Afghanistan Government

When the Virtue and Vice police caught sight of 14-year-old Farkhanda, with her naive eyes and childish face, they gave chase with their sticks and beat her. As she walked home from a family wedding in the capital, Kabul, three weeks ago, Farkhanda crossed the line dividing carefree girlhood from fearful womanhood, simply by showing her face.

As moves by Afghanistan's neighbors thrust it toward total diplomatic isolation, President Bush appeared to gain additional support from Russia on Saturday in building ties with anti-Taliban resistance forces. The United Arab Emirates broke off diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, and a top Bush administration official said Saudi Arabia is soon expected to follow suit.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze concluded two days of talks in the Siberian city of Irkutsk today by agreeing on the importance of Soviet and American cooperation in Asia. "In Asia, too, the Soviet Union and the United States do not regard each other as adversaries," Shevardnadze told reporters during a news conference after the talks. The U.S.

After all the years away, it would be so easy to stay put, comfortable in America's hulking embrace. But not for the three Farzana sisters. They won't hear of it. Smuggled out of Afghanistan by their parents in 1980 amid the rumble of occupying Soviet tanks, they landed in the United States to start over. Despite adjustments and heartaches, the sisters forged good lives. They have jobs, children, cozy homes in this Bay Area city's deeply rooted Afghan expatriate community.

Flanked by guards posing for the television cameras, a gray-bearded Afghan rebel leader proclaimed here Wednesday that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was "one of the most unprecedented events of the last few centuries" and that it "defeated communism's philosophy all over the world as a whole."

The leader of the Muslim rebel faction that helped drive Afghan President Najibullah from power last week pledged not to take the capital by force, as the besieged new regime said Sunday for the first time that it was considering the rebels' demand that Kabul be ceded to a government drawn from the guerrillas.

Rebel commanders rejected an offer from Afghan President Najibullah to directly negotiate an end to their country's civil war, vowing to fight on to topple his Communist-style government. They also accused fundamentalist rebel chief Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of secretly plotting to form a coalition government with Najibullah and Gen. Shahnawaz Tanai, a former defense minister who defected in 1990.

Rule 17 bans women from public baths. Rule 9 puts a razor to the hair of any man with a Beatles do. Rule 7 orders up to 10 days' imprisonment for shopkeepers selling materials to make kites. On its surface, the hardcover white booklet with side-by-side passages in the main Afghan languages, Pashto and Dari, appears as benign as a Farmer's Almanac. But inside the 142 pages of the "Official Gazette" is the list of do's and don'ts of life under the Taliban.

It was a rare moment in international diplomacy. Farid Ahmad Mazdak, the third most powerful official in a nation that has been at virtual war with the United States for more than a decade, had invited two American journalists to an informal Friday lunch in the sitting room of his Kabul apartment.

The director of surgery at the public hospital was a Muslim cleric with no medical experience. The state bank director had memorized every verse of the Holy Koran but knew nothing of finance. In all the Taliban provincial offices here, only the mullah who headed the provincial office of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice appeared qualified for his job.