In a 10-minute span on Thursday afternoon, three different cars arrived here from towns ruled by three different Afghan warlords. The first car arrived from Jalalabad, where a local political leader named Mawlawi Yunis Khalis has declared himself ruler, rejecting the Northern Alliance and the Taliban's authority.
The second came from the nearby city of Towr Kham, where a local commander named Hazrati Ali has seized power. The third arrived from Sorubi, where Ezatullah, a local commander with only one name, has created his own fief.
All three arrived at a Northern Alliance checkpoint set up near Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan, one of five provinces where Taliban forces have fled but Northern Alliance forces have failed to establish control.
PHOTO: AFP
Three days after the fall of Kabul, power vacuums in outlying provinces are being filled by local military commanders, political leaders and anyone with a gun. Parts of Afghanistan are beginning to present the same picture of lawlessness that led to the rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990s.
"The local people who have guns are now powerful," said Musa, a 30-year-old baker from Towr Kham. "We need some security."
Passengers in all three cars described fear and unease in the towns, but not yet panic and lawlessness. They suggested that if the situation is not addressed quickly, divisions could deepen.
The only direct front line that still exists between the alliance and Taliban forces is 161km southwest of Kabul near the city of Ghazni. Elsewhere, warlords seem to have established fiefs as former Taliban leaders melt away and rival groups within the dominant ethnic Pashtun group battle for the spoils.
Less than a week after Taliban power began to collapse across Afghanistan with the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif to forces of the Northern Alliance, the country's political map is beginning to look ominously like the map of 1989, after Soviet forces withdrew, or for that matter, like the map of Afghanistan while Moscow was attempting to turn Afghanistan into a pliant colony on its southern frontier.
Even under King Mohammad Zahir Shah, overthrown in 1973, Afghanistan was a construct of semi-independent fiefs, ruled by feudal chiefs who pledged loyalty to the monarchy in Kabul but acted, in practice, with wide autonomy. How the US and its Western allies might impose some unity on this fragmented country remains unclear.
Once the feudal lords of Afghanistan protected their power with muskets. But the warlords -- the so-called jihadi commanders of the 1980s Muslim guerilla struggle against Moscow and its puppet government in Kabul -- acquired the weapons of modern warfare, including mortars, shoulder-fired rockets, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and millions of Kalashnikov rifles.
By one 1989 estimate, more than 10 million Kalashnikovs were funneled into Afghanistan in the nine years of the Soviet occupation -- more than one rifle for every two Afghans in a country of about 15 million at the time of the 1978 Communist coup. Many of these weapons are still available.
Until this week, the high tide of new warlordism came between 1992 and 1996, when the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara ethnic factions that now comprise the Northern Alliance, as well as one of the major Pashtun factions, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, gained control of Kabul. That action came in the wake of the collapse of the puppet pro-Moscow government of President Mohammed Najibullah.
On Thursday, the men from Jalalabad said that Khalis, the local political leader, was the most powerful figure in the city. But they said armed supporters of Abdul Haq, the Afghan dissident hung by the Taliban last month, and Haji Kadir, a senior official in the Northern Alliance, are also present.
"The United States and United Nations should follow their plan, they should come to these places," pleaded Mohammad Zaman, a shopkeeper who arrived in the car from Jalalabad. "We are all afraid of this."
The gains made by alliance forces in the last week have created the potential for fragmentation across a wide swath of Afghanistan.
In the North, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek alliance commander, now appears to control the city of Mazar-i-Sharif and is again in position to receive aid from Uzbekistan. In the West, General Ismael Khan, an alliance commander, has regained control of the city of Herat, and is again in position to be Iran's proxy. Many provinces in eastern Afghanistan could fall under the influence of Pakistan. Pashtuns live on either side of the eastern border, in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Northern Alliance officials have apparently decided to not use force to win control of areas dominated by the Pashtuns. On Thursday, there was no evidence of a significant number of troops being massed near Nangarhar and Logar provinces, two areas east and south of Kabul where local officials seized power after the Taliban fled.
One report here on Thursday suggested that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a notoriously ruthless warlord, had returned from self-exile in Iran to proclaim himself governor of Logar Province. Control of Logar, which at its northern edge is only 24km south of Kabul, would make Hekmatyar a major power-broker.
Hekmatyar is in many ways the incarnation of the Afghan warlord -- ruthless, pitiless toward enemies, dedicated to nothing but power.
As a student at Kabul University in the 1960s, he was notorious as the leader of a militant Islamic student group that threw acid in the face of unveiled women students.
The Northern Alliance seems unready to take such warlords on, at least for now. It may well lack the manpower needed to mount attacks across the country. The alliance fields only 15,000 soldiers and the amount of territory it controls has quadrupled in two weeks.
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