Shell Game

Eve

n though the Northern Alliance commanders in Mazar-i-Sharif knew what was coming, they were taken by surprise. As dawn came Saturday, word spread that the besieged Taliban had broken out of its last northern refuge, Kunduz city to the east, and was advancing on Mazar, attacking security posts as it moved. General Rashid Dostum called his fellow commanders to a hasty meeting as Alliance fighters converged on the dusty square outside, readying their pickups and rocket launchers for battle. A small unit of American special forces arrived, and their commander slipped inside. A few minutes later, the Alliance chiefs jumped into their jeeps and sped across the desert, trailed by 5,000 troops. Dostum scrambled up an ancient mud mound and raised his binoculars: on the horizon a thin line of black dots showed where the Taliban was waiting.

It had come not to fight but to surrender. But the Taliban was early, and its premature arrival had panicked Alliance pickets guarding the road from Kunduz. All week long the Taliban in the city had seesawed between giving up and fighting to the death. No wonder no one was sure this was the real thing. Only on Sunday did the Alliance claim to enter Kunduz.

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The confusion over Kunduz reflected the nature of the Afghans' opportunistic arrangements and the difficulties they raise in translating military success into enduring peace. Encircled for more than a week by 30,000 Northern Alliance troops, Taliban leaders turned to the time-honored art of the deal. The Northern Alliance was just as eager to avoid an internecine bloodbath. That is the Afghan way of war, where changing sides is as habitual as combat, and victories are often measured in defections, not dead men.

So last Wednesday night Mullah Fazil, Taliban commander of northern Afghanistan, leader of the 13,000-strong Kunduz garrison and deputy of supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, drove into Dostum's mud-walled fortress to talk surrender. The two men and armed aides shared vast plates of qabeli, the Afghan staple of rice and mutton, and bowls of pistachios, to break the Ramadan fast. "They were laughing and chatting," commander Mohammad Anwar Qureishi, one of the Alliance leaders present, told TIME, "and hours before, they had wanted to kill each other."

After the meal Dostum took Fazil aside to arrange the details: the one hang-up was the fate of thousands of Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens and al-Qaeda stalwarts in the city, who had vowed to die fighting--even to kill Taliban who tried to give up. A deal was cut: if Fazil could ensure that the entire force surrendered, Dostum would give all of them--including the foreign contingent--safe passage across the country to Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold far to the south. Dostum didn't care what happened to them once they left his area.

That was hardly an outcome the U.S. could like. The one thing Washington cared about was that al-Qaeda and non-Afghan fighters in Kunduz be captured or killed. Pakistan, on the other hand, wanted to prevent a slaughter of its nationals who had flocked to the Taliban banner; there were unconfirmed tales of Pakistani planes landing in the night to spirit disillusioned volunteers away.

But out in the choking desert dust on Saturday, it was hard to tell exactly who was giving up: Taliban Afghans, the foreign fighters or both. For three hours arguments flared. "The Taliban are finished," said Abdul Razaq, 20, who had defected to the Alliance just three days earlier and boasted of how much television he had watched since switching sides. "The American bombing was terrifying. All of them wanted to surrender." Hundreds of fighters poured out of the city, throwing themselves into the arms of their enemies. "Welcome!" shouted a commander who expected all Afghan Taliban fighters to surrender by the end of the day.

As night fell, no one was sure where the foreign fighters were. Some Alliance commanders had promised that foreigners who surrendered would be held in detention or handed over to the U.N. Turncoats reported most of the foreigners were still preparing to fight the Alliance army. "Kunduz will fall tonight," declared an unmoved Dostum on Saturday. "We will accept whoever comes to us, but any who don't will be killed." Ignoring American observers hovering nearby, Dostum made no effort to sort through his defectors. "The Americans have their views, and I have mine," he told TIME. "What the Americans want is unimportant. It's my decision that counts." Now, he said, it was time for those who surrendered to lay down their guns and go home.

Watching the situation evolve beyond their control, U.S. officials attempted to draw a red line: the Afghan Taliban could go free, but foreign fighters and al-Qaeda leaders could not. In Washington, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke hinted the U.S. might use military force to stop any wholesale evacuation of the diehards. In public, the Administration remained confident that the bad guys would be rounded up by more cooperative Northern Alliance commanders. But the muddle in Kunduz was just one more reminder that in Afghanistan, victory today can look a lot like defeat tomorrow. Last week, after the heady military successes of the Northern Alliance had roused expectations that the war would swiftly wrap up, the country lapsed perilously close to chaos.