Jalalabad

FRIENDS HAVE ASKED in the last couple of months if I didn't wish I were still foreign editor of this newspaper, a job I held for 10 years until the end of last August. The answer's no. Others have asked if I didn't wish I were still a foreign correspondent during this most important conflict since the Vietnam War. Emphatically not. In my 10 years as foreign editor, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Balkans disintegrated in a blood bath unprecedented in Europe since World War II, the United States kept bombing the bejabbers out of Iraq, half a million people were massacred in Rwanda, Zaire renamed itself Congo in a blood-soaked revolution, NATO went to war against what was left of Yugoslavia, the Israeli-Arab conflict seethed on and on and on. Foreign editors have to tell correspondents to go to the places where this sort of thing is happening.

RECENT FIGHTING in the mountains of southeastern Afghanistan has been so muddled, ambiguous and treacherous that it makes the guerrilla war in Iraq look by comparison like one of those set-piece battles that the monarchs of Europe used to fight against one another. Afghan and Pakistani armed forces recently launched separate operations designed to roust the Taliban from its hideaways along the border, and wound up shooting at each other. Afghanistan claimed that the Pakistanis had invaded Afghan territory, and this news so inflamed a mob in Kabul that it sacked the Pakistani embassy.

MOSCOW - As Afghanistan's political factions meet in Germany to try to reach agreement on how best to piece together their shattered country, hundreds of merchants in a dingy hotel complex here are praying that the talks succeed. Over the past two decades, Afghanistan has been stripped of most of its professionals, civil servants and technical experts, people crucial for running a modern state. Many are here, wondering if they should return. Educated Afghans living in the West "are well off, they have legal status, and their children go to school - you can't expect them to return," says Gullam Muhammed, the unofficial leader of Moscow's Afghan community.

JALALABAD, Afghanistan - Osama bin Laden was seen last week at a large and well-fortified encampment 35 miles southwest of this city, a minister of the self-proclaimed government here said yesterday. The official, Hazarat Ali, the law and order minister for the Eastern Shura, which claims dominion over three major provinces in eastern Afghanistan, said trusted informants had told him that bin Laden was spotted near Tora Bora, a village where two valleys meet in deep mountains in Nangarhar province.

KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan man was sentenced to death in a Kabul court yesterday for his part in the killing of three foreign journalists and an Afghan photographer in November 2001 shortly after the fall of the Taliban. The four journalists - an Australian television cameraman, Harry Burton, and the Afghan photographer, Azizullah Haidari, both from Reuters; Maria Grazia Cutuli of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera; and Julio Fuentes of El Mundo, a Spanish daily - were traveling here from Jalalabad shortly after Kabul fell to anti-Taliban forces.

Attack victims Foreign relief and development workers killed in Afghanistan since March 2003: June 10: Eleven Chinese road workers and an Afghan security guard are fatally shot in northern Kunduz province. June 2: Three Europeans and two Afghans working for Doctors Without Borders are shot and killed in northwestern Baghdis. May 5: Three United Nations election workers, including two British security consultants, are shot dead in eastern Nuristan. The Taliban claim responsibility. March 5: A Turkish engineer is fatally shot on Kabul-Kandahar highway in Zabul province.

WASHINGTON - Mohammed Atef, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, is believed to have been killed Wednesday when a U.S. airstrike destroyed a house where he was staying, officials said yesterday. Atef, 57, said by authorities to have given the final order for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, was thought to be among those killed in a bombing run near the Afghan capital, Kabul, according to intelligence reports, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.

KABUL, Afghanistan - In a tentative yet risky attempt to exert his authority beyond Kabul, Hamid Karzai summarily fired more than 15 top provincial officials yesterday, accusing them of abuse of authority, corruption and in some cases narcotics trafficking. The firings are the first large shake-up in the 10 months Karzai has been Afghanistan's president. If the officials step down as ordered, more dismissals would be likely, his spokesman signaled yesterday. But if the orders are flouted, Karzai would come off as a feeble ruler whose writ ends a few miles from his 19th-century presidential palace.

POL-E CHARKHI, Afghanistan - In a 10-minute span yesterday afternoon, three different cars arrived here from towns ruled by three different Afghan warlords. The first car arrived from Jalalabad, where a local political leader named Mawlawi Yunis Khalis has declared himself ruler, rejecting the Northern Alliance and the Taliban's authority. The second came from the nearby city of Towr Kham, where a local commander named Hazrati Ali has seized power. The third arrived from Sorubi, where Ezatullah, a local commander with only one name, has created his own fief.

TALASH, Pakistan - Mohammed Youssef tried to stop it, first calling the local religious leader on the phone, then following his convoy of young jihad recruits into Afghanistan and confronting him in person. Don't take them, he said. They're just boys. They don't know how to fight. If it gets bad, they don't know how to run. "I personally talked to Sufi Mohammed twice and requested him not to go to Afghanistan with the large number of young people, all untrained," Youssef, a 55-year-old veteran of the Afghan war with the Soviets, says.