kill him?" he asked, over and over again.

It's no secret that the Taliban, in spite of their atrocities, were tolerated by the West because they stabilized a violent country by smothering it. Now, it was as if the end of the front line, the victory at Kunduz and the seeming consolidation of power had brought an end to that brutally enforced stability. Fighters may not have been in position anymore, but it seemed they were everywhere.

The next morning convoys of journalists abandoning Taloqan started on the bone-jarring, six-hour drive over desert dust back toward Tajikistan. A TV network let me ride with them, and a rented mujahedeen warrior lounged awkwardly in the back of the pickup truck, with an AK-47 and an ornate handmade-leather shoulder holster for easy access to more ammunition. Shy, he smiled and put his hand over his heart in the ancient Central Asian manner. By then, according to the accounts reporters were getting on their satellite phones, the conference in Germany was under way, and the participants were haggling politely, without guns, about some theoretical Afghanistan of the future.

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