Victors Find Old Summer Capital a Ghost Town : Afghanistan: A guerrilla unit wanders through the ruins of Paghman, now just another broken and abandoned village.

PAGHMAN, Afghanistan —  The men of Maulem Shah Mohammed’s lost command sat in the ruins of King Amanullah’s hillside guest house, waiting for lunch: a scorched vat of rice, a spent ammunition box of tea and a 50-gallon drum down to its last half-inch of lard.

The commander’s hands were frostbitten from the eight-day walk he and his 30 tattered fighters had made to claim the rubble of Paghman for their Muslim guerrilla faction.

They were acting on orders more than two weeks old. The victory came without firing a single shot; the prize was a ghost town.

Shah Mohammed’s men, assault rifles shouldered, wandered through the ruins, along the cratered, muddy lanes, past the roofless shells of century-old mosques and hotels, and into the heavily mined royal gardens of what was once Afghanistan’s showpiece summer capital.

“What is the day?” Hidayatullah, one of the commander’s bewildered guerrilla fighters, asked in broken English when he met the first foreigners he had seen in years.

“It’s Monday,” the young moujahed , or holy warrior, was told.

“Oh. What date?” he persisted.

“May 4,” was the reply.

“Oh,” he said. He turned to his fellow fighters to share the news, paused for a moment, then turned back to the strangers.

“Yes, but, what year?”

Hidayatullah’s confusion was an apt metaphor for an entire people left dislocated by a war that has wrought an immense human and physical toll on this country.

Paghman, the city that King Amanullah built as a centerpiece of Afghan pride, is “liberated” now, but the war simply will not fade.

As the moujahedeen ‘s heralded Islamic crusade deteriorated further this week into fighting among warring guerrilla factions for control of the nearby Afghan capital, the scene in Paghman was one of exhaustion, frustration and unease.

This summer paradise just 10 miles outside Kabul, whose ruins have changed hands several times in the war between Muslim guerrillas and a succession of brutal Soviet-backed regimes, is just one of tens of thousands of broken and abandoned villages, part of a bombed, rocketed and machine-gunned landscape.

Shah Mohammed and his weather-beaten guerrilla force walked in from the mountains and took possession of Paghman less than two weeks ago. After fighting so hard for it over the years, the collapsing regime of ousted strongman Najibullah simply gave up on Paghman, along with the rest of its final strongholds, when the government fell.

Paghman was not quite uninhabited. Walking amid the ruins was 65-year-old Fatullah, one of only two of the 40,000 onetime inhabitants who could be found here Monday.

After living in Kabul for more than a year, Fatullah had finally come home.

He had left Kabul at 3:30 a.m. and had walked for 3 1/2 hours to get here, and now he was leading a few visitors on a tour of the town. “There!” he shouted, pointing through the ruins. “There was my house. That’s where my three sons were killed when the bomb fell on them last year.

“After that happened, we left. We moved to Kabul. Seven years before, I had lost four daughters the same way. First it was the government that came and bombed us. Then the militia who came and bombed us. Then the government again. Then the moujahedeen. Then the government again. They all bombed us and bombed us until all of Paghman was finished.

“We couldn’t live here anymore. No one could live here. So finally, last year, the few who were left just went away.”

As he walked through once-pristine lanes now deeply rutted from tank treads and bombs, Fatullah pointed out some of the remnants of King Amanullah’s summer capital, which, after the corrupt monarch was ousted in 1929, became a summer mecca for family picnics and lazy afternoons.

There was the Bahar Hotel, Fatullah said, the largest of the king’s public buildings, and there, the hotel’s private garden, where diners once munched kebabs and sipped green tea beneath magnificent old trees.

The hotel is gutted now, its old stone roof blasted away. All that remains of its name on the single jagged wall left standing is, “AR HOTEL.”

And the garden that once boasted a riot of spring flowers is now planted with hundreds of anti-personnel mines, unseen beneath decapitated birch trees and pulverized poplars.

Fatullah then pointed out Amanullah’s strange mosque, a red-brick facade and four Doric pillars now pocked with hundreds of bullet holes.

On a terrace below, there was Amanullah’s towering Victory Arch, modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris as a memorial to Afghanistan’s 1919 war of independence from Britain.

Now the arch is battered, crumbling and forgotten, and its inscription of sovereignty obliterated.

A bit farther down the hill is the city’s Public Garden. In a 1972 guidebook, Nancy Dupree, the veteran American traveler, says the garden’s layout was supervised by the king, and she describes it thus:

“On the center terrace, there is a two-storied cafe, several fountains and a bandstand where the band used to play every afternoon during the busy social season.”

But when Fatullah met Hidayatullah’s patrol as he entered the town early Monday, the nearby garden was a bleak landscape with scorched trees, the only music the sound of far-off artillery fire.

The old man and the young guerrilla, whose worn Russian field glasses had only one eyepiece left and whose rifle bore a deep crack in the butt, spoke a few words. They were both from Paghman, as it happened. And both sadly shook their heads.

“It was so beautiful here,” Fatullah said. “And now there is nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

The two then shook hands and bade farewell. Hidayatullah would remain in Paghman with the rest of the lost command, helping his commander guard what was left of their new possession.

But Fatullah would not. And as he started back toward his new home in Kabul with a clump of wildflowers he had picked as souvenirs for the remnants of his family, his message was not a hopeful one.

It wasn’t that Fatullah, who is among hundreds of thousands of rural Afghans who have taken refuge in the capital throughout the war, objected to the new occupants of his old hometown.

“I like them very much, because they work for all of Afghanistan,” the white-bearded old man said when asked his opinion of the Islamic moujahedeen who have peacefully secured all of Afghanistan except for its embattled capital.

“And I would love to come back to Paghman, to work in the fields and make it beautiful again.

“But the problem is, we have no government. Everyone is fighting in Kabul. And, without a government to help, I have no money to rebuild my house.

“When Kabul is under control, and the government is settled, then I will go home.”

Then, halfway between Paghman and Kabul, he left his visitors with a chilling image of both the nation’s painful past and its uncertain future.

“There,” he said, pointing to an entire hillside covered with tombs, gravestones and multicolored mourning flags.

“There, on that hillside, you see the people of Paghman.”