Escaped Taliban may fight again

"If the Americans want me to, I can show them by helicopter exactly where the base is," says Zadran, removing his swirling gray and black turban. "We don't know why the Americans' information is so weak."

But Maj. Bryan Hilferty, stationed at Bagram airbase, disagrees with criticism of the US operation. "Operation Anaconda has been such a great success. I don't know what we could have done better or done differently. A failure is when your enemy really inflicts damage on you, and on the contrary, we crushed the enemy."

Lt. Col. David Gray, also at Bagram, told reporters that about 500 enemy fighters were killed in the operation, which got its name from a snake that surrounds its prey, then strangles it.

But Zadran says the US and its allies were more like snake charmers who didn't play the right tunes. "They have only killed the small fighters," says Zadran, who argues that there were no more than 800 fighters in the area to begin with, making it highly unlikely that 500 of them were killed. "They haven't killed anyone important. The important thing is to remove the key figures of Al Qaeda," Zadran says.

A good deal of Zadran's information comes from his older brother, Badcha Khan Zadran, a warlord who until a month ago was the governor of Paktia Province. Mr. Khan and his men have played a role in the ground battles that ensued after Al Qaeda was attacked by air. He, too, says the US waited too long to act.

"For two months, I've been telling the Americans that there are hundreds of Al Qaeda in Shah-i-Kot, but they didn't believe me," says Khan, interviewed about a kilometer south of a US base south of Gardez. With a shaved beard and a huge mustache, the charismatic warlord says he is a friend of America – but one who is a little disappointed by his allies.

"I am fighting against Al Qaeda. And I know where Al Qaeda are. There are other Al Qaeda bases in this area, like Sarana and Shamal area, which is a stronghold of Haqqani," he says.

Closer to the front lines, in the snow-covered mountains of eastern Shah-i-Kot, Hamid Khan, Badcha Khan's deputy commander, tells a similar story. He also says his men found evidence of only 42 bodies in the area, most of them young Chechens.

"A majority of them escaped through the southern route of Orgun," that leads down through Paktika and toward the North Waziristan tribal area of Pakistan, says Hamid Khan. Such different views of how the conflict played out could in part be explained by differences in strategy.

US military officials, describing the planning of the operation, say they decided to set up a network of blockades around the area before they struck, in anticipation of the Al Qaeda fighters looking for escape routes. But many of the fighters appear to have found their way out anyway.

• Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report from Washington.

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