Taliban commander who likes girls and shopping

For a man in the heart of enemy territory, Qadir was in jovial form. The Taliban commander's eyes creased up with laughter as he explained that he had bought the military-style jacket he was wearing - olive green, complete with epaulettes and cuffs - to woo Kabul's female population.

"There were two girls looking at me as I was shopping," he said from the back of a taxi in the Afghan capital. "They should have been wearing tighter T-shirts," he chuckled, cupping his hands in front of his chest suggestively and exhorting: "Tighter! Tighter!"

Qadir did not join the Taliban for ideological reasons

Qadir, a short plump man constantly on the phone making social arrangements, did not join the Taliban for ideological reasons. He was in Kabul on an infrequent shopping trip, ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid. With deep black hair, beard and eyes, Qadir is Pashtun - the ethnic group from which the Taliban draws most of its support - and he sprawled low in the back of the taxi until we were able to stop and find a private room with draped windows where he propped himself up on a pile of cushions and smoked ferociously while we talked.

Known to Afghanistan's secret police - or at least believing he is known to them - Qadir has become increasingly skittish about passing through government checkpoints since joining the insurgency five years ago. He visits the capital less and less and, when he does, prefers to travel with the friend who set up our meeting - another Pashtun, but one who lives in Kabul, shaves, and lamented the lack of whisky to hand.

Like many insurgents, Qadir took up arms after losing patience with house searches by foreign troops, the insensitive treatment of women this entails (visit an Aghan household and you are supposed to wait until the women have made themselves scarce) and the disrespect paid to tribal elders whose pleas for greater cooperation are often ignored by Western forces in the belief that some elders will pass on information to the Taliban. Most inflammatory of all has been the mistaken killing of civilians by foreign forces.

"To begin with I thought the international forces would bring peace and stability," Qadir said. "Then they started treating Afghans as their enemies. Their Apache helicopters killed civilians working in the fields."

In a battle last month Qadir lost 21 fighters but “killed lots” of Americans

As a wealthy landlord, disaffected tribesmen looked to him for leadership. The Taliban draws the majority of its fighters from the poor, so Qadir is unusual in that respect and more akin to the mujahideen who fought the Soviets and then each other. Now in his mid-30s, he roams the badlands stretching between his native Wardak, near Kabul, and Helmand province in the south.

He has over 600 men at his disposal, he told me, and described a battle last month in which he lost 21 fighters but "killed lots" of Americans. Inspecting the carnage afterwards, Qadir found a leg severed at the thigh but still wearing a US army boot.

Yet for all his talk of killing foreign soldiers, Qadir is one of the insurgents President Hamid Karzai's administration is courting.

With the support of the international community, Afghan officials have been making overtures to the Taliban for months, reckoning many insurgents are motivated by local grievances, cash or the desire for revenge against the invaders - but not ideology. The country's increasingly powerful Independent Directorate of Local Governance was recently charged with establishing