In Afghanistan the heat at noon is oven-hot, choking. At night the icy winds blowing down from the Hindu Kush chill through you. For sustenance there is nothing but rice, gritty bread, goat meat and tea. The only toilets are stinking holes. Village children collect cow dung for winter fuel. They stare with saucer eyes, their bare feet caked black with dirt, their coughs tubercular. Men who stop rare vehicles look wild with matted beards and hair, ranting that they will go with you to Panjshir, shaking a Kalashnikov in the air.
What ought to be highways are little more than paths, where it takes an indestructible Russian jeep to climb over rocks the size of television sets, forge rivers, negotiate slipshod bridges of logs and stone, slalom through sand so powdery it rises like steam and must be removed with windscreen wipers. Along the way, an abandoned Landcruiser makes you wonder what happened to its passengers; there can be little doubt about the fate of the cars and trucks lying at the bottom of the ravines. Or the Soviets who between 1979 and 1989 were constantly ambushed by Ahmed Shah Massoud's men in the Panjshir Valley. Dozens of carcasses of Soviet tanks and vehicles litter the valley floor; trophies, proof of the pleasure these tough people take in destroying invaders. It is difficult to imagine what new hardship the US and Britain can visit on the world's most punishing country.
I spent three days driving through the northeastern enclave held by the late Cmdt Massoud's "United Front"; conditions are even worse on the Taliban side of the front line. In Faizabad, where my journey began on Tuesday, the local United Front potentate has cornered the market on four-wheel drive vehicles and interpreters since journalists began flocking to Afghanistan in the wake of September 11th. Last week, the three-day journey cost $700; this week it's $1,500. Two colleagues and I found one of the last available interpreters in northern Afghanistan. "My name is Orush. It means 'danger'," he proudly told me.
Orush's grievance with the Taliban - like most of the Afghans I encountered - was personal. "We were living in Kabul in 1996. My father was a policeman," Orush said. "He fled to Faizabad before they came to the apartment. When I said he wasn't there, they threatened to kill me. They stole our car. It was a new Toyota, worth $2,000."
Like all United Front supporters, Orush refers to the Taliban as "terrorists". One of the big questions facing the West is whether the United Front would be significantly better. Orush defends the forced isolation of Afghan women - "They like wearing the burqa," he told me. In three days, his most passionate condemnation of Mullah Omar's regime was that they stole the family's new car. For Commander Rolam Jailani, whom I met a day down the road at Iskozar, on his way to "liberate" Kabul, it was also personal: the Taliban burned his house down.
There was something particularly sad about Azizullah, the United Front soldier I spoke to as we loaded up the jeep. His age - 23 - is exactly that of the Afghan war, and like most of the Afghans I met, Azizullah looked a dozen years older. He had just returned from two months on the front at Taloqan and was proud that his unit captured 100 Taliban. But five of Azizullah's friends were killed, 15 others wounded.
His wrist is scarred from a Taliban bullet, but he can still fire a Kalashnikov. "It's impossible to eat or sleep on the front line," he told me. "We had only bread and water - nothing else. Most of the people are hungry in Afghanistan; this is the main problem." Azizullah has been fighting since he was 15. "Afghan people like fighting," he continued. "But if there was peace, I would throw away my weapon. I am one of the government forces and I am very poor. I don't have a house." His monthly salary of 50,000 afghanis comes to about $1.20.
At the first check-point we passed, a soldier wearing a US army surplus uniform with the name "Deburg" still penned on the pocket flap pretended to read our travel permit - upside down.
"Dear military officer of the Islamic State of Afghanistan," it begins. "Three foreign journalists want to go to the Panjshir. Please help them. Mohamed Nazir, Chief of the President's Foreign Relations Office." The presidential seal at the top shows a Moghul dome with two flags embraced by laurel branches.
The president in question is Prof Burhannudin Rabbani, who was chased out of Kabul by the Taliban in 1996. He majored in Islamic studies in Kabul and at Al Azhar, the seat of Sunni Muslim theology in Cairo. Rabbani's Afghan government is still the only one recognised by the United Nations, but his "Islamic State" is an odd creature, repressing women almost as much as the Taliban, ensuring no government services other than defence. The "Islamic State" still grieves for its real leader, Massoud, assassinated by Osama bin Laden's followers on September 9th. Black flags fly throughout the enclave. A poster of "the martyr Massoud" with his head thrown back and a red rose shedding tears of blood is omnipresent. Nearly every vehicle has a picture of Massoud taped to the front windscreen.
