November 27, 2001	Tuesday	Ramazan 11, 1422

CHARAKA (Afghanistan) - It was the perfect place for an ambush. The road curved around a rocky hill, the barren landscape disappearing into the distance, and suddenly a half-dozen guerrillas in black Taliban turbans appeared, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, positioned to pounce on unwary passers-by.

On Saturday, Gulajan Armani and his fellow fighters might have done just that. But on Sunday the fierce 32-year-old fighter and his men were guarding the road not for the Taliban, but for the other side. “We’re helping the Northern Alliance now,” he said. “We just want peace to come to our country. We’re fed up with fighting.” One side one day, the other the next - this is war and politics, Afghan style.

In a country afflicted by 22 years of armed conflict, loyalties shift like the dust that swirls across the arid terrain here about 25 miles southwest of Kabul. Afghans have a remarkable, chameleon-like capacity for reinventing themselves. And nothing does more to change allegiances than the realization that the enemy has more firepower. Much like the Taliban’s rise to power from 1994 to 1996, the dramatic reversal of fortunes in recent weeks - the Northern Alliance has seized most of Afghanistan - was driven less by battlefield valour than by negotiating prowess. One by one, Taliban commanders and local warlords who had thrown their lot in with the radical militia over the years have yielded to the Northern Alliance, which recently has been assisted by the air power of the US and Britain.

On Sunday, a local leader who had previously sided with the Taliban in the impoverished villages around Maidan Shahr surrendered and agreed to turn over his heavy weapons to a Northern Alliance commander, ending a weeklong saga that offered a glimpse into the web of fealty and feuding that governs Afghanistan.

The showdown for Maidan Shahr was one largely driven by two local leaders vying for power. One was affiliated with the Taliban and the other with the Northern Alliance. In the end, they made a deal rather than fight.

Still, the situation seemed hard for some Taliban fighters to swallow. Standing off to the side, balancing his rifle with the safety released, Mir Rahman, 25, brooded and blamed the United States for coming to the aid of the Northern Alliance.

“The Taliban were very good,” he said. “They brought true Islam here. They brought order here. But the foolish people here,” he added, glancing over at the alliance troops, “are really looters.”

The young man was in a religious school when the Taliban arrived in this area in 1996 and he eagerly joined the militia. ”Now the Northern Alliance has occupied the area with a superpower and so I join them,” he said, describing his reasons for switching in purely pragmatic terms. He continued to wear the black turban often worn by Taliban troops.

“I had to join the Northern Alliance,” explained Ghulam Mohammad, the commander who conceded, stroking his long dark beard. “If we didn’t surrender to the Northern Alliance, many people would have died.”

Standing next to him, Rahman, the alliance commander, said that he believed his former enemy would live up to his word. “We trust Afghans, we trust each other,” he said. “There were some problems and we solved them. They are free to go.” Rahman emphasized that “it wasn’t a fight between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban of Mohammad Omar. It was just a fight between two commanders of the district.” As of now, he added, Mohammad “is a member of the (alliance) Defence Ministry and we have no problem with him.”

But loyalties can switch again. Back at the checkpoint, Armani, the former Taliban fighter, was pledging himself to the Northern Alliance too. But after a Western journalist was out of earshot, he confided to a driver that his group only defected to learn what was happening on the other side of the negotiations. If they do not like the results, he added, they will simply switch back. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.