General Baba Jan sits on a rusted camp bed in the control tower of Baghram airport. With 2,000 men and the biggest, most strategic military base in Afghanistan at his command, the paunchy 42-year-old Baba Jan is a legend in the United Front enclave.
"I've been fighting for 22 years. Six times I've been wounded," he boasts with a white-toothed grin. "I have fought in every province of Afghanistan." There is just one problem. Baba Jan's prize is the ghost of an airport. Nothing has flown out of here since Baghram was retaken - for the third time - from the Taliban in 1999.
Mullah Omar's forces lurk only two kilometres away, in the ochre-coloured village to the east of the airstrip, in the convoy-raising clouds of dust at its southern end. The United Front would have to put 15 kilometres between it and the Taliban to use the airport. Baba Jan, in a dubious claim, says the runway is operational.
The green linoleum floor buckles under his army boots. Piles of cigarette butts and sand collect along the baseboards.
Weeds sprout through the cement landing strip. Four crippled MiG fighters, painted in faded yellow and green camouflage, rest permanently at the northern end of the tower. Seven fire-trucks, intact but sunk into the sand, are aligned in a mock state of alert. Trees grow from roof-tops. The barracks are gutted and there is a shell hole over Baba Jan's head. "What is not operational is the radar and ground-to-air control system," he continues. "During the Taliban occupation it was dismantled and taken to Pakistan." Baba Jan wishes American forces would use Baghram to overthrow the Taliban and rebuild Afghanistan, but that dream slips away daily.
Dr Abdullah, the "foreign minister" of the United Front, now says the anti-Taliban forces will postpone their offensive against Kabul until a political settlement is reached among Afghan factions. That could be months. Or years.
In the meantime, Baba Jan waits, overseeing occasional heavy machine gun and artillery exchanges, surveying the vast Shomali Plain that stretches 380 degrees around him. Kabul is tantalisingly close - only 30 km to the south, beyond the lowest mountain. From radio intercepts and his spies, Baba Jan claims to know that the Taliban have deployed their best fighters - Muslims from China, Chechnya, the Arab world, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and the Punjab - to the frontline positions around Baghram.
As we speak, the Taliban are attacking the United Front, shelling them with tank fire at Benioursak, seven kilometres away. The noise punctuates Baba Jan's conversation, but it is routine and no longer interests him. "Nothing has changed in the last month," Baba Jan admits.
Incredibly, the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, and the US and British air raids have not fazed the most important frontline in Afghanistan - and what Baba Jan claims to be the biggest concentration of Taliban forces.
"The US and we have the same interest," Baba Jan continues. "They want to get rid of the terrorists and avenge their dead. We want to get rid of the terrorists and avenge our leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud."
If only Washington would see it that way, he continues. "It is a shame for America and Britain that (President) Perez Musharaff (of Pakistan) is able to tell them not to let the United Front go to Kabul. Pakistan asked the US not to bomb the Taliban frontlines . . . We are the only group fighting the Taliban. If the US thinks they can find someone better, let them try." The Front has it all figured out. If the order is ever given, "Our defence ministry has decided to surround Kabul and send the interior ministry forces into the city. We want to avoid any repetition of the fighting in 1992." When it ruled Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996, the Front discredited itself through factional fighting in which 50,000 people lost their lives.
The plan now is to seize Kabul's 12 police stations and disarm everyone inside the city. "We would need approximately 1,200 policemen to do this," Baba Jan explains. "A hundred for each police station. They would be armed with light weapons." It wouldn't take much to throw the Taliban out of Kabul, Baba Jan insists. "The Taliban have acted like barbarians. It might be enough for a small offensive from this side, and people would rise up and chase them out with sticks and stones." But the United Front has been ordered to hold back, and Baba Jan has no confidence in the air strikes. "If the Americans do not push them on the ground," he says, "the US can bomb them from the air for a year and it will accomplish nothing."