"Please-what is that word?"

He writes it down as I spell it out.

"Please-are they legal where you live?"

I've no idea. Sort of, I think.

"But please," he asks, "if everyone is allowed to sleep with each other anyway, what is the point of them?"

I try asking Kalahan about the civil war that ravaged Kabul and killed thousands of its citizens in the early 90s. There's enough of Kabul still standing up to give me the idea that it must have been quite an attractive city, once. It was also rather fun, according to long-serving expats I meet in the UN Club, now Kabul's only licensed premises ("In 1992," recalls one Belgian doctor, "you could stay out all night, and it was only about as far off the pace as Budapest, or somewhere like that"). Today, several suburbs of Kabul are uninhabitable ruins, though people still inhabit them. Even the less damaged areas look like English football fans have been staying in them ("And culturally," the same doctor tells me, "this place has gone from 1976 to 1376").

Kalahan and others his age don't really want to talk about the war, or the Soviet invasion that preceded it, or the Taliban takeover that followed it. This is understandable-it's all they've ever known. UNICEF estimates that 70 percent of Kabul's children lost a family member between 1992 and 1996. It's like trying to get Mauritanians excited about discussing drought.

"The Taliban," explains Kalahan, resignedly, "stopped the war."

But aren't you frightened of them?

"Of course. But they won't last. n.o.body does."

n.o.body, least of all the Afghans themselves, has ever succeeded in governing Afghanistan's volatile mix of tribes (half Pakhtun, with the balance made up by Tajiks, Turkomans, Uzbeks and Hazaras). Many have tried: the Sikh and Persian empires, Tsarist Russia and Victorian Britain. In 1979, the USSR decided it was the nation for the job and, just as America had done in Vietnam, found its immense, sophisticated army locked in unwinnable combat with motivated guerillas-performing the military equivalent of trying to swat wasps with a steamroller.

When Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the jig was up in 1988, Red Army casualties stood at 50,000. The road between Kabul and the Pakistani border is still littered with rusting remains of dead Soviet tanks. The tribesmen of Afghanistan, the dashing horse-mounted mujahedin who had opposed the initial Soviet invasion with rusty cutla.s.ses and flintlock rifles, were by this stage bringing down MIG fighter planes with Stinger surface-to-air missiles. They hadn't found these lying around-America, reasoning that the enemy of its enemy was its friend, spent $3 billion equipping and training the mujahedin. In creating this army of Islamic holy warriors to fight the G.o.dless communists, decadent Christian America forged the heavily armed and anarchic environment in which the Taliban would flourish. Funny old world.

The common enemy defeated, the mujahedin took their shiny new American weapons, and their captured old Russian ones, and fought amongst themselves. Throughout the early 90s, former mujahedin chiefs and sundry warlords-notably Ahmed Shah Ma.s.soud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Rashid Dostum-fell in and out with each other at such a rate that the favoured black humour fashion item among foreign aid workers at the time bore the legend "My party raided Kabul and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

Enter, in late 1994, the Taliban. The Taliban-the term is a plural of Talib, or religious student-formed in the madrasas (Islamic schools) of the southern city of Kandahar. They had Allah on their side like everyone else, only more so. They had weapons supplied by local merchants tired of the beatings, robberies and rapes perpetrated by the bandits who preyed on the roads around Kandahar (Noel Spencer had told me that, pre-Taliban, he'd been hijacked several times along the Kabul-Jalalabad road). The Taliban were tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime. They rounded up 50 local highwaymen and hung them off the barrels of tanks.

To a population as hara.s.sed as it was uneducated (53 percent of Afghan men and 85 percent of women are illiterate), this robust approach to enforcing civic order had a definite appeal. Over the next two years, the Taliban annexed swathes of Afghanistan, recruiting as they went from Afghanistan's uncountable gangs of freelance brigands, who knew a winning side when they saw one. In September 1996, the Taliban hoisted their flag over Kabul, a city which the mostly southern, rural talibs had always regarded with the same pious repugnance that Utah Mormons harbour for Las Vegas. The Taliban's all-white-or rather, given Afghanistan's chronic filth, all-grey-banner was alleged to be a symbol of peace. The Taliban removed Soviet-era President Muhammad Najibullah and his brother from their sanctuary in Kabul's UN compound, and hung them off a traffic observation kiosk.

