The Hunt for bin Laden

But few Afghans listened. "Omar doesn't have the same power he had in the past," says Haqiq, the Pashtun commander. "They keep saying he will fight to the end, but we don't think that's true." Across Afghanistan, people deserted the regime as soon as it started losing, exposing its shallow hold on them. "The Taliban showed they were good at enforcing beard lengths," says a Western diplomat, "and that's about it." The first, pivotal defeat of the Taliban, in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was greased by local Pashtun fed up with taking orders from "these village idiots from the south," as a foreign aid worker put it. Those fighters cut a secret deal with Alliance commander Rashid Dostum to allow Dostum's cavalry to pour through the Taliban front line. After that, the Alliance achieved its rout of the Taliban in typical Afghan fashion: by bribing Taliban commanders to defect.

With their ranks dwindling after weeks of American air strikes, the enemy's will to fight crumbled. Those pockets of Taliban troops still battling last week were doing so on their own. "As a fighting unit, they are rapidly collapsing," says a U.S. intelligence official. Pakistani intelligence sources told TIME that the rank-and-file Taliban militiamen have lost their taste for jihad. Some have returned to their villages pleading for mercy; others tried to slip unnoticed across the Pakistani border. "It's very easy," says Khair Ullah, a resident of the border town of Bajaur. "You remove your black turban and trim your beard, and nobody says you are a Talib."

Publicly, the U.S. knew better than to declare victory, insisting that Taliban fighters may be preparing to begin a new phase of the war, one in which they could do what they once did best: battle a more powerful foreign force from redoubts in the mountains, where tanks can't go and helicopters crash. The surviving Taliban could still withdraw to avoid the hellfire of American strikes and then spring ambushes on towns and villages below. "They can defect, change their mind and go back," Rumsfeld said. "It is not possible to answer the question as to the circumstance of the Taliban." But their divisions are scattered, their hard-core fighters are few—Pakistani sources say 2,000 members, at most, of Omar's 50,000-strong force are still active near Kandahar—and the regime has been drained of the financial and military resources that once sustained it. "Guerrilla warfare will be all that they can do," says an Air Force general. "I doubt they can mount a counteroffensive." Even if the Taliban commits its leftover men and matériel to a prolonged guerrilla campaign, there is little or no chance the same movement can return to power.

The sudden rollback of the Taliban vindicated the Pentagon's faith in air power. Just weeks ago, with the rebels bogged down in the north and Taliban forces cockily daring the U.S. to try to hit them, American strategists warned of a lengthy war and said a large percentage of Taliban targets were yet to be bombed. Despite the derision hurled at them from military hawks early in the campaign—who insisted that this war, unlike those in Kosovo, could not be won from the skies—the U.S. commanders are having the last word. Precision U.S. bombing raids early in the conflict obliterated the Taliban's rear guard, which had provided reinforcements, food, ammunition and fuel to the front lines. When the U.S. began pounding front-line troops and the calls for backup went unanswered, panic began to spread.

Last week U.S. warplanes strafed lines of fleeing Taliban soldiers, but even those ripe targets soon withered. That gave U.S. pilots, in the words of Centcom chief Tommy Franks, more room to "focus on the alligators"—the high command of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Last Tuesday, armed with fresh intelligence reports on the whereabouts of key Taliban and al-Qaeda figures, the Pentagon began attacking buildings in Kabul and Kandahar in which they were believed to be hiding. At least one strike nailed its target: on Friday, Rumsfeld said he had seen "authoritative reports" that the U.S. had killed Atef, al-Qaeda's military chief. Atef had intimate ties to bin Laden through his daughter's marriage to bin Laden's son and was seen as the cold-blooded strategist charged with carrying out bin Laden's deadly visions. As the mastermind of the ambush of the Army Rangers in Somalia in 1993, the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998 and the Sept. 11 airline attacks, Atef was responsible for more than 5,000 deaths. American commanders said his elimination may cripple al-Qaeda's terror-making machine. "He's not bin Laden or Omar," says an Air Force officer. "He's not John or Paul; he's George or Ringo."

That's why the American targeting of Atef also served to deliver a pointed message to his boss. As American commandos did in northern Afghanistan, U.S. special ops in the south provided Pashtun tribes with advice, ammunition and weapons. But the immediate goal was to divine bin Laden's location with enough precision for the U.S. to deploy its forces—either technological or human, in the air or down into a cave—to deliver the final blow. All week American troops manned checkpoints on the roads running through former Taliban country, seeking clues to bin Laden's coordinates. Special-ops commandos plied Taliban lieutenants on the leadership penumbra with cash in exchange for secrets about al-Qaeda leaders' movements. While the informants could not deliver the exact address, they knew the neighborhoods in which to look. Even with bin Laden at large, U.S. commanders became convinced they had him trapped. "If he moves, we spot him," a Pentagon official said. "If he doesn't move, we close in on him, cave by cave."

Still, no one in the allies' war councils believes bin Laden's demise will mean the end of al-Qaeda, much less global terrorism, or that the Taliban's disintegration will douse the flames of hatred in Afghanistan. But as a new world began to rise from the ruins of the Taliban's tyranny, there was cause for cautious optimism. Across Afghanistan, warlords scrambled to secure their own footholds, but for the most part, the Northern Alliance commanders avoided the widespread barbarism they administered a decade ago. And while America certainly has not finished the fight against terror, the punishment doled out by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan has made it more difficult for future bin Ladens to lure followers to join the jihad by portraying America, as he did, as a soft superpower that can be easily intimidated. "The Taliban really thought this was going to be the 1980s and their fight against the Soviets," a senior U.S. intelligence official told TIME. "They didn't realize that what al-Qaeda did on Sept. 11 unleashed some serious power against them." They do now.