Carjackings, Shoot-outs and Banditry

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Delawar loved his car, a blue Toyota 4x4 that chewed up the unpaved roads around Jalalabad. Two weeks ago a group of bearded men wrapped in shawls pointed their Kalashnikovs at him and demanded the keys. Now he watches every day as armed militia drive his car through Jalalabad, the main city in eastern Afghanistan and the summer residence of the former King. Delawar hasn't reported the incident to the police because there are no police. There is a security chief, a warlord who returned a fortnight ago with his supporters from Pakistan to reclaim the city, bloodlessly, from the fleeing Taliban. So Delawar asked him for help. "I told him that his men had stolen my car and I'd like it back," he says. But the new leadership, which is loosely affiliated to the Northern Alliance, refuses to return the automobile.

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While some are benefiting from the lawlessness, many of Jalalabad's citizens are starting to miss the comparative stability under their former rulers, as they are once again thrust into the maelstrom of feuding warlords. The Taliban's strict, often brutal, interpretations of Islamic law banned everything from music to squeaky shoes, but at least there were laws. (Rough justice is no excuse, of course, for the Taliban's intellectual and cultural oppression.) But now, as the three warlords who control Jalalabad remain inside their walled compounds, residents on the dusty streets outside fear their city will slip into medieval disorder. Relief grain sent by the World Food Program sits in warehouses, as deliveries remain too dangerous to complete. Bandits have overrun the most important road in Afghanistan, from Jalalabad to Kabul, rendering it impassable to anyone without an armed escort (four journalists traveling along it were executed on Nov. 26). Blood feuds that smoldered during the Taliban years have rekindled into nighttime firefights. Asked about these problems, the city's top military commander, Haji Zaman, arches his eyebrows. "There is no problem," he says. "Everything is O.K."

One person who apparently shares that view is Mohammed Azin. A peasant sharecropper outside the town, he stopped planting opium poppies after the Taliban banned the golden harvest last year and decimated the country's poppy fields. Azin's annual income shrank fivefold, he says, to less than $150. His nine children dress in rags, and his own flowing salwar kameez is so threadbare it has split at both elbows. He stands barefoot in his freshly plowed field with a football-sized lump of opium seeds gathered into the front of his garment. With flicks of his right hand, he scatters the seeds across the clumped earth. "I decided to plant poppies as soon as the Taliban left," he explains. After all, who will stop him?

When the Taliban fled, 140 men were serving time in the local prison for crimes including theft, murder and adultery. Conditions were harsh: prisoners slept eight to a room on the concrete floors and ate little but bread and water, although they were allowed to roam the yard for five hours a day and occasionally punch volleyballs over a net that still hangs there. There were no beatings, says a former inmate named Abdullah. "For punishment, they'd make us chop wood," he says. Today, documents are scattered across the clerk's floor and somehow Abdullah the thief has won a job as a guard. He isn't busy. Jalalabad has neither prisoners nor courts to sentence them. Commander Zaman explains that he offered someone a job as judge but was turned down.

Violent crime, meanwhile, is soaring. A nurse at Jalalabad's hospital says the number of gunshot victims has risen sharply since the Taliban left. That the hospital functions at all is a tribute to its staff: nobody has been paid in six months. Among the eight patients in one of the trauma wards are an 18-year-old whose face was crushed when a U.S. bomb destroyed his house, a 10-year-old boy shot by a stray bullet and an angry shepherd named Khan. He says that when he was tending his sheep last week, 25 armed men working for another of the city's commanders, regional security chief Hazrat Ali, drove up and began stealing the animals. He tried to stop them, and they shot him twice in the chest. "This kind of thing never happened under the Taliban," he says.

Few expect the situation to improve. Another of the city's power brokers, provincial governor and Pashtun leader Haji Abdul Qadir, was in Bonn for talks on the future national government when he staged a walkout, citing a lack of Pashtun representation. One of his last acts before leaving Jalalabad had been to declare that visitors entering Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass—one of only two border crossings from Pakistan—must first obtain written permission from his office. Permission costs $100. Foreigners traveling to Jalalabad must stay in his residence. This also costs $100, or more than triple the price of the city's regular hotel. But at least his armed guards aren't shooting each other. Those of commander Hazrat Ali are. He says two families in his militia used their Kalashnikovs to settle a long-standing feud. Two people died. "This is Afghanistan," he explains. "It had nothing to do with the government." It's an apt summary of the depth of the nation's problems.