Odd jobs: One Afghan's post-Taliban tale

"I agreed to work secretly with them as a spy for a little extra cash. I pointed out some of the top Taliban and Al Qaeda officials still living in the province, but they usually managed to slip away before the US soldiers could get to them."

"I was still afraid to tell the Americans everything because I was already being threatened by the Taliban," he says. "Still, the US forces eventually caught up to and captured Mullah Rocketti [named for his prowess with shoulder-fired rockets], a senior commander from the Jalalabad area who was plotting a Taliban comeback in the area." Rocketti is now being held in a secret US detention center, probably in Afghanistan.

Last March, the US Special Forces commanders handed Tahir a satellite phone and told him to call as often as possible with intelligence about new Taliban and Al Qaeda plots. "I called them twice down at their base in Kandahar to tell Col. Roger King about some recent meetings, but, in the end, I decided to sell the phone as I feared the Taliban would capture and kill me if they found me with it."

Last April, Tahir left Zabul, hitching a ride to Kabul with a couple of reporters from the Monitor, and started looking for work as an interpreter for news agencies – more challenging than traditional interpreting and safer than spy work. In Kabul, landed a job as an assistant with USA Today. Tom Squiteri, a senior reporter at the newspaper, describes him this way: "He is a hard worker, very persistent, and wants greatly to improve himself. He is a smart guy and works as well as anyone in the kind of cross-cultural environment he is now in."

Tahir's home province, meanwhile, has gradually been slipping back under the Taliban's influence. Television sets, banned under the Taliban, have vanished from the marketplace and a nearby girls' school was recently rocketed by rebellious former officials hiding in the hills. In addition, an intelligence chief, once loyal to the Russians, was assassinated on his way home from the governor's mansion.

Tahir worries that the renewed plotting by the Taliban spells trouble for the US-led war on terror in Afghanistan. He fears that the Americans will one day "face the music, just like the Russians did" and insists that the US military still needs better intelligence on the ground in the southern Pashtun regions.

But Tahir says there is no question of returning as a spy. Working for a newspaper in Kabul is far more lucrative, he admits.

The CIA and Special Forces aren't the only ones suffering from a similar "brain drain" in the remote provinces. Because of decisions by talented young Afghans like Tahir to work with reporters and leave for Kabul, government and economic development offices in rural areas also suffer from a lack of good translators and experienced eyes. For Tahir, there were also a few other practical considerations. Besides, he says of his co-workers at USA Today: "They are a bit more anxious to correct my grammar than the US Special Forces and the CIA were."

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