Shell Game

By Johanna McGeary

Even though the Northern Alliance commanders in Mazar-i-Sharif knew what was coming, they were taken by surprise. As dawn came Saturday, word spread that the besieged Taliban had broken out of its last northern refuge, Kunduz city to the east, and was advancing on Mazar, attacking security posts as it moved. General Rashid Dostum called his fellow commanders to a hasty meeting as Alliance fighters converged on the dusty square outside, readying their pickups and rocket launchers for battle. A small unit of American special forces arrived, and their commander slipped inside. A few minutes later, the Alliance chiefs jumped into their jeeps and sped across the desert, trailed by 5,000 troops. Dostum scrambled up an ancient mud mound and raised his binoculars: on the horizon a thin line of black dots showed where the Taliban was waiting.

It had come not to fight but to surrender. But the Taliban was early, and its premature arrival had panicked Alliance pickets guarding the road from Kunduz. All week long the Taliban in the city had seesawed between giving up and fighting to the death. No wonder no one was sure this was the real thing. Only on Sunday did the Alliance claim to enter Kunduz.

The confusion over Kunduz reflected the nature of the Afghans' opportunistic arrangements and the difficulties they raise in translating military success into enduring peace. Encircled for more than a week by 30,000 Northern Alliance troops, Taliban leaders turned to the time-honored art of the deal. The Northern Alliance was just as eager to avoid an internecine bloodbath. That is the Afghan way of war, where changing sides is as habitual as combat, and victories are often measured in defections, not dead men.

So last Wednesday night Mullah Fazil, Taliban commander of northern Afghanistan, leader of the 13,000-strong Kunduz garrison and deputy of supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, drove into Dostum's mud-walled fortress to talk surrender. The two men and armed aides shared vast plates of qabeli, the Afghan staple of rice and mutton, and bowls of pistachios, to break the Ramadan fast. "They were laughing and chatting," commander Mohammad Anwar Qureishi, one of the Alliance leaders present, told TIME, "and hours before, they had wanted to kill each other."

After the meal Dostum took Fazil aside to arrange the details: the one hang-up was the fate of thousands of Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens and al-Qaeda stalwarts in the city, who had vowed to die fighting--even to kill Taliban who tried to give up. A deal was cut: if Fazil could ensure that the entire force surrendered, Dostum would give all of them--including the foreign contingent--safe passage across the country to Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold far to the south. Dostum didn't care what happened to them once they left his area.

That was hardly an outcome the U.S. could like. The one thing Washington cared about was that al-Qaeda and non-Afghan fighters in Kunduz be captured or killed. Pakistan, on the other hand, wanted to prevent a slaughter of its nationals who had flocked to the Taliban banner; there were unconfirmed tales of Pakistani planes landing in the night to spirit disillusioned volunteers away.

But out in the choking desert dust on Saturday, it was hard to tell exactly who was giving up: Taliban Afghans, the foreign fighters or both. For three hours arguments flared. "The Taliban are finished," said Abdul Razaq, 20, who had defected to the Alliance just three days earlier and boasted of how much television he had watched since switching sides. "The American bombing was terrifying. All of them wanted to surrender." Hundreds of fighters poured out of the city, throwing themselves into the arms of their enemies. "Welcome!" shouted a commander who expected all Afghan Taliban fighters to surrender by the end of the day.

As night fell, no one was sure where the foreign fighters were. Some Alliance commanders had promised that foreigners who surrendered would be held in detention or handed over to the U.N. Turncoats reported most of the foreigners were still preparing to fight the Alliance army. "Kunduz will fall tonight," declared an unmoved Dostum on Saturday. "We will accept whoever comes to us, but any who don't will be killed." Ignoring American observers hovering nearby, Dostum made no effort to sort through his defectors. "The Americans have their views, and I have mine," he told TIME. "What the Americans want is unimportant. It's my decision that counts." Now, he said, it was time for those who surrendered to lay down their guns and go home.

Watching the situation evolve beyond their control, U.S. officials attempted to draw a red line: the Afghan Taliban could go free, but foreign fighters and al-Qaeda leaders could not. In Washington, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke hinted the U.S. might use military force to stop any wholesale evacuation of the diehards. In public, the Administration remained confident that the bad guys would be rounded up by more cooperative Northern Alliance commanders. But the muddle in Kunduz was just one more reminder that in Afghanistan, victory today can look a lot like defeat tomorrow. Last week, after the heady military successes of the Northern Alliance had roused expectations that the war would swiftly wrap up, the country lapsed perilously close to chaos.

The Taliban was down but hardly out. Mullah Omar vowed to hold Kandahar until Judgment Day, while loyalists led by hard-line Arab fighters dug strong pockets of resistance near Jalalabad. In the liberated zones, the re-emergence of rival warlords threatened to turn the clock back to the time when the same commanders fought for power so viciously that Afghan citizens welcomed the cruel security of Taliban rule. The Pashtun fled from the north, alarmed that unruly Northern Alliance troops might exact bloody reprisals. Civilians living near terrorist hideouts in the south fled American bombs. Taliban resisters and plain bandits stalked the roads leading to Kabul, where armed gunmen ambushed a journalists' convoy and shot four of them dead.

