Where Danger Lurks

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On an icy, still night in Kabul, two weeks ago, Marine guards in full combat gear at the U.S. embassy were startled by the whoosh of a fireball exploding underneath wintry trees at the far end of the diplomatic compound. The resident bomb-disposal expert decided to wait until dawn before venturing out of the fortified embassy to investigate. That's what makes him an expert. The explosion was only a decoy. The real killer was a land mine that was invisible in the dark but was spotted in the daylight half buried. Says Corporal Matthew Roberson of the Marine antiterrorist unit at the embassy: "It looked like somebody did it so we'd come running out and step on the mine."

Afghanistan's "postwar" era is hardly a peaceful one. Last Thursday U.S. special forces engaged in a major fire fight, one of the largest in the conflict so far, near the village of Hazar Qadam, 60 miles north of Kandahar. The good news is that no American soldier died; one was slightly wounded in the foot. The bad news is that Hazar Qadam's was only the latest of several recent clashes between U.S. personnel and al-Qaeda and Taliban resistance. To date, only two Americans, including one from the CIA, have been killed by enemy fire (17 have died in accidents, including one who may have been a suicide). But the potential for mayhem remains huge and, by some Army assessments, growing as Americans confront what General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, estimates to be about a dozen ever shifting pockets of resistance. Those dangers are exacerbated as American forces are drawn into local feuds and warlord ambitions. As the double-bang plot against the embassy illustrates, it is the multiplicity of perils and the long list of suspects that make Afghanistan one of the world's biggest booby traps.

Who carried out the embassy attack? The Arab members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network have long since cleared out of Kabul, but many members of their Afghan cohort are at large, according to intelligence sources in the government of Prime Minister Hamid Karzai. The attack might also have been the work of Taliban fighters who still roam the city--in beardless disguise--acting on their own instead of with al-Qaeda. A third possibility is that the bomber was an Afghan who wanted payback for a bomb the U.S. mistakenly dropped on his home.

Of the 4,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, 3,000 occupy Kandahar airport and 500 are stationed at the air base in Bagram. Al-Qaeda elements "probed" the Kandahar airport to test its security apparatus and were sent fleeing. At Bagram, just keeping watch over 50 detainees, among them Pakistanis, Moroccans, Chechens and British Muslims, is hazardous duty for the 65th Military Police company. Inmates have been found with razors, money and pens sewn into their clothing even after repeated searches. If a suspected terrorist should manage to get beyond the 8-ft.-high razor wire, the procedure is simple. "We tell 'em three times to halt," says Specialist Tim Vernon, 22, of Sumner, Wash. "And if they don't, we open fire. No way we're going to chase them through the minefields."