Casual brutality and an enthusiasm for Islam were hardly innovations in Afghan politics, but the Taliban really weren't messing about. They introduced a blizzard of laws. Some were biblically severe (public amputation of hands for theft, public execution for murder, often by relatives of the victim). Some were faintly hilarious (the criminalisation of kite-flying, the compulsory flowing beards for males). Except that even these really weren't funny. According to a report in Peshawar's Frontier Post Frontier Post, 500 Kabuli men were lashed the week before I arrived for having trimmed their beards. Akbar solemnly tells me that he has been warned about his fringe.

One afternoon, when Akbar is taking me shopping for a rug on Chicken Street, a young, correctly hirsute Afghan approaches me and asks if he can practice his English. Over tea in a nearby cafe, he and Akbar ask me about Australia. I tell them about the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, which I'd been to a few months previously. Their minds boggle almost audibly.

"What were the police doing while this was going on?" demands Akbar.

They marched in the parade.

"You have sodomites in your police?"

Akbar clearly thinks I'm winding him up.

"I was in Herat in March," says our new friend, blandly. "The Taliban caught two sodomites there. They pushed a wall over on them with a tank."

The department that enforces these laws is the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The name, like many aspects of Taliban rule, manages to evoke both George Orwell's satire and Monty Python's comedy (the Spanish Inquisition sketch comes to mind more than once, especially one morning at the Intercontinental when eight turbaned Talibs appear behind the waiter to hear me order breakfast-Rice Krispies, I decide, to general muttered approval). This Ministry's operatives are the public presence of Taliban justice, scowling beneath black turbans and behind blacker Ray-Bans as they sip Pepsi and patrol Kabul in Toyota pick-ups with tinted windows.

Akbar and I go to the offices of Vice & Virtue, which are situated just opposite the roundabout where Najibullah and his brother were killed. I ask to see Alhaj Mawlawi Qalamuddin, the Deputy Minister. I am treated with customary Islamic courtesy, provided with tea and biscuits and kept waiting for ages before being told that Qalamuddin is away at the front line (fighting continues 20 kilometres north of Kabul, against forces loyal to Ma.s.soud). This happens every morning for a week, which suggests that one reason n.o.body can figure the Taliban out is that the Taliban themselves aren't too clear on what they're doing. The chap who runs the shop, a one-eyed thirty-something called Mullah Mohammad Omar, stays down in Kandahar and doesn't do much press. There are, in theory, Ministers, but none of the ministries I visit know where the bloke in charge is-"Away at the front line" is, I suspect, a convenient shorthand for "s.h.a.gged if I know, and what's it to you, anyway?"

"There's no power structure, no accountability," one aid worker tells me, back at the UN club. "They're just young guys with guns who think they know everything."

ON SAt.u.r.dAY MORNING, outside the offices of the Taliban's intelligence service, the Estekhbarat, I wait to see some young guys with guns who think they know everything. While Akbar is inside making representations on my behalf, I sit at the gate with the guard. Like a depressing proportion of young Afghans, he has the soaring cheekbones and blazing eyes of a 50s matinee idol-if the women are as pretty as the men are handsome, the burqa is as great an affront to aesthetics as it is to human rights. The guard is keen to test an English vocabulary apparently acquired from satellite transmissions of Play School Play School.

"My nose," he says, pointing at his mountainous Afghan beak.

"My eyes," he continues, gesturing at two iridescent irises of a limpid aquamarine that suggests someone in his gene pool didn't object too strongly to either the British or the Russians.

"My ears," he announces, resting his rifle on his lap so he can hold them out for emphasis.

"And," he says, "my . . . bread?"

He has his fingers in the thatch trailing off his chin.

It's your beard, mate. Beard.

"Beard," he confirms. "Very good. Thank you."

Inside the Estekhbarat building, I am ushered into an office that smells of feet and resembles a student bedsit, except that the groovy oriental rugs on the walls were made locally. Inside, cross-legged on two camp beds, are two terse young Talibs in white robes and white turbans. One gives his name as Abdul Haque Waseeque, and claims to be Acting Director of Intelligence. The other declines to give a name or a t.i.tle, but mentions that he's just been away at the front. Ah, so it does exist.

