GARDEZ (Afghanistan): More than 60 prisoners, squatting along the walls of a frigid room in a police compound overlooking this city, gazed down dejectedly as the story of their capture was told.

The men had been with Bacha Khan, a local warlord who was appointed governor of Paktia province last week by Hamid Karzai, leader of Afghanistan’s interim government. They were coming to the provincial center with their leader to claim their prize and celebrate.

But the Gardez governing council didn’t want them, and when they arrived, fighting broke out around an ancient fort known as Bala Hissar. It quickly spread, and artillery rounds were soon landing on houses near the fort, and men were shooting at one another in the town’s central bazaar.

Gardez, a mainly ethnic Pakhtoon city 60 miles southeast of Kabul, is not one of the important cities in Afghanistan. But last week’s revolt underscores a dangerous weakness in Karzai’s struggling interim government — that its political control is limited outside the capital, and that it has no national army to resolve the inevitable disputes.

The fighting also raises the specter of the kind of factional violence that doomed Afghan governments of the early 1990s and opened the way for the rise of the Taliban.

More than 60 people are believed to have died in the open street fighting on Wednesday and Thursday, the worst violence in Afghanistan since the Taliban collapsed. Khan’s forces retreated on Friday, leaving behind artillery pieces, 15 of the pickup trucks that serve as Afghan troop carriers and almost 400 prisoners.

“We will trade these men if Bacha Khan goes away,” said Qasim Mohammed, a young commander fighting on behalf of the Gardez council, or shura, who helped capture the prisoners. “If he insists on coming to Gardez, we will continue to resist.”

Because US Special Forces are stationed in Gardez as part of the effort to prevent Al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives from fleeing to Pakistan, the fighting raises questions about their perceived and actual roles. It also threatened the safety of US troops for a time; Gardez fighters said the US compound was in the line of fire between the two factions.

The Afghan government’s response to the fighting was not to send in troops, but rather to dispatch a team of civilians to find out what happened and why. Those officials held separate talks on Sunday with the two sides, who refused a joint meeting.

“There are too many dead on both sides for them to talk together about a solution,” said Shahbaz Ahmadzai, a special adviser to Karzai and member of the delegation.

Both sides said they want to find a peaceful solution, but also said they were arming further to continue and even escalate the battle.

A spokesman for Khan’s forces said they were moving artillery into the snowy mountains that ring the city.

But Khan said on Sunday that he would hold off any attack until Friday, as long as talks continued with the officials from Kabul to secure the release of his fighters.

The Gardez fighting also reveals apparent splits within the Afghan government, between the Karzai group and leaders of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance militia who now control most of the national security ministries.

Reflecting the bare-knuckles politics involved, the deputy minister of the central government’s intelligence agency, former Northern Alliance commander Abdullah Jan, said last weekend in Kabul that “the only solution is to listen to the people and find an alternative to Bacha Khan.” He said that many Afghans perceive the United States to be supporting Khan and are beginning to question the previously popular American presence.

US warplanes circled over Gardez on Sunday, as they did during the fighting, but US military officials have told both sides that they are neutral in the dispute. They have brought the factions together to discuss a prisoner exchange and have ferried delegation leaders and ministers between Kabul and Gardez in US helicopters, but have said they do not intend to be active negotiators themselves.

However, several US officials were believed to be part of Sunday’s mediation efforts.

Karzai had been warned that there was strong local opposition to Khan, who has been accused of corruption and being unusually highhanded, but nonetheless appointed him governor of Paktia province last week.

Khan’s forces have also filled an early vacuum of Pakhtoon leaders eager to work with US forces. His troops guard the US base in Khost, for instance, and have been widely reported to be a major source of intelligence on Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

They have also been a source of controversy; Khan has been accused of giving US forces misleading information about a delegation from the Khost area that was hit by a deadly airstrike while travelling to Karzai’s inauguration in December.

Although neither side is eager to acknowledge it, tribal politics seem to be involved in the dispute. —Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.