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THE NEWS TODAY OH BOY night I sleep fitfully. The night sky is full of droning airplanes ta every lS minutes to re-supply the beleaguered Taliban forces in ml'I,C. ","." northern town of Kunduz. The next day I walk in to the Kabul Times what I can see and am invited to meet the Editor-in-Chief. Expecti fiery, grey-bearded mullah, or religious leader, I am surprised a quiet, wispy-bearded young man. Inatollah Kakazadah is 23 and pical of the next generation of Taliban. Unlike the back-country, battle-hardened men who run the e Ta wants 100 percent iteracy men a women. support education and equal rights. Good answer, but delivered with the same dead look as every answer. We discuss the current gender-junket celebrity of Kabul-the best trauma surgeon in Afghanistan, a single, 42-year-old Talib general who refuses to wear the burqa. It would seem that some women are more equal than others. And this is the great lie of junket journalism. Women can make a stand in Afghanistan. Women can walk the streets of Kabul uncovered, without close relatives and in the countryside there has been no change. He reminds me that it was Hekmatyar who closed the movie theaters, enforced the burqa and began the swing back to orthodox interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law. The Taliban are simply trying to bring peace to a very violent country. As I get up to leave he hits me with a zinger out of left field. He makes a speech in front of the two turbaned men who have been staring at me intensely from 18 inches away: "The western propaganda against the Taliban will be fruitless. It did not work before and it will not work now." ROCKETS FOR BREAKFAST This morning my wake-up call is the sound of Taliban MIGs thundering ove the city. They are off to bomb Massoud's forces and be back in time fo midday prayers. It's a fitting introduction to the day: I have been invited to the ordnance disposal site to see how they get rid of unexploded bombs, and shells they find around Kabul. I have spent a few days clearing efields and mine fields; now I want to see how they dispose of litter. On an old, destroyed military base, a hodgepodge of ordnance is out for my inspection. The most ominous sight is an lS-foot-long, n-built Urgan rocket that landed intact but was smashed open with a isel by some local kid who wanted to see what was inside. What inside was a cluster of 12 high-explosive bomblets. . We blow up a war surplus store full of SOO-pound bombs, anti-tank mines. The detonation is deafening but suddenly, even dirt and smoke has cleared, dozens of children come running down hills around us. The desperate scrap hunters run into the smoking fight over the red-hot shrapnel they then sell. There is a SOO-pound bomb II smoking in the crater. Small children grab the red-hot shell fragments, ile others dig for the tiny pieces that make the tinkling sound of deadly pnel. A fight breaks out in the pit, and one teenager hauls off and starts hitting another with a shovel. When they see me they stop, look up and ile. They are oblivious to the engineers ordering them away, my and the unexploded bomb smoking in the crater with them. aliban, these 20-something Talibs are soft-spoken, educated and even more committed to the Islamic cause than their fathers. Like all the Talibs I meet, he looks deeply into my eyes when I talk as if taking my measure before responding. Inatollah senses that I seek only answers and am not udging. E SON OF THE FATHER Inatollah's story is fairly typical in Afghanistan. His father is a famous mullah and legendary fighter. Even though Inatollah can barely grow a beard, he too has become a mullah. His father was a scholar of Arabic and religion but became a fighter when he was over 60 years old. While he fought the Russians in the mountains, Inatollah and his family went to live in the refugee camps of Pakistan. The family's expenses were paid by mujahideen office of the Pakistani government. Money from other Muslim countries, as well as our own CIA, paid for the Pakistani Police to train and support fighters against the Russians. After being wounded in the head by a Russian bullet, Inatollah's father went to live in Islamabad. Inatollah travels in his father's footsteps and is fighting for Afghanistan. But he no longe carries a AK-47. He uses a pen and a computer. He has a degree in rnalism and has set up a web site (www.taliban.com). BOYS' TOWN The future of any country is its youth, so I decide to visit the barracks. The UN has warned me against even getting close to the Taliban barracks. Fighters with large turbans and suntans sit with their heavy machine guns on the walls. Nearby is the recently bombed Ariana Hotel and an impressive array of anti-aircraft guns, trailer-mounted rocket launche and twitchy, hard-looking fighters. Most Talib fighters have no uniforms, no insignias, no official ranks. The young fighters have wispy beards, green sleeveless field jackets, cheap plastic shoes and no socks. Most sport the now-famous, black-with-thin-white-striped turban or lungi. They also carry brown wool blankets to keep the cold away and to hide their Kalashnikovs. senior fighters like to wear bl,ack blankets, larger wildly-twisted bla turbans, long curly hair and thick beards. The Afghan version of Darth Vader. I talk to a 23-year-old Taliban with piercing hazel eyes and a deeply sunburned face. He tells me his name but it doesn't matter, he i like hundreds of other Talibs and really can't speak freely. He has fighting for two years. Yes, he supports the Taliban but he keeps h'