Taliban retreat takes war to hills

In the space of 48 hours, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's Arab fighters have ceded 90 percent of Afghanistan.

At breakneck speed, the conventional war has all but come to an end. The Taliban, as a ruling entity, is fading fast. But a messier guerrilla war may just be starting. And ousting bin Laden from the mountains north of Kandahar - or wherever his hideout may be - is likely to require a new US military strategy, one that may not include much help from the Northern Alliance.

"I find it very important that the Taliban retreated from Kabul with all of their personnel and military assets intact," says Rifaat Hussein, director of the Defense and Strategic Studies Department of Quaid I Azam University in Islamabad. "They are ceding the cities and now regrouping in Paktia and southern Afghanistan, and they hope they can make it very costly for the Northern Alliance to move into Pashtun areas. And guerrilla warfare is what they are good at anyway."

At press time, Taliban and Arab fighters were reportedly amassing 35 miles south of Kabul, either for retreat or for a further strike. Other Taliban forces have fled to the mountains surrounding Jalalabad. The Taliban had abandoned all but two of the major cities of Afghanistan, the northeastern city of Kunduz, near the Tajikistan border, and the southwestern stronghold of Kandahar. But even in Kandahar, longtime home of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, there are reports that the Taliban are heading for the hills north of the city.

The speed of the Taliban's fall and the Northern Alliance's rise took much of the Western world by surprise. Now the American-led coalition must change gears, political and military, and shift to the next - and perhaps more dangerous - part of the war.

Experts warn that it is this stage of "mopping up" that caught Soviet occupying forces in major urban areas, where guerrilla forces excelled at sabotage and hit-and-run warfare. If history repeats itself, the US will find its most difficult task in keeping the various factions that make up the Northern Alliance focused on consolidating control of the country, rather than on expanding their individual piece of the pie.

"Now that the Northern Alliance has captured Kabul, their minds are set on sharing power, not on hunting the Taliban, and certainly not on finding Osama Bin Laden," says Timothy Gusinov, a former Soviet special-forces officer in Afghanistan and now an Central Asian area specialist based in San Francisco. "Until the present, they were united by being against the Taliban. From now on, each leader has his own agenda, to get the biggest piece of the pie as possible."

In Peshawar, Pakistan, this positioning is already taking place. Across the street from the main offices of the UN Refugee Agency, yesterday scores of tribesmen gather around Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, whose efforts to retake eastern Afghanistan for his fellow Pashtun tribesmen are being greased with Western dollars and advice.

Many of Mr. Ghamsharik's would-be bounty hunters appear more interested in money than in the broader US goals of rooting out terrorism in Afghanistan.

Dost Mohammad, a short, burly "commander," says he is heading into Afghanistan Thursday morning to remove several hundred Arabs from the mountains around the city of Jalalabad. He wants Western journalists to pay $3,000 for a view of the action. He promises that if he captures an Arab alive, "interrogations will be extra."

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