Supporters of the Taliban, the strict Islamic group that captured the Afghan capital last month, evacuating a wounded soldier near kabul. The Taliban conceded losing two towns to former government forces. (Associated Press)

KOAB, Afghanistan -- When a band of Afghan fighters rose before dawn Monday at a smoky inn in this village high in the Hindu Kush mountains, the prospect before them was much the same as it has been since the war here began with a Communist coup nearly two decades ago.

From all that the fighters said during a night resting at the inn, the outlook is for more long, dusty days tramping across inhospitable hills or bouncing in open trucks down rocky roads, with little awaiting them but the next skirmish. For many of them, fighting is the only life they have ever known.

But during hours spent sharing the fighters' evening meal of boiled rice and their dormitory on a bare mud floor at the back of the inn, their nonchalance was striking.

Among the fighters, there seemed to be little sense of a life beyond their ragtag existence in the Afghan hinterland. There were no complaints, even from men with no laces for the battered street shoes that serve as combat boots, no openly expressed fears of death in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands like them, not even much that could be called hope.

There was only a general sense that a life spent roaming this ancient land in pursuit of battle was about all that any Afghan man could expect.

"We are fighters -- that is what we do," said a man who gave his name as Shamsuddin, 45, a commander in the guerrilla force of Ahmad Shah Massoud.

He spoke during a break from an evening spent listening to bulletins on the Afghan fighting squawking from a short-wave radio tuned to Radio Tehran. The Iranian broadcasts are much favored among the Persian-speaking men of the ethnic Tajik minority in Afghanistan who are the bulk of Massoud's force.

From the grins that the commander's remark prompted among fellow fighters grouped about him in the glow of a kerosene lamp, it seemed that they, too, considered questions about their personal feelings to be effete or irrelevant.

They did not even seem much interested in the complex politics of the war, which has provided them with a kaleidoscope of enemies, some of whom have been allies, then enemies, then allies again. The rule seemed to be that they fight whomever the commander chooses.

At the moment, the enemy is the Islamic movement known as the Taliban, which captured Kabul, the Afghan capital, from the Massoud forces last month, then set about imposing a strict system that includes bans on women working, on girls going to school and even on the playing of soccer.

The Massoud forces have taken the lead in counterattacking the Taliban north of Kabul, striking in recent days at targets as close as five miles from the capital's northern outskirts.

The Massoud forces are newly aligned with two other ethnic armies, the Uzbek-dominated force of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and the Shiite Muslim force of Hazaras under Abdul Karim Khalily, which have pledged to resist the Taliban, who are mainly from the ethnic Pathan majority in Afghanistan.

An unpaved road leads to a rebel base high in the Bamian region.

But in this valley, as in many other regions of northeastern Afghanistan, there is plenty of evidence, in ruined villages and blasted bridges, of the fighting that pitted the Massoud forces against the fighters of Dostum and Khalily until only a month ago, before the Taliban united former enemies against them by taking Kabul.

For the Massoud men at Doab, Radio Tehran has provided the fighting rationale of the moment: that the Taliban have been armed and financed by Pakistan and the United States, and are therefore no better than the Russians who sent an occupying force to Afghanistan for a decade in the 1980s, or for that matter the British who invaded Afghanistan twice in the 19th century.

"The Taliban are puppets of Pakistan," the Massoud fighters said in a chorus that rang through the evening. "We will drive them out of Kabul."

But in the end, it seemed that it was the fighting, not the enemy, that mattered most. The evening was punctuated by bloodthirsty gestures that needed no translation, ranging from leveled Kalashnikov rifles and the staccato noises of automatic fire to hands strangling an imaginary foe.

It is a mood like this that has troubled the handful of Afghan psychologists who have not joined the middle-class exodus abroad. They have been saying for years that even if the fighting stops, Afghanistan will have to contend for decades with the tortured psychology of men who have known nothing but war.

The good-humored camaraderie of the Massoud fighters, some of whom gave up their own blankets to two Western reporters to ward off the night chill, seemed all the more remarkable for the hardships of the terrain they have been assigned to hold, and to recapture every time it has been lost.

Only three days ago, when the Massoud fighters were further up the valley, the village of Doab shifted its allegiances to the Taliban, posting a white Taliban flag on a pole atop a part of the main street that was bombed to a shell by Soviet aircraft a decade ago. The next day, as the Massoud forces approached, the village shifted back.

Doab -- the name means "two rivers" in Dari, the Persian dialect spoken by Afghanistan's Tajik people -- is in the heart of the Bamian region of the Hindu Kush, about 60 miles west of the Salang Highway that connects Kabul to northern Afghanistan through the mountains.

To reach here from the highway requires a 12-hour journey along a narrow, unpaved road made almost impassable by huge, knife-edged boulders, waist-high floods and bridges across plunging rivers that the fighting has reduced to little more than tangled masses of iron and wood.

To drive the road is to pass through a patchwork of territories, some only a mile or two along the riverbank, that are controlled by the different military factions belonging to the new anti-Taliban alliance.

At the checkpoints, trucks carrying cargos of rice and wheat -- and sometimes flatbeds full of Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara families fleeing Taliban rule in Kabul -- are charged tolls by teen-age fighters waving rifles.

Each halt has a commander who seems to report to nobody but himself, eager to show off his small band of fighters and his armory of battered Soviet weapons to passing foreigners.

Often there is enough bombast for a comic opera. "There is no way out for the Taliban fighters," Sherdat Fedayi, 50, a commander in the Dostum forces, said at a checkpoint a few miles east of Doab. "They will soon be surrounded by us to the north, the south, the east and the west."

As his men gathered around him, Fedayi pointed south toward Kabul and added, "The only escape for them is to the cemetery."