As the inevitable tea and biscuits arrive, I start with the easy stuff. Like most Talibs, they're of Pakhtun descent, and from outside Kabul-they both grew up in Ghazni, to the south, and were raised to regard Kabul as a sink of depravity. They're in their mid-twenties, and won't go into detail about their work, but say they're the Afghan version of the CIA.

"Laws made by humans have flaws," begins Abdul. "The rule of Allah has none."

The tone is set for the next couple of hours: G.o.d said it, they believe it, and that settles it. But why does divine rule have to be this . . . miserable?

"For the time being," says Abdul, "it is delicate. How can cinema be right in war conditions? The Taliban pledged Islamic law and peace, and we have created that."

Granted, Kabul is no longer at war, though the airport was rocketed by Ma.s.soud just before I arrived (I'd originally hoped to fly to Kabul on the the Red Cross shuttle from Peshawar, but flights were suspended when Ma.s.soud started acting the goat). There are fewer guns visible in Kabul than on the streets of Belfast or Beirut. Crime, which was rampant, is now so rare that for the last few weeks there haven't been any amputations or executions before the Friday football match at Kabul Stadium. Akbar and I had gone to the game the day before, a dismal 0-0 draw between two teams wearing shorts like you've only seen in footage of 1920s Cup Finals (the Taliban decided that football was un-Islamic for a while, but changed their minds). A few thousand people turned up, and mostly talked amongst themselves, though the wild, two-footed tackles that punctuated the match were greeted with appreciative laughter. Akbar, who I increasingly suspect of being a closet liberal, glumly admitted that on afternoons when someone's due to get something lopped off, the place fills to its 30,000 capacity.

But I still don't understand how security is abetted by forcing women to drift silently about looking like pantomime ghosts.

"The burqa is the rule of Islam," says Abdul. "The rule of Mohammad, Jesus and all the messengers is that women should be covered."

I take the sort of deep breath you take before arguing with armed fanatics on their own terms. According to my Penguin translation, the Koran says that "the wives of true believers should draw their veils close round them." It doesn't say that they have to cover themselves totally. It certainly doesn't rule them out of work, education and life the way the Taliban have.

"The burqa is the rule of Islam," repeats Abdul, though the news that I've read the Koran cheers him up a bit. "I must ask if you are concerned about the years you have wasted in preparing for the next world."

I change the subject. When the Taliban took power, they made extravagant fulminations against the drug trade: evil, corrupting, the ruination of us all, etcetera and amen. In 1997, according to the UN Drug Control Programme, 200,000 Afghan farmers grew 58,000 tonnes of opium, mostly on Taliban-controlled land. The British government estimates that 95% of the heroin in Britain is grown in Afghanistan's poppy fields. Afghanistan is also the world's biggest exporter of hashish-those who consider their narcotic recreation a victimless crime may care to contemplate whose wages they're paying.

Now, the Koran doesn't explicitly forbid making a fortune shipping smack to the infidel, but . . .

"The purpose of Islamic law," intones Abdul's friend, "is to protect life, property, religion and the brain. Heroin is forbidden."

So why not forbid it?

"We cannot stop the poppy from growing."

Yes, you can. Get some flamethrowers in amongst all those poppy fields I saw alongside the Jalalabad-Kabul road. It'd be a start.

"It is not our people who consume it. It is yours. In the West, society is riven by drugs and prost.i.tution. In the Islamic environment, young people have more love for Islam."

It's odd, then, that they find it necessary to beat people for failing to attend prayers.

"If a person does everything in accordance with Allah, then everything will be good. If not, we must implement the will of Allah by any means."

Eyes beginning to glaze, desperate to hear an answer that doesn't invoke Allah, Mohammed or the Koran, I ask Akbar to ask them who they fancy for the World Cup.

Abdul doesn't blink.

"In accordance with the teachings of the Holy Koran, no human being knows the future, only Allah almighty."

Oh, come on. Brazil? France? Argentina?

"Only Allah . . ."

