Our new friends in Afghanistan celebrated taking Kabul. They played some music. They flew a kite. They put a woman newscaster on the radio. They killed some people just because it felt good.

We give the Northern Alliance an air force and they embarrass us with savage force.

The photo spread in The Times yesterday was chilling. The photographer Tyler Hicks captured a tableau of alliance troops on the way into Kabul, dragging a wounded Taliban soldier out of a ditch, unfazed by the camera. After he pleaded for his life, his eyes full of fear, they pulled him up, shot him in the chest and pummeled him with a rifle butt and a grenade launcher.

Some alliance soldiers looted dead bodies for valuables. The U.N. said 100 young Taliban recruits hiding in a school had been killed in Mazar-i- Sharif, and there were reports of ethnic revenge executions in Kabul.

Even as President Bush was saying yesterday that "We continue to work with the Northern Alliance commanders to make sure they respect the human rights of the people that they're liberating," there were more reports of alliance soldiers lynching and stoning Taliban soldiers and dancing on their corpses.

We understand that this is a rough place with an ancient cat's cradle of tribal grudges. As Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday, when he argued that the Taliban should not be granted "moral equivalence": "That piece of real estate has changed hands dozens and dozens of times throughout history, and the carnage has just been unbelievable." The novel "Flashman" lists the pastimes of 19th-century Afghan warlords as "blood feuds, bribery and murder-for-fun."

And certainly it was gratifying to see women throw off their veils, men shave their beards and the brutish Taliban on the run
"like a slaughtered chicken that falls and dies," as their leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, put it.

Still, the rebel forces' chaotic and grisly entry into the Afghan capital, after the U.S. had ordered them to stay out,
illustrated how tough it's going to be to manage our murky new deals with murky people.

The color our foreign policy will be wearing this fall is gray. We have to capture Osama bin Laden and quell terrorism, so the Bush administration is making compromises and offering carrots where it once turned up its nose.

Mr. Rumsfeld bristled defensively when asked about reports of Northern Alliance atrocities. But the retired general Wesley Clark spoke bluntly to Wolf Blitzer: "War is a matter of relative evils. We're not legally responsible for all this and we're probably not going to be able to physically stop it, either."

The world's in a swirl, and things are changing at a dizzying pace.

Our president, once oblivious to Afghanistan, can now discourse on the geography of the Shamali Plain.

Old liaisons and assumptions are turned on their heads. Iran rises to the defense of the country formerly known as The Great Satan. Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, once scorned by America, now chummily talks over higher textile quotas with Colin Powell. Mr. Powell acknowledges the Bush team needs to work hard on the Middle East peace process it once ignored, to jump-start the Palestinian economy "and remove the level of humiliation that exists in the region."

In an odd twist yesterday, it was the Russian president who defended the American president when a Russian reporter asked Mr. Bush about American curbs on freedom of the press, referring to Condoleezza Rice's successful lobbying of TV executives to keep Osama bin Laden's videos off the air.

In another strange reversal, Mr. Bush did not care about the Reagan dictum "Trust but verify." Talking about their agreement to reduce strategic nuclear arms, Mr. Bush used the word "trust" three times and said they could make the deal on a handshake, while Mr. Putin said, "The world is far from having international relations be based solely on trust."

Mr. Bush said yesterday that the war on terrorism had "transformationed" the U.S.-Russia relationship.

The two men are so chummy now that when Mr. Bush called Mr. Putin to invite him to the ranch, the Russian president said he was looking forward to riding horses with the American president. Mr. Bush had to explain that he doesn't ride. He prefers to saddle up his jeep or his golf cart, Gator, around the ranch.