Down And Dirty

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It was the colors that Hamad Alokzai noticed. The gaunt Afghan, with a beard like matted wool and gaudy silver rings on his fingers, had returned to Afghanistan from exile in Quetta, Pakistan, to check on his former comrades. On Thursday night he sat with his old Taliban commander under blankets in a pickup truck, safely tucked away in the hills outside Kandahar. "The bombs make a sound, then you see green lights falling through the sky," the commander told Alokzai. "The missiles have flashing yellow lights." That night, Alokzai counted 30 missiles striking targets around the city: "It was like Kandahar was covered in a floating green dust," he told TIME. Most of the Taliban fighters--including their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar--had already left town, though a number of Omar's relatives are said to have been killed in the attacks. On Wednesday night a single missile was fired on the village of Sangesar, destroying the mosque where Omar started his movement in 1995. Even the war-hardened locals were impressed by that level of accuracy.

Though Kandahar's hospitals were filled with casualties, the only troops killed, Alokzai said, were boys "left behind at the airport as night watchmen." Where once 10,000 Taliban supporters had gathered to pray in the Halqa Cherif mosque, now fewer than a hundred did. In the town, the Taliban's exodus left its Arab sympathizers at the mercy of the townsfolk; at least three were murdered for their watches and motorcycles. But the Taliban was preparing to fight. On just one day, more than 45 trucks left Kandahar for redoubts in the high mountains. They were filled with guns and ammunition.

This is the real thing. The silent war against terrorism--the one that takes place in police stations, law courts and banks--isn't over and won't be for years. But last week the noisy war, the one marked by percussive blasts that shake mountains, by the rattle of small-arms fire and the air-sucking whump of a fuel-air explosive, finally started. Like all battles, it had an other-worldly quality. The cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs that thudded into Afghanistan, the B-2 Stealth bombers, half-circling the globe from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Central Asia, all seem more at home in a science-fiction novel than on the evening news.

But stripped to its essence, this new form of war is as old as the hills. Victory still requires one group of men to find and kill another. Technology can't do it all. "The cruise missiles and bombers are not going to solve this problem," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week. In an assessment of the Soviet Union's defeat in Afghanistan written for the U.S. Army in 1996, a retired Afghan general and his American co-author were blunt. "A guerrilla war," they wrote, "is not a war of technology against peasantry. Rather, it is a contest of endurance and national will. The side with the greatest moral commitment will hold the ground...Tactics for conventional war will not work."