Okay, okay. What do you do for fun?

"To relax, we recite from the Koran."

The depressing thing is that I believe him. If I thought there was the slightest chance that, as soon as I'd gone, Abdul was going to turn to his mate and go, "There's another dopey gringo sold on the gimlet-eyed holy warrior tip, you go and round up some birds and I'll get some cans in for the match," I'd be a lot less worried about Abdul and his mate and the country they're running.

When I get up to leave, two strange things happen. The first is that Abdul stands as well, clasps my hands in his and asks Akbar to ask me to stay in Afghanistan, become their brother and join their jihad. The second is that while I'm trying to think of a polite way to decline this kind offer, the room starts shaking. At first, I think it's just me-n.o.body else notices, or if they do, they don't care. After a few seconds, with the shaking growing more violent, and things starting to come off shelves, I ask Akbar what's happening.

"Abdul wants you to join the Taliban," he says, wobbling.

This isn't what I'm worried about; I'm thinking that maybe Ma.s.soud's rocket batteries have lost interest in the airport and are trying out a new target. Or that Abdul really does have friends in high places.

"Oh," says Akbar. "I think it's an earthquake."

I will later learn that a few hundred kilometres north, 5000 people have just been buried alive. Funny, in a country so forsaken by G.o.d-scenery aside-that people should be so keen on Him.

WONDERING IF AN older head might prove more reasonable, I drop in on the mayor. Mullah Abdul Majid, even by Afghan standards, is an imposing figure. He has one severely mangled hand and one missing leg, legacies of his time as a Mujahedin commander-a common CV among senior Taliban figures. He begins by welcoming me to his city "in the name of Allah, the compa.s.sionate and merciful," and pours me the first decent coffee I've had in two weeks. An elderly secretary beside him writes down every detail of our conversation, so that it may be broadcast to an enthralled nation on Radio Shariat (I listen to the daily English-language bulletin that night, hoping to hear that "His Excellency the Mayor today briefly tolerated some scruffy hack from The Face The Face," but I can't make out a word through the static).

"It is our religious duty to implement the basics of Islam," he explains. "No other country has shed so much blood. We must ensure that we have a result for the price people paid."

He deflects questions about women ("The burqa is not new to Afghanistan, just to the outside world") and drugs (shrugs). He only gets excited when I raise foreign reaction to the Taliban-n.o.body but Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has recognised the Taliban as a legitimate government.

"Five years ago," he glowers, "the world was wondering how to bring peace to Afghanistan. The Taliban did, and world still recognises robbers like Ma.s.soud."

Laughing Boy at Estekhbarat had said the same, and it's a hard point to argue with. It's not like the world doesn't do business with human rights black holes like China, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Maybe the Taliban are suffering for being too honest or too artless or too thick to dress up their regime as anything other than mediaeval barbarism. But maybe if they moderated their approach, the emba.s.sies might start reopening.

"You cannot," says Majid, "moderate the will of G.o.d."

THE ONLY MODERATING influences on the Taliban are Kabul's aid agencies, or non-governmental organisations (NGOs). They are doing what they can to drag this hopelessly poor nation into the current century. Afghanistan's poverty is best ill.u.s.trated not by per capita wages as percentages of gross domestic product, or anything like that, but by a uniformed policeman who accosts me one afternoon in Kabul's market.

"You are very rich," says the cop. "I am very poor. Give me some money, please, so I may spend it."

You're supposed to arrest me first, I tell him.

This dest.i.tution exists despite Afghanistan's situation astride one of the most lucrative trade routes on earth-unfortunately, the kind of merchants who'll shift crates of Pepsi across places this politically unpredictable and riddled with landmines are not the kind who pay import duties. It also seems incompatible with Afghanistan's glorious natural beauty, which, given a few years of peace, tourists would happily pay enormous sums to see. The only ones I meet are a pair of dour French pa.s.sport stamp-collectors, in Afghanistan only because it's the fifth-last country they haven't been to. They ask me if I know anything about getting visas for North Korea, and if the Taliban will ha.s.sle them much.

