Buffeted by a chilling wind that funneled down the gorges of the Panjshir Valley in northeast Afghanistan, three horsemen urged their mounts up a rocky defile at a punishing trot. Traders and refugees walking the same path late last month could tell by the men's heavy field jackets and Soviet-made automatic rifles that they were officers of the mujahedin, the Afghan resistance fighters who now control the once fiercely contested valley. Few of the walkers bothered to look carefully at the sparsely bearded, intense face of the lead rider as he passed. Had they done so, they would have recognized a...
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