JALALABAD: Afghanistan is now entering the bumpy - and risky - transition phase between war and peace. Here, looting and fighting continues while anti-Taliban factions jockey for political power.

On a national level, the same postwar positioning is starting. Deposed Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani returned to Kabul for the first time in five years on Saturday. Perhaps assuming that possession is 9/10ths of the law, he took up residence in Palace No 1. He met on Monday with UN envoy Francesc Vendrell, who is pushing hard this week to create a broad-based interim regime. But there is already bickering over just where to broker a deal.

On the battlefront, US warplanes continued to pound an estimated 3,000 Taliban, Pakistani, and Arab fighters who control Kunduz. At press time on Monday, an opposition commander said that the Taliban had offered to surrender Kunduz provided there was a guarantee of safety for Osama bin Laden’s foreign fighters. Iran delayed a 15-truck aid convoy on Monday after a gunfight broke out between two anti-Taliban factions in Herat.

In Kandahar, there was no sign that the Taliban were ready to withdraw from the power base they captured seven years ago, despite reports on Friday that they negotiated a withdrawal that would leave the city in the hands of fellow ethnic Pakhtoons.

Here the transition of power is rocky. Looting and lawlessness are still apparent, and residents are wary. “The people who are in power now will repeat the same mistakes,” says Shamsul Haq, a drug-control officer who served both for the Taliban and the previous mujahideen governments. “In the last three or four days you are witnesses of what they are doing. They are looting in the offices and they have returned to the same positions. I don’t think it will be a healthy administration.”

It is a situation that mirrors the fractious condition of Afghanistan itself, but instability and lawlessness among the Pakhtoons - Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group - could have effects far beyond the mud-hut oasis and rich farmlands around Jalalabad. The reason has as much to do with history as with Afghanistan’s complex ethnic makeup.

Pakhtoons have always dominated Afghan politics and they have the greatest potential to undo any peace plan or any chance for a truly stable Afghan government. If Pakhtoon warlords here cannot restore peace in their homeland, they may be shut out of power in the central government of Kabul, which is currently composed of ethnic minorities. And if history is the gauge, any government that excludes Pakhtoons is a fragile one.

The man who arrived here first on Monday claims the traditional right to divide the spoils. That man was Hazrat Ali. A warlord of the Nooristani minority who arrived just two hours after Taliban governor Haji Kabir left here. Ali’s speed assured him not just control over most of Jalalabad but a position in the next government as minister for law and order.

The process of carving up the spoils is still taking place in the massive domed governor’s mansion here. Behind closed doors the top Mujahideen leaders - including newly selected governor Abdul Habir, security minister Haji Zaman Ghamsharik and law-and-order minister Hazrat Ali - are deciding which faction could receive the remaining posts.

Outside these doors, the hallways look like Washington, DC, with lobbyists offering advice that serves the people - and themselves. The difference of course is the presence of dozens of young fighters carrying assault rifles.

But amid the peace talks, many Pakhtoons here grouse that ethnic minorities like Ali, and the just-returned Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, cannot be trusted. After all, they say, Ali - the man charged with maintaining law and order - has dozens of soldiers under his command riding around in pickup trucks apparently stolen from UN relief agencies here.

One of Ali’s commanders, Muhammad Khaksar, has assured the UN that any of his men caught stealing will be punished according to Islamic law: Their hands will be chopped off. Outside the governor’s mansion, hundreds of supporters wait to find out what their leaders have been able to gain for each respective group. And residents and warlords in this city warn that a crucial - and emblematic - showdown is developing.

Ali and Ghamsharik - two pro-Western regional commanders - are bickering over who has both the right and the might to attack several hundred, possibly 1,000 of the best Arab fighters in the Al Qaeda network, who have vowed to make a last stand from their Tora Bora mountain redoubt south of the city.

The sudden collapse of the Taliban regime in eastern Afghanistan along with reemerging rivalries have already given hundreds of Arab fighters a chance to slip out of the country and into Pakistan.—Dawn/LATS Service (c) Christian Science Monitor.