The few hundred other foreigners in Kabul all do far more useful things than checking off place names in their atlases, or asking nonplussed secret policemen who's going to win the World Cup, and the Taliban ha.s.sle them a lot. The NGOs do the things governments are supposed to do-pave roads, build bridges, heal the sick, educate the young-while the Taliban pursue such crucial concerns as caning taxi drivers for carrying women unaccompanied by male relatives (this happened to ten cabbies the week I was there), or drafting ludicrous visa regulations (having spent a week in Peshawar getting a visa to get into Afghanistan, I have to spend a day in Kabul getting another one to get out-the Talib who signs off on my exit visa lectures me about irregular verbs and asks me to make sure that I tell my readers how nice the weather in Kabul is compared to Peshawar). The Taliban are at pains to tell me how grateful they are for the work the NGOs do. NGO workers say they're sure the Taliban would run them out of town if they thought they could afford to, and make me promise not to mention them or their organisation.

To justify their paranoia, one NGO worker shows me a memo, dated May 24, 1998, from my perpetually absent friend Qalamuddin at Vice & Virtue. It refers to a much-gnawed bone of contention-employment for women. The Taliban are not keen on the idea, though they're less keen on healthcare for women being provided by men. So, compromises allowing local women to work in this area have been made, and broken, and made, and . . .

"Inspectors have been ordered to identify and arrest such people. Offenders will be treated in accordance with Sharia law. You will have to bear any further responsibilities in this regard."

"This," I am told, "is what we're up against, every day, about every d.a.m.n thing."

The same NGO worker tells me about a local woman, formerly employed by their NGO, who'd come in one day tearful because she was an hour late. The reason was that her twelve-year-old son had refused to come with her. Women who leave home unaccompanied by a male relative do so at their own very real risk.

"Can you imagine a twelve-year-old boy having that kind of power? That's what worries me, that people are already accepting this as normal."

Wandering around Kabul the last few days, though, I've been wondering if the women of Afghanistan are beaten yet. Oppressed people, consciously or not, will reach for whatever means of rebellion are available, however trivial, and beneath many of Kabul's shambling burqas are expensive-looking, open-topped leather shoes with high heels. Given Kabul's chronically potholed streets, shrapnel-ravaged footpaths and open sewers, that's as fine a definition of heroism as you could want.

I HAVE TO leave Afghanistan by road, as well. I hadn't been able to get in on the Red Cross shuttle flight between Peshawar and Kabul because of Ma.s.soud's rockets, and I can't fly out because the airport is closed by rain (there's no radar, no air traffic control, and an awful lot of mountains-if pilots can't see, they can't land). I find a lift back to Peshawar with a truck-load of European doctors, all trying to connect with planes and choppers heading up to the earthquake zone. It takes us just short of two days, via Jalalabad-the roads are not improved by rain.

It's only after we've crossed the border, collected our armed guard for the Khyber drive, that I can identify the single strangest thing about the Taliban's Afghanistan. It's something that wasn't there, rather than something that was, and I encounter it blaring from a tinny speaker outside a roadside tea shop. It's one of those regrettable hybrids of Asian folk and European pop, it's got a beat that sounds like a washing machine with an unbalanced load, an arrangement that suggests the contents of a tool kit being emptied down a lift shaft and a vocal apparently recorded by a c.o.c.katoo with one wing in a wringer but it's. . . music.

3.

BALKAN AFTER MIDNIGHT.

Sarajevo's rock'n'roll scene March 1996

THIS TRIP WAS a penance, of sorts. I have few meaningful regrets, but among them is a failure to make more of an effort to write more about the war that beset Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s (that regret is, of course, tempered significantly by the knowledge that Bosnia-Herzegovina was, at that time, the kind of place in which a young and clueless interloper could very easily have ended up dead-and that, of course, is at least part of the reason why I didn't make more of an effort). The failure of the civilised world to act decisively to halt a genocide in the heart of Europe struck me as an atrocious and inexcusable dereliction then, and seems even more so in retrospect. The spectacle of Muslims being slaughtered with impunity, for year after unnecessary and avoidable year, was a viciously radicalising catalyst for more than a few angry, vindictive and malevolent souls: the route to 9/11 leads through Sarajevo and Srebrenica.

