Into The Caves

By Romesh Ratnesar

The white mountains of Afghanistan are beautiful this time of year. Snow blankets the peaks from Kabul to the Khyber Pass, smothering the ancient smugglers' footpaths that lead out of the country and into Pakistan. With the arrival of winter, human traffic in the mountains comes to a halt and the terrain is enveloped in an otherworldly calm.

Last week the hush was shattered by the blasts of hundreds of American bombs, the rattle of Kalashnikovs and the roar of tanks and pickup trucks carrying about 1,000 anti-Taliban soldiers into the Tora Bora cave complex to deliver a final reckoning to Osama bin Laden. The Afghans crept through the valleys and into the caves in the wake of U.S. air strikes, hoping to nab enemy militants as they tried to scramble to higher ground.

But things did not proceed quite as planned. On Thursday, 60 fighters ventured past a front line near the village of Melawa and took up positions on a hill that offered a clear line of fire. Moments later al-Qaeda snipers protecting bin Laden began firing from a crest above. Six men were gravely wounded. The hunters evacuated the injured, then beat a retreat, done for the day. "We were thinking we'd be bold and courageous," said one. "They were waiting for us."

For the Taliban, for Osama bin Laden and his dwindling legion of lieutenants, Tora Bora is the last sanctuary. The Taliban's barbaric and medieval rule unraveled for good last week as the regime's soldiers fled from Kandahar, their last stronghold. Some skulked back to their home villages with the idea of starting new lives. Others, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, went missing. As a fresh power struggle raged in Kandahar and a new Afghan government prepared to take over in Kabul, the black turbans and medieval strictures of Taliban rule began to seem like a bad dream.

There are bound to be more surprises lurking in the snow. In a war of bribes and secret deals, targets have a way of becoming more elusive the closer you get to them, and victory doesn't necessarily bring the promised spoils. The conflict in Afghanistan has confounded expectations. Who anticipated that the Taliban's rule would disintegrate wholesale two months into the U.S. bombing campaign? Or that the regime's soldiers would abandon Kandahar as meekly and abruptly as they did, quitting the city in the dead of night?

The reaction to that leave taking proved to be no surprise at all. The next morning, amid much confusion, there was jubilation in the streets of Kandahar. Residents tore down the white Taliban flag and waved pictures of exiled King Zaher Shah, and rebel Pashtun forces fired AK-47 rounds into the air.

But there was no champagne in the allies' high command. Anti-Taliban forces in Kandahar led by Hamid Karzai, the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan, failed to capture Omar. That left the U.S. and its allies embroiled in a two-front manhunt for the Taliban chief and his even more high-profile Saudi guest. "We simply don't know right now where Omar is," the U.S. Central Command chief, General Tommy Franks, said Friday. A Kandahar eyewitness told TIME that early in the week Omar was spotted heading into the hills around Argandhab, west of Kandahar, with five bodyguards. He was said to be riding on the back of a motorcycle, with his henchmen around him. On Friday Karzai told TIME, "I consider Omar a criminal, an associate of terrorists. He's a fugitive from the law."

The allies have long believed that Omar and bin Laden would choose to go down in a blaze of martyrdom. But with the storm gathering around them, both men appeared intent on survival. Perhaps their only way out was a dangerous route through the snowy passes of the White Mountains and into one of the border towns of Pakistan. Once there, they could receive refuge from sympathetic Pashtun tribesmen and be absorbed into the anonymous urban surroundings.

American commanders were determined to stop them. With control of the country wrested from the Taliban, the full wrath of American military power turned toward the sprawling Tora Bora fortress in the eastern ridges of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda fighters still huddling inside their caves have little chance of getting out alive. For the first time last week, forces loyal to three U.S.-backed bounty hunters clambered into the mountains to stage assaults on al-Qaeda redoubts, while as many as 40 U.S. commandos called in B-52-delivered bombs and precision-guided missiles.

