Mullah Omar

"Half my country was destroyed by 23 years of war," Mullah Mohammed Omar told Time earlier this year. "If the remaining half of Afghanistan is destroyed in trying to save [Osama] bin Laden, I am ready." He had no illusions, therefore, about the choice he and his country faced after Sept. 11.

His improbable rise to power began in 1994, after he emerged from anonymity armed with the militancy of his faith and a twisted sense of divine mission. Today, however, with his ideology more closely linked to his patron than his Prophet, he is skirting oblivion, destined for a cell or a grave. Of all the protagonists in this war — George W. Bush, Pervez Musharraf, even bin Laden himself — no one had more to lose. He chose the well-financed, well-armed hatred of our age's pre-eminent archvillain over the wellbeing of his people.

Omar is not really a Mullah. He prefers to be called a talib (student), because his religious studies were interrupted by the Soviet invasion in 1979. As a mujahed, he earned a reputation as a marksman, but the conflict cost him his right eye. After the Soviets pulled out and Afghanistan descended into civil war, he lived simply as a village clergyman until, he claims, he had a dream in which the Prophet Muhammad revealed that he, Omar, should lead the country out of lawlessness and immorality. He and a few dozen other clerics became the foundation of the Taliban. Despite its adherence to the strictest interpretations of Islamic doctrine, the movement was welcomed in much of the country as a deliverance from chaos. Instead, Afghanistan got more chaos and inherited a dangerous new guest from Saudi Arabia.

Omar is rarely seen or heard and never photographed, and his word is law. A reluctant, inarticulate speaker, he knows little of the world outside Afghanistan. By some accounts, he had been to Kabul, his nation's capital, only a few times since taking power. As a leader, he was more concerned with enforcing rules about beards and kites and restricting the movement and rights of women than he was with the millions of Afghans on the brink of starvation.

After Sept. 11, Omar responded defiantly to Western pleas, ultimatums and then bombs, vowing that Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers would never lay down their arms, and that he would never give up either himself or bin Laden. Town after town fell, and one militia commander after another defected. With anti-Taliban forces and U.S. jets pounding Kandahar, Omar tried to negotiate his own surrender in exchange for his freedom. The deal fell through, however, and Omar told his top commanders that they could make their own choice: stay and fight, or flee, as he planned to do. His men stayed, but they would fight no more; the last stand ended before it began.

In a sense, he's lucky to be alive — assuming he still is. Early in the war, U.S. planes had his convoy targeted but didn't get clearance in time to take him out. Now Omar is in hiding, his messianic dream buried in the war's rubble.