I did end up making one visit to Bosnia's war, almost by accident, which is described elsewhere in this book, but I didn't get to Sarajevo until after the war had (more or less) ended, and I still feel pretty bad about that. Not that I imagine my presence would have made any difference to anything, but it's a stand I would like to feel I'd taken when it counted: on the side of a city with a tradition of amiable plurality, against the forces of bigotry and backwardness seeking to destroy it-and, not insignificantly, against the agents of ignorance and indifference, possessed though they were of air forces big enough to put a stop to the nonsense in an afternoon, who watched Sarajevo burn for a little over four years.

What follows is what I felt I could do-which, at the time, was write about rock music, quite a lot of which, I'd heard, had been made during the siege. I secured a tentative commission from a now-extinct magazine called Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. I rustled up some phone numbers from some friends at an aid organisation called The Serious Road Trip, whom I'd got to know in London. I flew, via Frankfurt and Zagreb, to the Croatian port of Split, where I cadged a lift with a French NGO as far as Mostar, who handed me over to another NGO who took me to Zenica, from where the Road Trip drove me to Sarajevo in a hot pink Land Rover with flames painted down the side.

As it turned out, showing up in a war zone and writing about rock'n'roll was easier and more rewarding than I'd antic.i.p.ated. Sarajevans were, not unreasonably, bored sideways with war as a topic of conversation, and once word of what I was doing spread among local musicians, my days and nights filled up profitably and agreeably. I was a.s.sisted above and beyond the call by Jim Marshall, a splendidly laconic Scot who had suffered none of my qualms and spent most of the siege in Sarajevo as an aid worker. He's still there today, and provides the following updates of the characters you're about to meet. Enis from C.I.A. became a DJ, spent some time in Berlin, but is now back in Sarajevo. The members of Z.O.C.H. have been spotted, it seems, "hill-walking and pushing baby strollers." Pedrag "Paja" Pasic still runs his football school. Zelimir Altarac-Cicak is a radio personality, and has a Sarajevo music website every bit as excellent as his haircut at www.cicak. ba. And Sikter are still going, as well-www.sikter.com.

The image, or idea, that has stuck with me hardest from this trip was that of the kids gathered in the club called Obala, urging the DJ to turn it up so loud that they couldn't hear the explosions of the sh.e.l.ls landing outside. I've often wondered since if that isn't the reason that human beings have always made and listened to music: to obliterate reality, and to replace it with something beautiful, or at least with something that makes some sense to us at those moments when little else does.

ALONG THIS STRETCH of the south bank of the Miljacka River, the front lines were so close that, with a following wind, it would have been almost possible for the Bosnians defending their city to spit on the Serbs besieging it. Near the bitterly contested Jewish cemetery, the barricades are still in place, separated by a no man's land which is the width of an inner-city street, because the no man's land is an inner-city street. A few blocks farther along the river today, history is being made. Grbavica, the last of Sarajevo's suburbs still held by Bosnian Serb forces, is being handed back to the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the terms of the four-month-old Dayton Peace Agreement.

Myself, a veteran Scottish photographer and aid worker called Martin Kennedy and a young rock'n'roll band called C.I.A. are picking our way through what were, less than six months ago, Bosnian army positions. We're looking for suitably dramatic backdrops for photographs for our story about Sarajevo musicians, and we're spoilt for choice. Film studios spend millions to create this kind of picturesque destruction.

On an inside wall of one half-destroyed house that had functioned as a Bosnian army sniper post, there's a lurid, hand-painted cartoon portrait of Dr. Radovan Karadzic. Karadzic is the retired psychiatrist, useless poet, convicted fraudster and nationalist maniac who, as leader of something amusingly called the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), presided over the attempted murder of Sarajevo. The anonymous artist has perfectly captured Karadzic's hooded, punch-drunk eyes, mean, lopsided mouth and extravagant, blow-dried bouffant, and made his opinion still clearer by ramming a sickle through the good doctor's ears, jamming a hammer, handle-first, into the top of Karadzic's fussily-coiffed head and dubbing the picture with the caption "CCCP Koza." CCCP was what the Soviet Union used to call the Soviet Union. "Koza" is Bosnian for goat.