Sardar, a 23-year-old working in his brother’s barber shop in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, said local officials had asked for bribes to resolve a long-running family dispute over land.
When the backhanders failed to have their desired effect, he turned to the Taliban, the austere Islamist movement that has been fighting foreign forces since it was ousted from power 13 years ago.
“They came to our home in Chahar Darah and took two days to solve the problem,” he said.
The case of Sardar and others like him may prove sobering reading for US, Nato and Afghan governments who spent billions of dollars, and thousands of lives, to overcome the Taliban insurgency and turn a war-torn nation into a peaceful democracy before foreign combat troops leave at the end of the year.
According to local officials, the Taliban controls virtually all of two out of seven districts in Kunduz - Chahar Darah and Dasht-i-Archi. It is gaining influence elsewhere, and residents say it has been able to because what little state authority exists is viewed with deep mistrust.
On a national level, the Taliban takeover of two districts is a worrying harbinger more than a strategic shift, and US-led forces believe that Taliban advances will be temporary.
“The Taliban may take over a district centre or something, but only temporarily,” General John Campbell, commander of the coalition forces in Afghanistan, told reporters this month.
“There’s nowhere that we have Afghan security forces that the Taliban can get the terrain and hold the terrain.”
Yet the gains, and efforts by the Taliban to win over locals with a somewhat softer form of rule than their previous hardline regime, come as foreign combat troops prepare to withdraw and hand over to relatively inexperienced Afghan forces and an inefficient government.
People in Chahar Darah speak of a drive by insurgents to impose the rule of law, allow some freedoms like television and Western clothes, and, significantly, let girls attend school - something unthinkable when they were in government.
That said, extensive classroom restrictions apply.
“When they check the subjects being taught at school and see they are in accordance with sharia (Islamic law), they trust the system,” said Badal Bibi, chief of women’s affairs in Kunduz.
“The Taliban are (even) sending their girls to school to learn and to monitor classes. But they have removed English as a subject,” she said, adding that classes had an increasingly religious focus and no male teachers were allowed after girls had reach puberty.
Interpretations of sharia vary widely, but for the Taliban it requires teaching religious subjects, strictly segregating classes and females wearing all-covering clothes.
The Taliban is seeking to distinguish itself from unpopular local authorities through a network of informal “courts” that focus on Afghanistan’s backlog of land disputes.
One Taliban judge interviewed by Reuters in Kunduz said mobile “special justice commissions” had been deployed across Afghanistan to fill gaps left by the chaotic and sometimes corrupt legal framework.
Calling himself Mullah Abdul Bakhi, the judge said he had been in Kunduz province for six months, having previously been deployed elsewhere in the country since joining the insurgency three years ago.