In a village called Hazrati Said, I met a pharmacist named Golam Omar, another refugee from the Taliban's 1998 conquest of the Shomali plain. He has not fought for three years, "but I will fight now", the mild-mannered, bespectacled pharmacist said. "We needed this," he said of the US intervention. But didn't it sadden him to kill fellow Afghans? Omar reiterated a theme I hear often: "Afghans never kill other Afghans. I killed foreign terrorists," he said, alluding to the Arabs in Pakistan who joined bin Laden's forces.
We stopped for the night at what Orush called a "hotel", a mud hut with a jute cloth roof. The three owners brought plates of rice which we ate with our fingers by the light of a sputtering lantern. The BBC was reporting the death of four UN employees in Kabul, civilians who worked in mine-clearing. A French correspondent and two photographers, disguised as women wearing burqas, had been arrested by the Taliban. It was the third night of the US bombing raids over Afghanistan, which the innkeepers had learned of only that day. They weren't really interested - the price of rice in Faizabad was their first question to our interpreter and driver. I was the only woman among 11 people who climbed into sleeping bags on the floor. Although I kept my long black coat and headscarf on, the Afghans stared at me as if I were an extra-terrestrial.
They had probably never seen the face of a woman outside their immediate families. Just after they snuffed out the lantern, torrents of rain began pouring through the jute ceiling - in a country that has known three years of drought. "No problem. It's just one night," Orush said.
We shared a breakfast of tea and bread with hundreds of United Front soldiers at a truckstop at Iskozar. The first fighter I spoke to fretted that the Americans were destroying Kabul - most of which is already in rubble. "Who will rebuild it?" he asked me. "Will the Americans pay for it?" The men sat cross-legged on thin mattresses on the floor, their Kalashnikovs in front of them, on the edge of a red vinyl cloth that served as a table. Some wore daggers on their belts. They pointed out an ethnic Pashtun soldier named Nasrullah.
"He's a Taleb," (the singular of Taliban) they joked. There were 50 Pashtuns in their unit of 400, they boasted; the United Front constantly tries to refute its image as the party of Tajiks.
If they met the Taliban in the trenches around Kabul, how would the "army of the Islamic State" know the difference between Mullah Omar's men and their own fighters? "They all wear longi (turbans)," the men laughed. "And they have long beards and long hair," another chimed in. "We can tell from their speech," a third said. Later, when we asked a goatherd to clear his animals from the road, Orush told me he was a Taleb. How did he know? "He has a Pashtun accent," the interpreter responded.
The unit commander, Rolam Jailoni, supported the US intervention "if only Taliban and military are killed. But I don't agree if civilians are killed, because they are Afghans." Jailoni fought the Soviets throughout the 1980s and boasted gleefully, in front of his two teenage sons, "I killed a lot of Russians". But wasn't it strange that "infidel" Russia is now the United Front's ally? Not at all, Jailoni said. "The Russians are out of Afghanistan, and they help us." Perhaps it was little different from the US government's flip-flop regarding Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. When the latter came to power in 1996, Madeleine Albright said it was "a positive step".
The high mountain pass leading to the Panjshir Valley is dotted with Soviet bomb craters, now lakes of sapphire-blue water. For all the desolation of this country, there are moments of great beauty: villagers harvesting golden wheat on a mountain plateau; the apparition of a horseman on a white Arab stallion who stops to stare at us from the riverbank.
The road gets slightly better as we jolt towards Kabul. There, on the opposite bank of the Panjshir River, are Massoud's collection of spent missile cases fired at the Taliban; more trophies. Three of the Front's helicopters - one of which bombarded Kabul on the night of September 11th - wait on the tarmac at Astanah. At Bozarak, the Front have assembled an impressive array of Soviet-made material.
And these are not rusting carcasses, but functioning weapons: 15 T-54 and T-55 tanks; 10 Katyusha rocket launchers; a dozen Kamaz trucks (used as troop carriers); a surface-to-surface missile, towed machine guns, a dozen heavy artillery pieces.
It seems foolhardy to leave so much weaponry lined up in the open. The Front obviously no longer fear the Taliban air force. One day soon, they believe the US and Britain will attack the Taliban's frontline positions, just a few dozen kilometres away. And that will be the signal they are waiting for, the signal to advance on Kabul.