No Bombing Pause for Ramadan

The

Muslim holy month of Ramadan will bring the Taliban no quarter. That was the message from the White House, Thursday, as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice vowed that the U.S. would continue to step up its military campaign to tilt the scales against the Taliban before Afghanistan's winter renders significant ground advances unlikely. And a letter purportedly from Osama bin Laden widely broadcast Thursday, which calls on Pakistanis to fight against the U.S. campaign suggests that General Musharraf may be in for a testing month as fasting Muslims are drawn together on a daily basis at their mosques.

The thunder of carpet bombing by B-52s rumbled for a second successive day in Afghanistan, Thursday, heralding an approaching moment of truth for the opposition Northern Alliance. The heavy bombers, not used since the first days of bombing, have joined an American air armada pounding frontlines north of Kabul and all around Mazar-i-Sharif, as part of a U.S. effort to soften Taliban defenses for a ground offensive by the Alliance on both fronts. The bombing may continue for days yet, but when it ends, it will be up to the anti-Taliban armies of the north to go in and recapture territory from a battle-hardened enemy for whom surrender is not an option.

The coordinated move against the Taliban on both fronts reflects a U.S. concern to score a morale-boosting victory before the onset of winter bedevils prospects for progress on the ground. The Pentagon has faced mounting domestic political criticism over a four-week bombing campaign that has thus far produced no tangible shift in the balance of power in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance, too, has criticized the U.S. for failing to subject the Taliban frontlines to sustained aerial bombardment, with frontline commanders questioning whether the Americans were serious about helping tilt the balance in favor of the Alliance. The sustained bombing of the past two days has changed all that; the question now is whether the Alliance has the capacity to overwhelm a more numerous, better armed and perhaps even more motivated foe and prove itself a capable proxy for a ground war against the Taliban.

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Holding the Alliance back on the Kabul front may once have been part of the U.S. strategy, on the grounds that allowing such an ethnically-narrow force to capture the capital would complicate efforts to forge a broad-based government and potentially rally many uncommitted Pashtuns — the largest ethnic group — behind the Taliban. Also, Pakistan is deeply suspicious of the Northern Alliance and was supporting the Taliban's war against the Alliance before September 11. Instead, the U.S. had encouraged the Alliance to move on Mazar-i-Sharif, a strategically important city in the opposition group's northern heartland that fell to the Taliban in 1998.

The Alliance's first attempt, two weeks ago, was a disaster. Rival warlords failed to properly coordinate a four-pronged assault on the city and instead ended up losing ground to its defenders. Since then, local alliance commanders have complained of a lack of ammunition and supplies, and have spoken of laying siege to the city through the winter and renewing the offensive next spring. But with little to show for its Pakistan-backed efforts to lure Taliban defectors and forge an anti-Taliban Pashtun coalition in the south, the U.S. has moved to shorten the Alliance's timeline on both fronts. Realistically, however, the stronger push will come at Mazar-i-Sharif, where the opposition forces have a far better chance of prevailing than they do in Kabul, right now. (And, of course, even though Pakistan hasn't managed to deliver a Taliban breakaway, the political problems of having the Alliance capture the capital in the absence of agreement on a broad transitional government persist.)

Capturing the northern city whose population numbers somewhere between 150,000 and 700,000 may be the key to breaking the Taliban's supply lines in the north and facilitating the Northern Alliance's reclaiming of much of northwestern Afghanistan. It would potentially also allow the U.S. a foothold deep inside Afghanistan to help wage war further south. But it is the psychological impact of taking it before winter that may be most important: Mazar-i-Sharif was the last major domino to fall to the Taliban in its conquest of Afghanistan, and its recapture by the opposition would signal a turning of the tide — and that could be as important to quiet concerns in Washington as to encourage defections from the Taliban.

But the battle to wrest control over Mazar-i-Sharif will be fierce and bloody, and the outcome far from certain. The city is, in every sense, occupied by the Taliban. The majority of its residents are Uzbek and Hazari, and the Taliban can only count on the support of a few Pashtun villages on the outskirts of the town. For the rest, they rule by fear, and Northern Alliance leader General Rashid Dostum believes his Uzbek supporters in the city will function as a fifth column once the battle begins. That may not be enough.

The Northern Alliance claims the Taliban has some 20,000 troops in Mazar-i-Sharif, whereas the Alliance can muster, at most, half that. The Taliban forces, which allegedly include a number of Arab volunteers of the Bin Laden-trained "Brigade 55," are better armed. And it's a relative certainty that they're more motivated right now: Running up the white flag is simply not an option when surrender would bring almost certain death. Contemplating the Alliance's recapture of the city, Alliance commander Mullah Ustud Mohammed Atta recently told TIME, "We will kill them all."

And that's unlikely to be an idle threat, for each time the city has changed hands, blood has flowed freely. The Taliban first seized the city in 1997 after one Northern Alliance commander had betrayed another and invited them in. But when the local militiamen rebelled against Taliban efforts to disarm them, thousands of Taliban fighters were killed in the ensuing uprising — many of them executed by suffocation in shipping containers or being dropped alive into wells which were then bulldozed over. When the Taliban recaptured the city a year later, it exacted a terrible revenge, butchering some 6,000 Uzbek and Hazari civilians. The Taliban fighters defending the city are unlikely to expect any mercy from the Northern Alliance, giving them every incentive to fight to the last man. Still, right now, Mazar-i-Sharif looks like the best bet for the Alliance, and its U.S. backers, to show that the Taliban can be beaten. And much hinges on the outcome, because if Northern Alliance troops backed by American tactical air support aren't up to the task, the U.S. and Britain may be forced to consider mounting a full-blown invasion next spring.

With reporting by Tim McGirk/Quetta, Alex Perry/Tashkent, Mark Thompson/Washington and CNN's David Georgie