Afghan soldiers claimed that a U.S. raid early last week may have killed al-Qaeda's strategic mastermind, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and its financial adviser, Ali Mahmood. The wife and children of al-Zawahiri were confirmed dead. The Afghan fighters slowly widened their forays, capturing low-elevation hollows used by al-Qaeda to store ammunition. The Pentagon said the proxy forces last week drove some of the 1,500 al-Qaeda troops higher into the Khyber Pass, forcing them to break into smaller units that U.S. bombers could then pick off.

With all that, the principal U.S. goal of snaring bin Laden in Tora Bora was shrouded in a fog of conflicting reports about whether he was even there. A brother of Hazrat Ali, one of the warlords chasing bin Laden in Tora Bora, said Friday that "one of our soldiers saw Osama yesterday," riding on horseback with four bodyguards after visiting his troops. Yet Ali's brother-in-law says, "We don't have any confirmed information about Osama, but his son is still in the caves."

Those mixed signals were the side effect of fighting a proxy war. Since the start of the conflict, the U.S. strategy of striking ruthlessly from the air while enlisting Afghan forces to wage war on the ground has paid spectacular dividends. But as the campaign has lurched toward an endgame, the limits of the strategy have become glaring. The absence of a sizable American battle force on the ground has left the U.S. unable to dictate the terms of surrender, making it easier for Omar to go on the lam and perhaps emboldening bin Laden in his game of hide-and-seek. "You get what you pay for," says an Army officer. "When you fight a ground war on the cheap, you can't always get what you want."

So American commanders may be getting ready to boost the number of U.S. forces inside Afghanistan to hunt down their two biggest prey and prevent Taliban fighters from going underground. Last week some 1,500 Marines at Forward Operating Base Rhino fanned out across swaths of southern Afghanistan, blocking the escape routes of stray Taliban forces, and Centcom said U.S. ground forces exchanged gunfire with Taliban forces around Kandahar. Deploying a bigger U.S. combat force now would pose political risks, not least the possible opposition of members of the newly picked interim government who don't like the idea of foreign troops staying on Afghan soil. They may have to get used to it. On Friday Franks said, "The possibility of increasing forces on the ground is certainly on the table... The mission has not started to ebb down."

The ousting of the Taliban from Kandahar and the evisceration of the regime's military power allowed the allies to cross off at least one war aim. Even with Omar still at large, the Taliban is all but finished as a movement. The lightning advance of opposition forces scooped up most of the Taliban's weapons and ammunition and eroded its popular support. By the beginning of last week, several senior Taliban commanders had begun negotiating terms of a surrender with Karzai and other opposition leaders loyal to King Zaher. A deal for the peaceful handover of the three provinces still under Taliban control was scuttled last week after Omar demanded a guarantee of safe passage to his hometown, without threat of arrest and trial for war crimes. When Karzai refused, Omar balked and ordered his shrinking core of loyalists to fight to the death.

But after weeks of ruthless American bombing, their will was breaking. A black cloud of dust hung over the city, kicked up by U.S. strikes. American special-ops forces joined the anti-Taliban forces commanded by Karzai and Ghul Agha Sherzai, and the merged units closed in on the city from the east and north. Sherzai's 700 men advanced as far as the Kandahar airport before encountering fire from Taliban and foreign Arab fighters making their last stand. During bombing lulls, Taliban soldiers hauled their dead comrades out of the trenches before ushering in new fighters. Those trying to run away were shot in the legs by their commanders.

On Wednesday the Taliban negotiators secretly approached Karzai again; they wanted amnesty for Taliban fighters in exchange for surrender. "Maybe they thought that because I was named Prime Minister, they had lost legitimacy," Karzai told TIME. "Or it could have been my arrival on the outskirts of Kandahar, or maybe common sense. They knew they were finished." As Karzai waited for Taliban Defense Minister Obaidullah Akhund and Interior Minister Abdul Razaq to meet him at his desert base, he was nearly killed by an errant American bomb that killed three U.S. commandos. Karzai steadied himself and held two days of talks with the two Taliban commanders, the intended targets of the U.S. strike. The next day he made the deal for "a slow and orderly" transfer of power from the Taliban to a tribal council of non-Taliban leaders.

