The New Rules of Engagement

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What the Alliance did have for the first time was heavy U.S. bombs dumped onto Taliban front lines. But those strikes were still measured, and Alliance frustration is growing. "The longer you wait, the more the Taliban can figure out how to continue life with constant air strikes," says a cavalry commander near Mazar.

And yet for all its showy impatience, much of the Alliance doesn't look war-ready. Near Khoja Bahauddin, on the Taliqan front, the Alliance must move its tanks across a steep-banked river before it can even think of mounting an offensive. That's not to say an Alliance breakthrough is impossible, especially if American strikes against the Taliban pick up. But even the most confident Alliance soldiers say it won't happen soon. "War is in our blood," says Safaullah, a fighter in Dasht-i-Qala. "We'll fight for centuries if we have to."

Rule 2: That House Is Really a Weapons Depot
The Pentagon's most optimistic estimate is that 85% of American bombs and missiles have hit their targets. But that means that 450 or more may have gone astray, regularly nailing civilian structures and residential neighborhoods. The military has struggled to explain some of its mistakes. Rumsfeld flatly denied a Taliban report that a U.S. warhead landed on a hospital in Herat. But the next day he sent his spokeswoman out to concede that "it is possible" a 1,000-lb. bomb from a U.S. F-18 accidentally damaged the hospital. The U.S. has also acknowledged dropping two 500-pounders in a residential area north of Kabul. On Friday American warplanes blitzing Kabul successfully leveled a target selected by Pentagon planners. But the target turned out to be a Red Cross warehouse--the same one the U.S. had hit by mistake 10 days earlier.

All of which has damaged whatever credibility America might have had among the ordinary Afghans it hopes to convert. The Taliban, like the Iraqis and Serbs before them, have exaggerated civilian casualties while helping create more of them by positioning artillery near mosques and schools--erecting human shields and daring the U.S. to hit them. Daud Khan, 28, a refugee coming out of Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold, told TIME that the regime's forces have moved into residential quarters of the city, occupied houses and put antiaircraft guns on the roofs. Another 45 camouflaged truckloads of weapons have been moved into the mountains.

Rumsfeld has pledged "to do everything humanly possible...to let the world know that this is not against the Afghan people," but he has little chance of winning that argument. Many rural Afghans will believe anything the Taliban tells them about the U.S.--including last week's accusation that American planes were dropping chemical weapons. The only way for the U.S. to counter such claims may be to slow the aerial campaign and avoid borderline targets altogether. The U.S. destroys about 1% of an enemy force for each day of bombing; by that yardstick, there remain many Taliban targets to hit--if the pilots can find them. But the targets' mobility, invisibility and dwindling numbers mean they can't be destroyed at once. A British defense official says that in coming stages of the campaign, days may pass in which no bombs fall.

Rule 3: Watch Your Back
There may be one compelling reason to scale back air strikes: doing so could help contain anti-American unrest in Pakistan, a war aim that will become vital as the thrust of the campaign shifts to ground operations by special forces. U.S. commandos staging from bases in Pakistani territory have already faced mortal danger. When two Chinook helicopters landed at the Panjgur airport in southern Pakistan after retrieving a downed U.S. chopper, aviation sources tell TIME, they were met with a swarm of bullets from pro-Taliban, Pakistani irregulars who were guarding the airport. The Chinooks returned fire for several minutes before roaring off. The ambush was extinguished by Pakistani military forces.

Since the firefight, the U.S. has conducted its operations in Pakistan with more discretion; at the airstrip in Jacobabad, U.S. aircraft now land only at night, without the aid of runway lights. American servicemen on motorcycles race up the strip to guide the gunships in. That has added another hazard to the difficult job of locating bin Laden and the Taliban leadership and going for their throats. British intelligence believes the bombing campaign has flushed bin Laden out of his hiding places, providing opportunities for prying eyes to fix his location and sell the information to the U.S. The forces arrayed against him are growing; last week Britain committed 200 Royal Marine commandos to participate in search-and-destroy ground raids.

The top British military commander, Michael Boyce, said last week that commando operations could go on for weeks at a time to give Western forces the chance to gather intelligence on their prey. But the longer special forces are on the ground inside Afghanistan, the bigger the bull's-eye on their backs. The special-ops raid staged near Kandahar last month nearly ended in disaster when, as TIME reported last week, U.S. commandos were ambushed by Taliban guerrillas. A central piece of the U.S. strategy--to grease the gates of entry into southern Afghanistan by turning tribal leaders and warlords against the Taliban--may have died along with Haq. His capture also highlighted the treachery of the Taliban's network of spies in Pakistan, who will try to tip off holy warriors in Kandahar to pending U.S. raids. In American war rooms, that reality--and the memories of Beirut and Mogadishu--haunts military strategists. As long as the public is patient and intelligence is thin, the Pentagon will wait on ordering up big commando missions that might produce heavy American casualties.