The Taliban hunters

PITHAVE, Afghanistan -- A Soviet bullet entered his skull behind the left ear and exited via the nearest eye socket, leaving nothing but lid. Two decades later, a permanently winking Maj. Mulla Naimatullah beams with pride when his commanding general tells this story.

Then there is Col. Talib Hayatallah, who literally ate a Taliban slug. It crashed into his mouth and pulverized every tooth on the left side of his face before bursting out his cheekbone. He, too, smiles in satisfaction about the flesh-and-bone medal of valor.

These are America's allies in the south-central Afghan precinct of the worldwide war on terrorism, just two of the 220 men who recently began an open-ended mission to hunt for Taliban fighters who have gained a foothold back inside the country.

The United States toppled the Taliban's darkly repressive Islamic regime in 2001, payment for harboring the headquarters of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terror group, which pulled off the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The Bush administration's plan to rebuild this Texas-sized place includes the creation of a new national army and the disarming of a veritable army of warlord militias -- including the relatively elite 1818 Advanced Special Operations, an oft-ambushed intelligence task force to which Naimatullah and Hayatallah belong.

U.N. teams plan to begin the disarmament program on Oct. 18, offering cash for weapons. But few expect much cooperation from the warlords who have bankrolled their own armies to fight 23 years worth of wars in Afghanistan.

To the commanding officers of this unit -- run by the secular ruler of southern Kandahar Province and various other regional Sunni Muslims -- the disarming idea triggers more perplexity than anger.

"We're fighting the Taliban and they want us to disarm?" asked the hulking Gen. Atta Mohammad, director of Kandahar Special Forces and leader of this patrol, which consists of 20 commanding officers of other units, each with 10 of their own hand-picked men.

Their mission, is to patrol the rugged and isolated area that forms the apex of three hot provinces: Zabol, Kandahar and Uruzgan. Scores of aid workers and others affiliated with the Western presence in Afghanistan have been murdered in recent weeks in the region.

As the force casually mobilized in a Kandahar military base parking lot, the general -- who like many Afghans, only has one name -- strode among his men, giving an upbeat but vague outline of their mission to scout Taliban command posts. He would be heading into the most isolated areas of the country, with no U.S. assistance.

"Our goal is to gather intelligence, show the flag (of Afghanistan) and capture the Taliban alive," he boomed. "If they ambush us again, we'll have to kill them," he added, a month after his unit lost a man to enemy fire.

Then off they went at sunset last weekend, one of the boldest moves yet by regional chieftains to show they belong in Afghanistan's democratic future and its national army, after helping the United States do much of the fighting on the ground while the U.S.-led force shelled the Taliban and its al-Qaida cohorts.

A pair of Associated Press reporters went along for the first two days of the patrol's hashish-scented ride through "ground zero" of the southern-based Taliban operations, which have spread inland from the border regions during the past six weeks to an area devoid of any international presence.

The idea of disarming career guerrillas seemed as alien as southeast Afghanistan's shades-of-beige landscape, with jagged mountain ridges that loom like hallucinatory skyscrapers, roads cut into maze-like gorges that turn a truck into a target, and treacherous stretches of rock quarry-like paths on which dust clouds often allow zero visibility.

The guerrillas, shrouded in robes over their camouflage fatigues, traveled in 10 light pickup trucks and two larger trucks filled with fuel, spare tires and other supplies. They were on a loosely planned mission to fly the flag for the isolated, impressionable people of the flyspeck villages that are often hideaways for the Taliban -- a term that has been loosely used of late to include any enemy of the U.S.-backed central government.

As night fell, some of the scouts noticed what seemed like the same pickup truck pass them a second time. They moved slowly into the mountains, then stopped when they saw a pair of headlights coming toward them. It was the same truck, doubling back and, seemingly, scouting their movements. Taliban spy?

Two soldiers were the first to burst out of their vehicles, swinging their Kalashnikovs, and soon dozens of others were pulling a young man from the truck. Terrified, he said he was heading toward a town and had lost his way. He was asked if he knew the name of a prominent tribal leader who lives in a village near the town.

"Yes, he's my neighbor," the young man said.

"And the name of the village?" the general asked.

The man didn't know.

"Maybe he was scouting, maybe he was a spy," Gen. Atta said. In any case, he was hustled into the bed of his pickup truck, flanked by armed soldiers, and his vehicle was incorporated into a patrol of indefinite duration.

"Worried? I'm more than worried," the 20-year-old suspect, a visibly shuddering Abdul Aziz, told a reporter as he was tucked into the back of his truck the next morning. The patrol continued deeper into the most obscure parts of the south. Aziz was along for the ride pending more interrogation, the general said, though the unit seemed more interested in the extra vehicle at their disposal.

The Afghan government is trying to rein in warlords who control most of the countryside while it builds an entirely new army, which so far numbers only about 5,000. The militias are proving difficult to control, and even those who support the post-Taliban government have waged war with each other over local disputes.

Yet these are also longtime American allies who drove the Soviet Union from the country at the Cold War's end, then helped topple the regime that harbored the architects of the biggest terror attack on U.S. soil.

They wear their wounds of allegiance with honor, yet they are rogues the Bush administration aims to disarm.

Disarm? The idea seems incomprehensible even to callow young militiaman like Lala Jann, who signed on after the Taliban were toppled at the age of 19.

"This unit is an efficient unit," he said of the 1818 Advanced Special Ops, many of whom smoke the dizzying hashish that is a staple of the culture, especially among secular groups like Kandahar's Sunni Muslims.

"I have to fight for my country."

Now 21, he was born into war and plans to carry a gun even if peace finally takes hold. His future, he said, is as a soldier in south Afghanistan, though he has no scars to show for it. Not yet.