He had just reached this frontier city after traveling two days from Kabul, the Afghan capital, and sneaking across the border. A sheaf of letters was folded in his pocket, bearing identical, handwritten messages from his panic-stricken community. He would not return home, he vowed, until they were delivered.

The letters were addressed, in the Afghan Pashto language, to President Bush, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the leaders of China, France, Britain, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

"The world must know what is happening in Afghanistan," said Mohammed Sardar, 46, his voice ragged with anxiety and anger. "The terrorists and the leaders are still free, but the people are dying and there is no one to listen to us. I must get to President Bush and the others and tell them they are making a terrible mistake."

Sardar, a taxi driver and father of 12, said his family had spent night after night listening to the bombing in their community south of Kabul. One night during the first week, he said, a bomb aimed at a nearby radio station struck a house, killing all five members of the family living there.

"There was no sign of a home left," he said. "We just collected the pieces of bodies and buried them."

In many ways, Sardar's lonely, quixotic mission reflects both the desperation and naivete of Afghans, who have been virtually cut off from the outside world during two weeks of U.S.-led military assaults. The Afghan people, he said, have no idea if anyone knows or cares what is happening to their country.

Most telephone communication is gone, television is banned by the ruling Taliban Islamic movement, and most news is filtered through Taliban-controlled radio. Thousands of people have fled Kabul, trying to reach the Pakistani border. The official crossing point 50 miles west of Peshawar has been sealed by authorities on both sides, so people walk for hours and slip across the border on mountain paths. Sardar has made the hazardous trip twice. Three weeks ago, before the bombing began, he managed to reach Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, with another sheaf of letters asking world leaders not to attack Afghanistan. Unable to deliver them, he returned home and then sneaked back Monday for a second try.

This time he made it only as far as Peshawar, where he spent the night with his nephew, who sells imported tea from a stall. Today, as Sardar sat on his tea sack, fingering his beads and worrying about how to deliver his letters, another relative chatted and sipped tea with a friend on a worn carpet across the stall.

Both are grizzled men in their forties, natives of Kabul who had spent their youths at war. First they participated in the armed resistance against occupying Soviet troops in the 1980s; then they joined rival Islamic militias that fought each other for control of Kabul, turning the once-elegant capital into a shell-pocked wasteland. Now, with their country besieged by U.S. bombardment and its political fate uncertain, the two veterans vowed never again to let factional disputes destroy what remains of their homeland.

"We were fighters and enemies once, but not anymore," said Abdul Hamid, 40, a gaunt man with a long black beard, laughing ruefully as he glanced at his friend. "Our city and our country were ruined by foreign countries, and now it can happen again. The only hope is for all of us to get together, overcome our differences and work for peace."

Both men said they plan to attend a Wednesday meeting of several hundred former Afghan resistance leaders and exiled politicians that has been called in Peshawar to discuss the political crisis that looms in Afghanistan if the Taliban collapses. Some critics have derided the meeting as a naked power grab by former Afghan factions with Pakistani backing, but these two men said they hoped it would yield results.

"We have been meeting with other former commanders from Kabul, and some of them will be coming too," said the second man, Mohammed Arif, 46. "We have been meeting in people's homes for the past few weeks. We have no political agenda. We just want to support the process and try to solve this crisis."

As he listened from atop his sack, Sardar shook his head and sighed repeatedly in agitation. A frail man who never fought in the Afghan wars, he witnessed their brutal impact on his impoverished but strategically located country. And although illiterate, he learned the bitter lessons taught by ideological and religious extremism, fratricidal conflict and foreign intervention.

"All the terror in Afghanistan has been caused by other countries," Sardar said. "Iran, Russia, the Americans -- they all gave these groups money to kill our brothers and sisters." During the Taliban's five-year rule, he said, "there has been so much intervention by [Saudi] Arabia and Pakistan. Now we are asking them all, please do not intervene again. Go away and leave us in peace."

Despite the years of hardship and violence, Sardar said, he had never before left his homeland and has no wish to join the stream of refugees now fleeing Kabul and other cities. He noted that there are already several million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, many of them unemployed and unwanted. He said he planned to return to his family in Kabul as soon as he delivers his message.

"We love our country, and we have no business being in Pakistan. There is nothing here for us," Sardar said. The only people left in Kabul now, he said, are those who have no money and no relatives abroad. But if Afghans remaining behind must "die at home, at least we will be buried there."

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

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