Down And Dirty

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.

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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."

In this place and facing this enemy, the Pentagon's preferred war-fighting method--the deployment of massive air power followed by overwhelming force on the ground--is irrelevant. Special forces are going to carry a greater share of the burden than in any war ever waged by the U.S. Already, sources tell TIME, a number of Delta Force commandos and CIA agents, together with members of the elite British SAS 22nd regiment, are in eastern Afghanistan, conducting strategic reconnaissance of targets linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Special-operations soldiers are thought to be acting as spotters for the bombing raids; a senior diplomatic source in Paris says a small number of French intelligence agents in Afghanistan are also helping identify targets. A Green Beret contingent is on its way to act as liaison and to train officers with the Taliban's opponents in the Northern Alliance.

For President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and their soldiers, the moment of pivot has come. They have always known that soon enough this war would be waged not from the sky but on the ground; that fierce fights would take place in caves and canyons; that throats would be slit and bodies mutilated. "Our guys are going to be in the killing business," said an Army special-forces veteran last week. He didn't have to add the obvious corollary: if Osama bin Laden and his supporters are to be rooted out and destroyed, our guys are going to be in the dying business too.

If the war is now real for Americans, it is no less so for Afghans, even though those who live in that Texas-size country have been fighting the Soviets or one another for more than 20 years. The bombing was "a normal thing for us," said Mohammed Hashim, 23, who was in the Interior Ministry in the wrecked capital of Kabul at the time of the first attacks. "The women and children went out into the street. In Kabul there's no safe place to hide from bombs anyway." That's why some got out of town; October is the time of the grape and melon harvest in Afghanistan, so trucks laden with fruit lumbered for 24 hours down the road from Kabul to the markets in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar. In Jalalabad, just up the Khyber Pass from Peshawar, 60% of the population is thought to have fled to the relative safety of mountain villages or across the border into Pakistan. By the weekend there were reports that civilians--how many was a matter of wild dispute--had keen killed in a strike on the eastern village of Karam. And on Saturday the Pentagon confirmed that a smart bomb dropped from an F-18 had missed its target at a Kabul airfield and hit a civilian neighborhood. U.S. officials estimated that four may have died.