Yet Washington watched it all with a startling detachment, a view refracted through its focus on Osama bin Laden. While the Bush Administration cares about stabilizing Afghanistan, its first interest is eliminating the master terrorist. So far, officials don't think the situation on the ground is impeding the pursuit. In some ways, the chaos even played to the U.S.'s advantage. "Our priorities have much more to do with finding bin Laden," says an intelligence official. "If it's Afghans killing Afghans, that doesn't hurt us as much as Americans killing Afghans."

Administration officials seemed surprisingly comfortable with surfing the instability. While European allies pleaded to rush in to prevent mayhem, the Bush Administration preferred to wait and see (irritating best pal Tony Blair, who wanted to deploy hundreds of British peacekeepers). "They're not devolving into slaughter," a senior State Department official said of the warlords. Washington saw only minimal intertribal fighting, so the smart play was to sit back and let Afghan leaders run things for now.

Despite its reputation for brutality, the Northern Alliance was behaving better than expected. "We've been impressed by the way they comported themselves in Kabul," says the State official, "and we have reason to believe they'll take a constructive role in Bonn," where the main factions meet this week to thrash out a power-sharing arrangement. Washington will do business with the warlords, however thuggish or politically grasping they might be. That's partly by necessity but also because the Pentagon wants people in power with enough authority to locate bin Laden and assist in killing him.

The Administration's biggest worry is bin Laden's slipping away. "It's reasonable to assume he has a Plan B as to his own safety," says the intelligence official. The Pentagon is watching the mountain passes along the south and west of Afghanistan's long, porous border with Pakistan, and pushing the Islamabad government to mount stringent patrols. The search concentrated last week on the ridges of Tora Bora, just southwest of Jalalabad, where a thousand or so Arab fighters were holed up. Last month Afghans passing through reported spotting bin Laden near the Tora Bora bunker built by mujahedin in the 1980s. Washington ordered the Navy to board any ship officers suspect might be ferrying bin Laden abroad. But when it comes to covering the ratholes, this official admits, "We're just guessing."

Still, it must be comforting to have so single-minded a purpose. But there is more to Phase I of the war on terror than the demise of bin Laden or even the defeat of the Taliban. The collateral damage from those objectives has reduced Afghanistan to a nation where warlordism, betrayal and defection are again the order of the day. After 22 years of perpetual war, Afghans no longer trust any army on their territory. What they long for is security.

Across the liberated provinces, Afghans have feared a return to pre-Taliban civil strife. Pashtun farmers have lived in the northern plains around Mazar-i-Sharif for a century, but now many have had enough. With 32 other families, a farmer named Saidu walked for 15 days through cannon fire and biting wind to reach a bleak refugee camp in the Pashtun desert of the south. "I've suffered too much," he said. "I'm not going back up north, not if [Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin] Rabbani is ruler or Dostum. They'll kill us Pashtun." The country could yet fracture along north-south lines as tribes coalesce in their home regions.

Saidu has some reason to run from Mazar, where thousands have died each time the city changed hands. Last week Red Cross workers found nearly 600 bodies, killed in fighting or executed. The manner in which Mazar emerges from Taliban rule could signal how Afghanistan will fare at peace.

For a few days the city celebrated its liberation, but soon the victorious commanders zeroed in on the spoils. While Dostum, an Uzbek, held court at his Kalai Jangi fortress to the southeast, Tajik leader Atta Mohammed and Hazara chief Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq set themselves up in palatial villas in their own quarters of the city. In public all three insist their convenient alliance is holding as they empty Mazar of armed men and set up a joint security force.

But night tells a different story. Once the sun sets, residents scurry inside their high-walled houses as gunfire resounds across the city until dawn. Few people venture out of their neighborhoods, divided into Atta, Dostum and Mohaqiq ghettos. Two men were killed one night when a patrol of Atta's soldiers clashed with a group of Mohaqiq's men stealing a car. The same night Hazaras hijacked a taxi and beat up the driver. "It's just like it was before the Taliban were here," said the injured man.

After two decades of fighting, suspicion and betrayal are still the guiding principles for any smart operator. "No alliance ever lasts for long," explains a Dostum aide. That only underscores how difficult it will be for negotiators, who gather this week in Bonn's Hotel Petersberg, to get over years of mistrust. The U.S. proposal is for a loose central government composed of an executive council run by 10 to 20 warlords and other political personages. Such a preservation of the status quo is unlikely to bring stability, even if the Afghans accepted it. The Pashtun suspect the Northern Alliance wants only to validate its power, with no intention of broadening it. The Alliance warned that the Bonn session is only "symbolic," while its commanders furtively try to outmaneuver one another. Any unity achieved could prove fragile. Says a senior Pentagon officer: "These guys change sides like we change socks."

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington, Anthony Davis and Terry McCarthy/Kabul, Tim McGirk/Spin Boldak and Alex Perry/Mazar-i-Sharif

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington, Anthony Davis and Terry McCarthy/Kabul, Tim McGirk/Spin Boldak and Alex Perry/Mazar-i-Sharif