By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 23, 2003; Page A01

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Oct. 22 -- "Name?"

"Shah Mahmad."

"Age?"

"Thirty-four."

"Can you read?"

"No."

"Any skills?"

"Just this gun."

With such terse exchanges, repeated several hundred times during the past two days at army bases across the northern province of Kunduz, Afghan and U.N. officials launched a long-awaited national program to disarm tens of thousands of factional fighters, demobilize them from their militia units and reintegrate them into civilian life.

At one base, long lines of grizzled men in tunics and baggy trousers, each lugging a battered assault rifle or rocket launcher, waited hours to register for the program. Then they filed over to a cargo truck where each weapon was inspected by U.N. officials, slapped with an identifying bar-code sticker and stashed away.

In return, each fighter was handed a plastic ID card that entitled him to $200, a change of civilian clothes, a box of food and vocational training and employment counseling in such fields as land mine clearance, road construction and factory work.

"I feel like I've been let out of prison after a long time," exulted Nizamuddin, 35, a hulking man who had just turned in an enormous mortar tube. "I have been carrying a gun since I was 20, and I never learned to do anything else. People in my village blame every crime on me. Now maybe I can finally get a job and get married."

The pilot project in Kunduz, scheduled to include 1,000 fighters, will be celebrated Friday with an official parade and ceremony to be attended by top Afghan and U.N. officials. Every demobilized man will receive a military medal, and President Hamid Karzai will symbolically lock up a truckful of weapons.

Hopes for pacifying Afghanistan, which has been embroiled in a succession of conflicts since the Soviet army occupied it in 1979, rest largely on the success of this program. Karzai's authority remains limited, and some regions are controlled by militia leaders with little loyalty to the government. A constitutional assembly and national elections are scheduled in the coming months, and there are widespread fears of political violence.

The start of the program was delayed for months while reforms were carried out at the Defense Ministry, giving its leadership -- once dominated by former militia commanders from a single faction -- a more ethnically balanced and professional nature. Now, in theory, no ethnic militia should object to handing over its weapons or decreasing its forces for fear that a rival group will exploit this weakness.

Kunduz, a remote but verdant province close to the border with Tajikistan in the far north, was selected as the program's launching pad because it is unusually peaceful. Nearly two years ago, after the collapse of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamic movement that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, Afghan military officials spearheaded a weapons collection drive here and registered most former militiamen with new army units.

Across the province this week, civilians expressed universal and often impassioned support for the program, saying that two decades of conflict had destroyed normal life. Tea shop customers and school teachers, farmers threshing rice and horse-cart drivers waiting for riders all said the only way to ensure peace was to rid the region of guns, by force if necessary.

"The warlords and commanders with guns just drink the blood of the people," said Anakhul, 62, a baker in Aliabad, a busy town surrounded by rice paddies and melon fields. "We have all been their victims, and we have all had enough. If the government can negotiate seriously and get the guns away, that's fine. If not, then they must search every house and take every weapon away."

In the city of Kunduz, a dusty provincial capital where the most common sound is the jingle of horse harness bells, Abdul Rasool, 63, a saddle maker, recounted how militiamen had broken into his workshop and smashed his safe a few years ago. "We don't have war now, by the grace of God, so there is no need for guns," he said. "Everyone wants them gone except the few who make money from them."

The crucial support for disarmament, however, comes from Gen. Daud Khan, a former militia leader who is regional commander of the Afghan Defense Forces. He is viewed as loyal to the Karzai government, and he faces no threat from factional rivals that would justify clinging to his weapons and troops.

"I am ready to demobilize 30,000 men in three provinces if the authorities ask me," said Khan, 33, in an interview at his headquarters, where hundreds of fighters were registering to disarm. "There are rumors that we mujaheddin [Islamic holy warriors] still want to rule by the gun. We want to prove we have a place in civilian society, and we want to set an example for the rest of the country."

To ensure that the fighters do not return to their former way of life, the United Nations has set up the Afghan New Beginnings Program, which will offer free job training and placement for all demobilized forces. Unskilled men can learn how to operate road repair equipment; officers with some education may receive help opening small businesses. A few are expected to enlist in the new Afghan army.

"These people have had enough of war. You can see the elation and excitement on their faces," said James Grimshaw, a British manager at the New Beginnings office, which is scheduled to open other branches in half a dozen provinces where the disarmament program will begin in the coming months. "This is not just about collecting weapons. It is about turning people into permanently employable individuals."

But U.N. officials and other analysts said there was no guarantee that a successful demobilization campaign in Kunduz could be replicated in other regions where there is political instability and armed conflict. Even in Kunduz, the modest goal of disarming 1,000 volunteers ran into numerous difficulties.

The lists of approved participants arrived so late from the Defense Ministry that there was little time to properly verify their identities; various official lists of total soldiers in the region were wildly contradictory. Some officers balked at disarming in a last-minute bid for more money and office jobs; some fighters presented old weapons that were virtually unusable, including World War I-era carbines.

"Everyone knows this is a pilot project, and everyone is testing it," said Sergei Illarionov, the chief U.N. political adviser here. "Our main concern is that people with bad backgrounds, criminals and human rights abusers, don't get included. But there have been so many delays; everything is happening at the last minute. We don't really have time to verify, but we can't delay the launching any further."

Although most participants were only in their thirties and forties, many had been soldiering virtually full time since they were teenagers: first as resistance fighters against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, then as followers of various factions in the civil war of the 1990s, and finally as combatants against the Taliban. From their comments this week, it was clear many had no idea how they would earn a living or fit into civilian life.

Shukrullah, 48, a gray-haired veteran, sat in the grass on an army base cradling an old Kalashnikov rifle he had carried for 20 years. "I fought the Russians, I fought the Taliban, I fought whoever was our enemy," he said. "I can't read or write, but they're promising to give us jobs, so here I am. It's time to go home to my children."