KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Hotel Intercontinental, gem of a ruined city, exudes a medieval charm.

The lobby walls surrendered their photos and portraits to the Taliban religious police two years ago. The drinking and dancing that drew sultans and kings have been replaced by ice water and prayer. At night, the breeze wafts into the Pamir Supper Club through a hole made by a missile, the gap framing a city of twinkling lights and curfew calm.

"The Taliban took everything," says Sher Ahmed, the sad-eyed manager of food and beverages. "But they brought the fighting to an end."

Peace has come to Afghanistan with a puritanical touch. After nine years of civil war, the soldiers of the Taliban religious army have tamed the cities and conquered the countryside, bringing this nation a measure of order and quietude it has not known in a quarter-century.

The price of peace has been tyranny and fear, imposed by an Islamic movement so extreme that those who violate its ways are often killed or maimed in public ceremonies. Members of the Taliban militia patrol the cities with switches and whips, dispersing crowds and snooping for dissent.

The onset of calm has given rise to the first signs of discontent, often expressed at the risk of arrest or death. Couples complain that their daughters are prohibited from attending school. Many women, their identities cloaked behind mandatory tentlike burkas, are beginning to publicly question a system that forbids them from working, reading or walking the streets alone.

"It is like a death," says Mariam, her face invisible behind a full-length shroud. Once a professor of Persian language, Mariam had to surrender her job when the Taliban took control of the city of Herat. She offers only her middle name. She fears for her life.

The public executions at the Kabul Sports Stadium have become an almost weekly ritual.

"Please, I beg you, spare my son's life," cries Abdul Mubin, father of the condemned man, exercising his final chance to seek absolution from the victim's family.

"He killed my son, and I will not forgive him," answers Ahmad Noor, whose son was murdered in an irrigation dispute. "I will never forgive him."

The warm-up act is an amputation. A group of Taliban surgeons, wearing green hoods and white surgical masks, crouches around a man named Ali Shah, convicted of stealing four watches and the equivalent of $50, and removes his right hand. One of the doctors tosses the bleeding body part into the grass.

Shah, sedated but still conscious, is carried away on the bed of a red Toyota pickup truck.

The mood tightens. Taliban guards carrying switches thrash a pack of filthy orphans who have tried to sneak into the stadium. A voice crackles into the loudspeaker: "In revenge, there is life."

The condemned man, Atiqullah, is seated cross-legged at the far end of the football field, blindfolded. One of the surgeons hands a Kalashnikov to the murder victim's brother.

The crowd goes silent. The brother crouches and takes aim. "In revenge, there is life," the voice says.

The brother fires into Atiqullah's head. Atiqullah lingers motionless for a second, then collapses in a heap. A groan escapes from the audience.

The brother stands over Atiqullah, aims and fires again. The body lies still. Then the brother walks around his victim, crouches and fires a final shot. Spectators rush onto the field as the two men, avenger and condemned, are carried away in separate trucks.

A spectator, who asks not to be identified, explains that most Afghans do not share such enthusiasm for the public executions but that they fill the Kabul sports stadium Fridays because there is little else to do.

"In America, you have television and movies -- the cinema," he says. "Here, there is only this."

Away from the execution ground, Mullah Mohammed Hassan, a senior Taliban leader, is perplexed. "I don't know what we have done to earn the enmity of so many countries," he says. "What have we done?"

Hassan offers a bit of history to justify the Taliban's harsh regime: Afghanistan's glorious victory in 1989, ending 10 years of Soviet occupation, soured when the many factions of freedom fighters turned on one another. Anarchy was loosed and Afghanistan was destroyed. Every street corner became an opportunity for one of the militias to set up a checkpoint, where residents were often forced to pay bribes and turn over their daughters and wives.

"We emerged to restore order and peace to the country," says Hassan, who lost a leg and pinky finger during the war against the Soviets.

To answer the anarchy, the Taliban imposed a series of sweeping rules that touched every aspect of daily life. Men must wear their mustaches just above their lips and their bangs neatly trimmed along their foreheads. Women must don burkas that cover the entire body and provide only a screenlike vent in front the eyes.

If a woman refuses?

"Maybe we beat her with a stick," says Mullah Mohammed Wali, minister for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice.

Wali, like other Taliban members, relies on an extreme interpretation of Islam to mete out punishments for such sins as drinking, gambling, drugs, watching television and listening to music. Women who wear white socks -- drawing attention to the ankles -- are flogged. Homosexuals are buried under walls of bricks. Adulterers are killed with stones.

"On the surface it looks like I have a difficult job," says Wali. "But I am willing and happy in my work."

Jilani Humayum remembers when Kabul was divided among five warring militias and the fighting raged almost every night. "Now you can walk the streets without fear," he says.

But though he is grateful for the Taliban's peace, he doesn't care for its harsh brand of Islam. Not long ago, Taliban enforcers decided that his uncle's hair was too long. They pulled him aside and shaved his head without water.

Humayum would like to see his young daughter go to school: "There is nothing in Islam that says a girl cannot be educated."

Taliban leaders say they will allow girls to attend classes only when the country is able to build separate schools and give the girls what they consider appropriate Muslim educations.

Sadiqullah Siddiqui, a taxi driver, thinks he knows why education has a low priority.

"The Taliban does not want our children going to school," he says. "Because if you get an education, you won't fight."

Sher Ahmed, the food and beverage manager, holds a color brochure that the Hotel Intercontinental printed 30 years ago. It shows women lounging by the pool, couples playing tennis and Ahmed as a young man, sporting a red dinner jacket and a wide smile.

Ahmed, now wearing a gray beard and a tattered tunic, stands on the deserted dance floor of the Pamir Supper Club. As a young man, he used to sneak up to the fifth floor to watch the couples dance. Today, the bar is closed, the dance floor is dusty and Ahmed rarely ventures up.

"I used to love this place," he says.

Pub Date: 11/04/98