The Taliban's final retreat was characteristically craven. Taliban sources told TIME that Omar "resisted handover until the end"--until his commanders turned against him--and then vanished. The bulk of the Afghan Taliban fled in the middle of the night to avoid reprisals by the tribal elders who immediately carved up the city. On liberation day Kandahar was as chaotic as it was joyous. Non-Taliban forces led by Mullah Naqib Ullah, an Omar backer and member of the Alokzai tribe who was handed control of part of the city, skirmished with men loyal to Sherzai trying to grab their share. Meanwhile, the Pentagon said, anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 Taliban troops--most of them Pakistanis, Chechens, Algerians, Saudis and Egyptians--remained in or near Kandahar, some holed up in the homes of their former comrades. U.S. bombers strafed Taliban forces in the city, and Marines traded fire with those trying to get out. On Friday Franks said the U.S. "has not ruled out the possibilities of the Marines' going into Kandahar."

The task of stabilizing Kandahar may eventually fall to American troops, but U.S. commanders made clear that their top priority in the region was the capture of Omar. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stopped short of an ironclad demand that Omar be turned over to U.S. troops once he is caught, but warned that American support for the new government hinged on its finding Omar and meting out a sufficient punishment. Karzai told TIME that Omar will "face trial in Afghanistan for his crimes. But first, we'll have to provide enough solid evidence for a case against him." That comment probably did not lift the heart of Rumsfeld, and U.S. officials dropped broad hints that they don't want to see the Taliban leader make it that far.

The dilemma for the Pentagon is that until it beefs up the 2,000-strong American ground force and authorizes it to take control of the manhunt, the U.S. military can only cajole the Afghan forces to do what it wants. In eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. has plied one bin Laden hunter, Haji Zaman, with $100 for each of his soldiers. The $25 million bounty promised to the warlord who captures bin Laden has created a dash for the Saudi's throat between Zaman and two rival commanders, Hazrat Ali and Haji Qadir. U.S. officials treated claims of bin Laden sightings in Tora Bora with skepticism, knowing that the warlords are angling to procure more funds for the hunt. The commander who finds bin Laden could also win control of Jalalabad and the smuggling route through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan.

None of the three warlords appears strong enough to capture bin Laden on his own. Zaman made his name as a mujahedin commander fighting the Soviets, then fled to Dijon, France, when the Taliban took Jalalabad in 1997. Ali's soldiers are the most hardened fighters in the gang chasing bin Laden. But Ali, who is not a Pashtun, commands little support among mountain villagers. Qadir marshals the weakest militia but controls a former Taliban ammunition compound chock full of rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and tank shells.

With the competing loyalties of the men venturing into Tora Bora, the cave assault has been halting. The first team of soldiers dispatched by Ali to Tora Bora disarmed groups of Zaman loyalists opposed to al-Qaeda. Another group of Zaman's forces tried to set up a base in the town of Pachir, within sight of Tora Bora; the next night a U.S. warplane struck the building, killing everyone inside. The commanders greeted reports of limited advances in the mountains with tempered enthusiasm, mindful of the difficulty of penetrating such a labyrinthine redoubt.

Though the American commanders still counseled patience last week, they will not put up with inaction for long. Afghan forces told TIME they spotted U.S. and British commandos heading into the Tora Bora mountains last week, traveling in pairs, shouldering heavy supplies and carrying rifles. There were more soldiers on the way, backed by U.S. gunships, bombers and Predator drones, ready to pounce on their prey. It's a safe bet that if bin Laden is holed up in the snowdrifts of Tora Bora, with his hosts defeated and on the run, he still harbors hopes of making a great escape. It's a safer bet that the U.S. would love to see him try.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Matthew Forney/Tora Bora, Terry McCarthy/Kabul, Tim McGirk, Kamal Haider and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Quetta and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Matthew Forney/Tora Bora, Terry McCarthy/Kabul, Tim McGirk, Kamal Haider and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Quetta and Mark Thompson/Washington