JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Under the trashed control tower of Jalalabad's bombed airport, sullen prisoners who were captured by anti-Taliban Afghan forces languished in a locked basement.

This wrecked airport in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, was not offering them, or anyone else, a flight out of here.

Atop the airport's tall control tower, a tattered white Taliban flag flapped in a desert wind.

The flag was tied with bright green string to a tree branch, which was wedged vertical into the base of the control tower's telecommunications antennae.

The defiant nylon flag was decorated by a scrawl of black, hand-painted Arabic calligraphy hailing Allah, Islam and the Taliban.

The losers' flag.

Thick shards of glass littered the control tower's viewing room, and its lower rooftop, amid ripped-up official flight plans, broken furniture, and yanked out electronic gear.

Discarded scraps of paper, dating back to October, offered information to the International Committee of the Red Cross and other applicants who wanted to land their airplanes here.

Crumpled official flight maps showed complicated data for routes, leading all over Afghanistan and beyond.

Downstairs, on a lawn in front of the control tower, 90 victorious anti-Taliban Afghan fighters squatted on their haunches, shoved logs into blazing campfires, and cooked supper out in the open.

Instead of the usual gaggle of arriving and departing passengers, the garbage-strewn grassy area between the control tower and airport runway hosted an open kitchen, where hobo-style clusters of armed Afghan men stirred big aluminum pots of bubbling stew.

Some of the tough, bearded men sported pink roses and other flowers in their hats, or behind their ears, brightening an otherwise grim scene.

A fearsome Soviet-era, radar-guided, anti-aircraft gun rested in overgrown grass to the left of the runway.

Afghans like to use anti-aircraft weapons to shoot down planes or deliver scathing ground-to-ground bombardment, though the pale green vehicle-mounted gun was rusty and it was unclear if it still worked.

A red sign warned of landmines under the dirt where the tarmac stopped.

In a nearby garage, several expensive, white, United Nations vehicles were parked.

They were now possessed by the anti-Taliban Afghan forces, including one car idly blaring Pashtun music from its tape deck.

After the Taliban seized power throughout most of Afghanistan in 1996, they alienated many Afghans by outlawing music.

The Islamic Taliban perceived plaintive and fun-loving Afghan songs, and foreign melodies, as plots to "fool the mind."

An Afghan man grinning in front of the U.N. vehicles shyly nodded his head to the loud music, gestured with an upward thumb and said, "We like it."

He and his comrades, however, soon realized the shiny U.N. vehicles might mark these Afghan fighters at the airport as car thieves.

After whispering among themselves, one man came forward and said: "We are keeping these U.N. cars only for safety purposes, to prevent them from being damaged or stolen by others. We will return them to the U.N. when the U.N. people come back to Jalalabad."

Elsewhere at the airport, smashed Soviet-supplied communications trucks, and unidentifiable twisted metal, lay abandoned by the side of a building.

The runway bore three deep craters from a recent U.S. aerial bombardment.

U.S. bombing raids systematically destroyed most, if not all, of Afghanistan's airports to prevent the Taliban using them as military airstrips, and to achieve U.S. domination over Afghan airspace.

Long before the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began on Oct. 7, however, Washington clamped an international embargo on the country's Ariana Afghan Airlines.

The commercial passenger flights were allegedly being used by the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network to transport suspected terrorists, weapons and ammunition.

Back at the top of the control tower, meanwhile, someone suddenly let out a bold cry, grabbed the branch with the Taliban flag, and speared it down into a pile of garbage and shattered glass.

The fighters cooking supper on the lawn, roared with approval.

Shortly after Nov. 13 when the Taliban fled Kabul, the Afghan capital, the Taliban were forced to peacefully leave Jalalabad.

Local opposition commanders told them to get out of town or else, because the Taliban's presence in the region attracted too many U.S. bombs.

In the control tower's makeshift dungeon, meanwhile, seven detained men said they were Pakistanis who recently crossed the border to join the Taliban in a burst of Islamic solidarity.

The men, wearing civilian clothes, said they quickly discovered they were unable to fight a real war once the shooting started.

One man said he was a journalist for a pro-Taliban publication in Pakistan but was robbed while on assignment outside of Jalalabad.

"These seven are here as our prisoners," one of their captors said in an interview, pointing at the men who were praying in the dim subterranean room.

"We don't really know where they are from, or if they are Arabs or not, but they say they are Pakistanis."

One of the prisoners said, "We wanted to fight against the United States, but after we came across the Pakistani-Afghan border we were abandoned by our Taliban recruiters."

When asked about the prisoners' fate, Nangarhar Province's Security Chief, Hazrat Ali, replied, "The prisoners who are related to people in Pakistan's tribal areas and cities will be released soon.

"Those who are al Qaeda will be kept and put on trial."

Mr. Ali belongs to a newly formed anti-Taliban Eastern Alliance of warlords and former anti-Soviet mujahideen guerrilla commanders.

After ousting the Taliban, they set up their own coalition government for Afghanistan's Pashtun tribal majority in the "eastern zone."

It includes the provinces of Nangarhar, Laghman, Kunar and Nuristan, which are east and northeast of Kabul.

Jalalabad is the most important city in the four provinces, because the main two-lane highway linking Kabul and the Khyber Pass into Pakistan runs through the center of this provincial capital.

Nestled in a river valley, Jalalabad is 146 kilometers (88 miles) east of Kabul, and 78 kilometers (47 miles) west of the Khyber Pass.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, needs to fix its airports as soon as possible.

The Kabul-Khyber Pass highway, and other routes across Afghanistan's mountains and deserts, are frequently raided by murderous bandits and Taliban snipers.

Jalalabad's airport still has its big, white Japanese-made radar dish on the roof where the Taliban flag once stood.

In one of the office rooms, a satellite communications center, powered by a bunch of new Australian batteries, appeared in relatively good order.

In the evening, while anti-Taliban fighters huddled around their campfires swapping satirical jokes, a U.S. Air Force high-altitude B-52 warplane slowly crossed the clear sky.

Its 185-foot wingspan created straight trails of puffy white vapor.

One excited Afghan man peered at the B-52 Stratofortress through binoculars and exclaimed, "Will it land here? I don't think so. Oooh, I can see happy people inside the plane. Oooh, there is a beautiful girl in there smiling at me."

Other Afghan fighters peered out of the control tower's broken windows and watched in awe as the U.S. plane flew westward, its white trails turning red in the dusty sunset.

Richard S. Ehrlich has a Master's Degree in Journalism from Columbia University, and is the co-author of the classic book of epistolary history, "HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" -- Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews.

Richard S. Ehrlich's Asia news, non-fiction book, plus hundreds of photographs are available at his website http://www.oocities.org/asia_correspondent