Into the Caves

American commanders were determined to stop them. With control of the country wrested from the Taliban, the full wrath of American military power turned toward the sprawling Tora Bora fortress in the eastern ridges of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda fighters still huddling inside their caves have little chance of getting out alive. For the first time last week, forces loyal to three U.S.-backed bounty hunters clambered into the mountains to stage assaults on al-Qaeda redoubts, while as many as 40 U.S. commandos called in B-52-delivered bombs and precision-guided missiles.

Afghan soldiers claimed that a U.S. raid early last week may have killed al-Qaeda's strategic mastermind, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and its financial adviser, Ali Mahmood. The wife and children of al-Zawahiri were confirmed dead. The Afghan fighters slowly widened their forays, capturing low-elevation hollows used by al-Qaeda to store ammunition. The Pentagon said the proxy forces last week drove some of the 1,500 al-Qaeda troops higher into the Khyber Pass, forcing them to break into smaller units that U.S. bombers could then pick off.

With all that, the principal U.S. goal of snaring bin Laden in Tora Bora was shrouded in a fog of conflicting reports about whether he was even there. A brother of Hazrat Ali, one of the warlords chasing bin Laden in Tora Bora, said Friday that "one of our soldiers saw Osama yesterday," riding on horseback with four bodyguards after visiting his troops. Yet Ali's brother-in-law says, "We don't have any confirmed information about Osama, but his son is still in the caves."

Those mixed signals were the side effect of fighting a proxy war. Since the start of the conflict, the U.S. strategy of striking ruthlessly from the air while enlisting Afghan forces to wage war on the ground has paid spectacular dividends. But as the campaign has lurched toward an endgame, the limits of the strategy have become glaring. The absence of a sizable American battle force on the ground has left the U.S. unable to dictate the terms of surrender, making it easier for Omar to go on the lam and perhaps emboldening bin Laden in his game of hide-and-seek. "You get what you pay for," says an Army officer. "When you fight a ground war on the cheap, you can't always get what you want."

So American commanders may be getting ready to boost the number of U.S. forces inside Afghanistan to hunt down their two biggest prey and prevent Taliban fighters from going underground. Last week some 1,500 Marines at Forward Operating Base Rhino fanned out across swaths of southern Afghanistan, blocking the escape routes of stray Taliban forces, and Centcom said U.S. ground forces exchanged gunfire with Taliban forces around Kandahar. Deploying a bigger U.S. combat force now would pose political risks, not least the possible opposition of members of the newly picked interim government who don't like the idea of foreign troops staying on Afghan soil. They may have to get used to it. On Friday Franks said, "The possibility of increasing forces on the ground is certainly on the table ... The mission has not started to ebb down."

The ousting of the Taliban from Kandahar and the evisceration of the regime's military power allowed the allies to cross off at least one war aim. Even with Omar still at large, the Taliban is all but finished as a movement. The lightning advance of opposition forces scooped up most of the Taliban's weapons and ammunition and eroded its popular support. By the beginning of last week, several senior Taliban commanders had begun negotiating terms of a surrender with Karzai and other opposition leaders loyal to King Zaher. A deal for the peaceful handover of the three provinces still under Taliban control was scuttled last week after Omar demanded a guarantee of safe passage to his hometown, without threat of arrest and trial for war crimes. When Karzai refused, Omar balked and ordered his shrinking core of loyalists to fight to the death.

But after weeks of ruthless American bombing, their will was breaking. A black cloud of dust hung over the city, kicked up by U.S. strikes. American special-ops forces joined the anti-Taliban forces commanded by Karzai and Ghul Agha Sherzai, and the merged units closed in on the city from the east and north. Sherzai's 700 men advanced as far as the Kandahar airport before encountering fire from Taliban and foreign Arab fighters making their last stand. During bombing lulls, Taliban soldiers hauled their dead comrades out of the trenches before ushering in new fighters. Those trying to run away were shot in the legs by their commanders.

On Wednesday the Taliban negotiators secretly approached Karzai again; they wanted amnesty for Taliban fighters in exchange for surrender. "Maybe they thought that because I was named Prime Minister, they had lost legitimacy," Karzai told Time. "Or it could have been my arrival on the outskirts of Kandahar, or maybe common sense. They knew they were finished." As Karzai waited for Taliban Defense Minister Obaidullah Akhund and Interior Minister Abdul Razaq to meet him at his desert base, he was nearly killed by an errant American bomb that killed three U.S. commandos. Karzai steadied himself and held two days of talks with the two Taliban commanders, the intended targets of the U.S. strike. The next day he made the deal for "a slow and orderly" transfer of power from the Taliban to a tribal council of non-Taliban leaders.