Jalalabad

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A suicide bomber and gunmen attacked a drug-eradication team in eastern Afghanistan yesterday, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 40, authorities said. Twelve police officers were among the dead in the assault, the latest in a string of attacks by militants against government teams responsible for destroying the lucrative opium poppy crop during the planting season. The insurgency is fueled with profits from the drug trade. The seven other people killed were civilians, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

WASHINGTON - It is called Tora Bora, or "black dust," a series of caves and redoubts carved into the remote White Mountains of northeastern Afghanistan, hard up against the border with Pakistan. U.S. and Pakistani officials believe it is the likely lair of Osama bin Laden and hundreds of his most ardent followers. It is a perfect place to make a last stand, they say, or perhaps try to slip across the border to safety. U.S. military officials and Northern Alliance forces are increasingly focusing on this mountainous cave complex southwest of Jalalabad that is accessible only by foot or mule over narrow, stony trails.

BEFORE TALIBAN leader Mullah Mohammed Omar fled Kandahar on Dec. 7, he inserted a codicil into the last will and testament of the religious movement he led for seven years. It was, in effect, a guarantee that the city - and the country - he left behind would revert to the same strife and murder that plagued Afghanistan when the followers of the mullah emerged in 1994 to restore the law and impose peace. On Dec. 6, Prime Minister-designate Hamid Karzai, the sophisticated, Pashtun aristocrat appointed at the Bonn talks on Afghanistan to head the United Nations-backed transitional government, offered Omar a personal guarantee of amnesty in exchange for the keys to Kandahar, the last Taliban stronghold.

The rain of rockets and artillery on Kabul makes the Afghan capital another Sarajevo. Hundreds are dead. Thousands are wounded. The hospitals cannot cope. The victims' crime is to dTC live in Kabul. The perpetrators are the militia Hezb-I-Islami whose leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, believes that interim President Burhanuddin Rabbani is insufficiently Islamic and should step down, preferably in favor of Mr. Hekmatyar. The weapons are American.Perhaps Mr. Rabbani, a comparatively gentle cleric who favors an Islamic Afghanistan, should step down.

WARLORDS are back in Kandahar, Mazar-e Sharif, Herat and Jalalabad. Armed thugs roam Kabul, robbing innocent folk. Highwaymen menace life on the road. Aid agencies cannot protect their vehicles or food from thieves. This return toward the conditions of 1992-96 in Afghanistan is not a surprise. Nor is it a refutation of the logic of U.S. intervention. It is what was expected, what would happen if nothing were done. The provisional prime minister, Hamid Karzai, has begun to do something, ordering armed men who are not uniformed police off the streets of Kabul.

JALALABAD, Afghanistan - A suspected suicide car bomber hit a military bus carrying German troops yesterday in Kabul, killing at least four soldiers and wounding 29 in the most deadly attack on the international security force since its work began 18 months ago, military officials said. The German defense minister, Peter Struck, said at a news briefing in Berlin that four soldiers had died and 29 had been injured, seven of them seriously, Reuters reported. "A lot of the indications are pointing toward a suicide attack," Struck said.

The United States may be slowly ridding itself of the urge to impose the death penalty, according to a study released last week. A protracted execution in Florida on Wednesday starkly illustrated one of the reasons for the change in attitude. Angel Diaz was the 53rd and last person to be executed in the United States this year. He was strapped onto a gurney and given an injection that was supposed to kill him within 15 minutes, but he lay there squinting and grimacing and seemed to be trying to speak.

THE FALL of Jalalabad on Wednesday promises resolution to the struggles among extremist groups, extolling their own Islamic purity, that has tortured Afghanistan since the collapse of its Communist regime four years ago. The most extreme and least known of the groups, Taliban, controls more than half the country and lays siege to the capital, Kabul.President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a clergyman elected by rivals to interim leadership, heads a government whose writ runs only in the capital and parts of the north.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A suicide bomber on a motorbike drove into a convoy of Afghan National Army soldiers boarding minibuses outside their training base on the edge of Kabul yesterday, killing nine people and wounding 28, the Afghan Defense Ministry's spokesman said. The dead were eight military personnel and a civilian bus driver, said the spokesman, Gen. Zaher Azimi. The attacker also died. The bombing was the first major incident of violence since Afghanistan's parliamentary elections 10 days ago and the first suicide attack in Kabul in months.

TOKYO - Japan, after pledging more than $1 billion to the United Nations to support the care and feeding of Afghan refugees, is closing its doors to nine Afghan citizens seeking asylum from brutal Taliban rule. The nine, who separately stole away to Japan by ship or plane after family members had been murdered by Taliban soldiers, were rounded up by immigration authorities Oct. 3 and questioned under the pretense that they might be terrorists. Now immigration officials insist that the nine, most of them ethnic Hazara who have been persecuted by the Taliban, should be denied asylum and sent back to Afghanistan.