Others dismiss these objections as self-serving. In his heavily guarded office above a hectic commercial street in downtown Pul-i-Khumri, a council member named Moh Faisal told me that the A.L.P. was anathema to Rasoul Khan because it represented a Pashtun threat to the Tajik hegemony over which he presided. “In the past, he was involved in drug trafficking and killed lots of people,” Faisal said. “Now all his relatives, friends and associates are in the government. The national police in Baghlan are not accountable to the chief of police. They are accountable to Rasoul Khan.”

Nearly everyone in Pul-i-Khumri seemed to agree with this. The provincial police chief at the time, Brig. Gen. Abdul Rahman Rahimi, was a Pashtun; the fact that the vast majority of his men were Andarabi Tajiks rendered him largely ineffectual, his authority mostly nominal. Not long after speaking with Faisal, I visited Rahimi in his opulent Pul-i-Khumri office, where each wall was lined with plush leather couches on which petitioners could wait to be invited into a much smaller and less stately room for private conversation. When it was my turn to see the general, he said: “An area that could not be secured by 500 national policemen is secured by 50 A.L.P. But what is really important is that the A.L.P. must be regulated.” Ultimately, that regulation should come from the chief of police. But the general claimed that the Americans had hampered his ability to do his job and that U.S. Special Forces protected A.L.P. commanders from criminal investigations. “The rules say the local police must be under the direct supervision of the national police,” Rahimi said. “Our friends in the Special Forces must not intervene in this.” Toward the end of our conversation, his cellphone rang. After listening to the other line for several moments, and perhaps forgetting my recorder was on, he said in Dari: “All three of them must be here for the investigation. Otherwise, the investigation cannot proceed.”

Rahimi was speaking of Nur-ul Haq, his younger brother Faz-ul Haq and their cousin Abdur Rahman. On later trips to Shahabuddin, I spent time with Faz-ul Haq and Rahman (who Human Rights Watch, in a recent report, says is accused of raping a 13-year-old boy), visiting A.L.P. checkpoints and accompanying foot patrols. As we made our way through verdant farmland irrigated by hand-dug canals, Faz-ul Haq seemed to have a story for each compound and cotton field we passed: here had been a Taliban headquarters, here a bloody firefight, here an R.P.G. attack. At his checkpoint in Omarkhel village, Rahman told me that as bad as it had sometimes been in Shahabuddin, he had only made the 20-minute drive to Pul-i-Khumri twice during the last year. “They were terrorizing us, stealing from us,” he said of the Taliban. But the Tajiks in the capital “are stronger than the Taliban,” he said.

“They never want to come,” General Rahimi now said into the phone, impatiently. “They are evading it by various means.” When he hung up, I asked whom he’d been talking to. He said it was the U.S. Special Forces. The general was no doubt affected by Ramadan and the day’s long fast, but he looked and sounded like a man overwhelmed by competing influences. “The Special Forces must hand these guys over,” he said. “If they don’t, it will jeopardize the entire program.”

The commander of U.S. Special Operations Forces in northern Afghanistan calls Rahimi’s characterization “an absolute lie.” When we spoke, he stressed that it lay with Rahimi, not the Americans, to investigate complaints and make arrests. “I’m not here to defend Nur-ul Haq,” he said. “But what I do know is I’ve seen a string of baseless allegations that when we followed up couldn’t be substantiated.” The leader of the Special Forces team working in Shahabuddin told me that he had personally escorted Haq to see criminal investigators in Pul-i-Khumri. “If they want to arrest him, they can arrest him,” he said.“We’re not going to stop them in any way.” In fact, it makes sense that Rahimi would want to give an impression of disapproving of Haq (thereby appeasing certain Tajiks in the provincial government), while also refraining from arresting him (which might result in Haq’s removal and risk upsetting the precarious stability Shahabuddin now enjoys). Accusing American Special Forces of obstructionism would afford the general a convenient means of doing both.

All the same, whatever forces might influence Rahimi’s actions, or lack thereof, the allegations remain. “If they are true, obviously Nur-ul Haq won’t be an A.L.P. commander,” the Special Forces team leader told me. The problem, he said, was that no accusers had come forward, which only fed suspicions of Tajik subterfuge. I mentioned what a villager had told me: “We are too afraid to raise any complaints against the local police. If we complain in the day, they will come in the night to take us from our homes. If they capture somebody, they tell the Americans he is Taliban.” I also repeated the claim of the elders who said that more than 100 families had left Shahabuddin since Haq took control. If true, wasn’t this evidence enough of mistreatment? The team leader acknowledged that many villagers had moved to the city. But here, too, the story was more complicated than it seemed. Before Haq joined the government, residents of Shahabuddin were obliged to ally with one of two insurgent groups — H.I.G. or the Taliban — and bitter grievances endured between those who chose differently. When the Taliban controlled Shahabuddin, supporters of Haq were forced to flee to the city; last year, when Haq returned and ousted the Taliban, many of those who stayed did the same. “Whether they’re innocent or not, they have this Taliban association,” the Special Forces team leader said. “And then the other families that are in the area have the H.I.G. association. And either way, they despise each other.”

At the end of the day, the team leader said, the situation in Baghlan was enormously complicated, and you never truly knew whom to believe. “We’re really trying to do the right thing,” he said. “One of my intelligence sergeants said it the right way: ‘Everybody in some way or form is a bad guy here. So you just have to pick the people who are less bad than others to work with you.’ ” The Special Operations commander in northern Afghanistan agrees. “Given the guy’s background, he’s clearly not an angel,” he said of Haq. “We struggle with it. He’s an imperfect solution. If not him, then who?”