Meanwhile in Afghanistan: the coming "warlord war" in America's other occupation.

• Author: Fenwick, Ben

MAIMANA, AFGHANISTAN -- U.S. Army Maj. Kerry Trent, a member of the 45th Infantry Brigade, a National Guard unit from Oklahoma, walks to the illegal checkpoint to meet with the armed men who run it. The Afghan soldiers escorting him scurry into position; they are members of the First Kandak (battalion) of the First Brigade of the Afghan National Army (ANA), which was set up under the auspices of President Hamid Karzai's interim government. Trent is their adviser.

Trent spies the men he is looking for as he walks past a cleft in the bluffs overlooking a river. The men, who are not uniformed, carry the ubiquitous Kalashnikovs, but they also have rocket-propelled grenade launchers and PKM squad machine guns. Even though two U.S. Humvee crews with a mounted .50-caliber machine gun and another with a grenade launcher back Trent's unit, it would be a fierce battle if the men wanted to fight.

Instead, they get up, greet Trent with "Salaam, salaam," and invite him and his ANA commander, Col. Kareem, for tea. One man introduces himself as a general in the loosely organized, militia-based 200th Division, a unit of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the hero of the famed Northern Alliance who turned on the Taliban and, with the help of American air strikes, defeated them. Dostum's forces sit on the pipelines that move gas into Uzbekistan and on the opium trade routes in the north that move heroin into Germany.

Trent, Kareem, and the interpreter sit down with the Dostum man on a large mat. An attendant brings them tea. Trent does not drink until the Dostum man drinks.

"Why are you here with weapons?" Trent asks. "The Security Council has agreed that no one but ANA forces are allowed to carry guns outside the compound."

"We came here to protect this village," the man answers via the interpreter. He casts a prolonged glance at a large truck driving past, carrying wool.

"Protect them from what?" Trent counters. "Are there Taliban here?"

No.

"Are there Al Qaeda?"

No, the man admits.

"Then what are you protecting them from?"

"We are sightseeing," the general now says. "Many of the men are from this village, and they wanted to visit their homes. We are leaving this afternoon." The general glances at another truck passing by, this one carrying sand. "We will go back this afternoon."

"That is good," Trent says. "I'm glad you are going back this afternoon. That way no one will mistake you for bad guys who are out here robbing people."

The general nods. Then he speaks to the ANA colonel in Uzbek. Their voices rise. They interrupt one another. This goes on for some time. Trent observes. Then the general turns back to him.

"We are leaving this afternoon," the man says again.

"Good. I must take your guns from you if I find you out here with guns again," Trent says. "I am just a soldier, and my orders are to take the guns if they leave the 200th Division compound again."

The general nods and hangs his head in supplication. Then everyone gets up, shakes hands, and walks away. The team reassembles and convoys back through the village to Maimana, past fields of poppies with their bulbs swollen for harvest.

"I figured out what he was doing there," Trent says later. "He was stopping the trucks and charging them fees to pass his area. Every truck that passed, he was assessing how much money he was losing. You could see it in his eyes."

The next day, a patrol is sent back to the location. But even before they leave, the order comes that, despite his previous orders, Trent will not take the men's guns from them. The orders have changed.

"Well, they cut my nuts on that one," Trent says. "It's frustrating."

That small event, with its potential for sudden violence, underscores the balancing act in Afghanistan between the U.S.-led coalition, the warlords, and the weak but growing central government and its fledgling army. Both the interim government and the army are initiatives created by the Bonn II agreements, which charted the current path for Afghanistan's future according to the Western powers' vision for it. Dostum in the North, Ismail Khan in the West, and a host of smaller players throughout the country might have different visions.

In July, President Hamid Karzai postponed the country's parliamentary elections for six month s, citing a threat of disruption. According to the president, Afghanistan's private militias had become the country's greatest danger--a bigger threat than the Taliban. Karzai told The New York Times he had attempted to disarm the militias "by persuasion." Now, he said, "The stick has to be used, definitely."

Afghan Standoff

Dostum boasts he could raise as many as 40,000 militiamen. Khan in the West brags of a potent 20,000. Both numbers are probably inflated. Yet as of May, the ANA, the only military in the country with a chartered subservience to civilian government, numbers a little more than 11,000. Despite would-be peacekeeping ventures in both Khan's and Dostum's stomping grounds, the central government's control is at best shaky there.

In the north, Dostum's influence is strong. While the region is supposed to be under the law of the Karzai government, it is really ruled by a string of alliances between feudal warlords. In...