A squeeze on Taliban, bin Laden

As Taliban and Arab control over Afghanistan shrinks, the United States is focusing its war efforts on two final holdouts.

In the southwest, lies Kandahar, the desert-walled city where Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar started his long march to power more than six years ago and where he will likely make his last stand. In the southeast, is Tora Bora, the mountainous village where a tunnel complex built by Islamic guerrillas against the Soviets is thought to be occupied by hundreds of Arab militants, including Osama bin Laden.

Physically, each of these locations will present its own peculiar challenges for the Afghan forces aligned with the Northern Alliance, and for the US and British military forces that are providing them crucial logistical and air support. But with Taliban units defecting in ever-greater numbers, the endgame of the Afghan war is close at hand.

"It's a very different kind of scenario than a lot of us experts were predicting a month ago," says Rifaat Hussein, director of the Defense and Strategic Studies department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. "The Taliban did not get a chance to disperse their forces throughout the country, and now America has cut off all supply routes and all sources of financial support. So, the Taliban have two choices: surrender to the rebellious commanders, or fight to the last man and commit collective suicide."

America has had a very different experience in this war than the Soviet Union and other superpowers that took on Afghan-istan's fierce tribes. The reason appears to be two-fold: American air power has done much of the work, allowing Afghan militias to strike hard against weakened Taliban defenses.

The deflation of Taliban control has been remarkable, from 90 percent of the country to about 10 percent. But experts say the final 10 percent could be the bloodiest, since the hard core of 10,000 or more Taliban believers are now defending their homes and families against what they regard as the "Supreme Evil." And those who know the foreign militants who fight alongside the Taliban - including Arabs, Chechens, and Pakistanis - say they have nowhere else to go, except what they consider paradise.

"I would not rule out large scale rebellion, even if Mullah Omar has said he will fight to the last man," says Dr. Hussein, noting that many Taliban soldiers and commanders have families in Kandahar. "My biggest fear is that if there is no surrender or compromise, the Americans will get the inclination to carpet bomb the Taliban, and you could not tell the military targets from the civilian targets. Will the Americans be willing to decimate the entire civilian population in order to get what they want: the Taliban?"

At present, the bulk of US military operations are focusing on Kandahar, a desert city that still bears the name of Sikander, or Alexander the Great. The pancake-flat terrain of Kandahar gives the US and its Afghan allies a distinct advantage, since there are few of the mountainous nooks for Taliban units to hide in that were present in and around Kabul, for instance.

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