Down And Dirty

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In part, that's for ethnic reasons. The Taliban is dominated by the Pashtun, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group and one that straddles the border with Pakistan; the Northern Alliance troops are predominantly from Afghanistan's other minorities. And in part, it's because of the memory of the years from 1992 to 1996, when warlords held Kabul and did little else other than wreck it and fight among themselves. The Northern Alliance's fighters, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said last week, were responsible for "all kinds of atrocities. I think their return would mean a return to anarchy and criminal killing." A senior British source lends some support to this position. Those fighting the Taliban, he says, are "good guys to the extent that they are helping us meet our objectives," but "will have to change their ways very substantially to be able to form a government." Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented gross violations of human rights by the Afghan opposition, though it's fair to say that no group in the region--including Pakistan's government--has clean hands. We're not in Kansas.

Northern Alliance commanders bitterly blame Islamabad--or rather, Washington's determination to keep Musharraf on board--for the fact that they haven't been given the green light. On Saturday U.S. bombs hit targets in Taloqan, far to the north. "The Taliban is kaput," said a soldier up there, with a Soviet-era RPG launcher slung over his soldier. But it's not; the Taliban's front lines outside Kabul still haven't been attacked. In fact, its position there has been reinforced; an extra 500 men and 20 tanks arrived toward the end of last week. The mood among Northern Alliance commanders on the front is turning ugly; they are talking of plans to march on Kabul with or without U.S. approval and air support, and they are openly complaining that American tactics have been ineffective. This disillusionment and frustration with the U.S. spells danger. The Taliban may be deeply unpopular with many Afghans, but it is local. Says Nancy Dupree, a veteran observer of the country, now based with relief agencies in Peshawar: "It's the first thing you learn about the Afghans. They will fight among themselves until kingdom come, but as soon as an outside force comes in, they will come together." Opposition leaders now sound much more nationalistic and less friendly to Americans than they were a week ago. If the U.S. sends in ground troops, says Haji Almaz, a 23-year war veteran who is a commander on the Kabul front, "the Afghan people will greet them in exactly the same way as they welcomed the Soviets."

A standard Afghan greeting for Soviet troops was to skin prisoners alive. Afghanistan is not for the fainthearted; Richard Kidd, a West Point graduate who has been in and out of the country for more than a decade, warned his classmates in a recent e-mail: "Sometime in this war I expect we will see videos of U.S. prisoners having their heads cut off." In conventional battle, the Taliban's soldiers would not scare the Army football team. Their air force is destroyed, they have few heavy weapons, and, says Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan army, they are so undisciplined that in past battles, "they have rushed to the front line to share the glory and spoils." The U.S. Army would exploit snafus like that in a flash.

Only problem: the U.S. Army is not going to fight a conventional battle with the Taliban. Afghans may be fervent, but they are not stupid. For a price, some will switch sides and join the forces allied to the Americans. In Afghanistan's wars, the liberal application of bribes to local warlords has always been a deadly weapon. But to take out key leaders of the Taliban, let alone find bin Laden and his top associates, money won't be enough. Special forces are going to have to do the dirty work.

It won't be easy. The U.S. has three options for running commandos into Afghanistan. It can use the bases in Pakistan or Uzbekistan; it can establish a temporary camp in Afghanistan; or it can use the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, now loading up in Oman, as a base for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Army's commando chopper unit. The first is politically sensitive; nobody's eager to do the second; so even though forces may use Pakistani bases for refueling and emergencies, the Kitty Hawk, sailing in the Arabian Sea, is likely to be the primary base of sustained special operations.

Once in theater, much of the work of tracking down bin Laden and his lieutenants will fall to the supersecret Delta Force. Forming into 15- to 21-man troops or four- to six-man teams, they will chopper into place, flying into canyons under cover of darkness. Then, protected by Kevlar body armor, they will fast-rope to the ground, bending under the weight of night-sighted M-4 carbines and grenade launchers, carrying radios and handheld global-positioning gear. Some of the teams will feature snipers; others will race across the desert in specially equipped dune buggies; yet others will practice their mountaineering skills, crawling over Afghanistan's rugged mountains. For many search-and-destroy missions, the aim will be to get in and out so fast that forces stay on the ground in Afghanistan for less than an hour.