Down And Dirty

By Michael Elliott

It was the colors that Hamad Alokzai noticed. The gaunt Afghan, with a beard like matted wool and gaudy silver rings on his fingers, had returned to Afghanistan from exile in Quetta, Pakistan, to check on his former comrades. On Thursday night he sat with his old Taliban commander under blankets in a pickup truck, safely tucked away in the hills outside Kandahar. "The bombs make a sound, then you see green lights falling through the sky," the commander told Alokzai. "The missiles have flashing yellow lights." That night, Alokzai counted 30 missiles striking targets around the city: "It was like Kandahar was covered in a floating green dust," he told TIME. Most of the Taliban fighters--including their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar--had already left town, though a number of Omar's relatives are said to have been killed in the attacks. On Wednesday night a single missile was fired on the village of Sangesar, destroying the mosque where Omar started his movement in 1995. Even the war-hardened locals were impressed by that level of accuracy.

Though Kandahar's hospitals were filled with casualties, the only troops killed, Alokzai said, were boys "left behind at the airport as night watchmen." Where once 10,000 Taliban supporters had gathered to pray in the Halqa Cherif mosque, now fewer than a hundred did. In the town, the Taliban's exodus left its Arab sympathizers at the mercy of the townsfolk; at least three were murdered for their watches and motorcycles. But the Taliban was preparing to fight. On just one day, more than 45 trucks left Kandahar for redoubts in the high mountains. They were filled with guns and ammunition.

This is the real thing. The silent war against terrorism--the one that takes place in police stations, law courts and banks--isn't over and won't be for years. But last week the noisy war, the one marked by percussive blasts that shake mountains, by the rattle of small-arms fire and the air-sucking whump of a fuel-air explosive, finally started. Like all battles, it had an other-worldly quality. The cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs that thudded into Afghanistan, the B-2 Stealth bombers, half-circling the globe from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Central Asia, all seem more at home in a science-fiction novel than on the evening news.

But stripped to its essence, this new form of war is as old as the hills. Victory still requires one group of men to find and kill another. Technology can't do it all. "The cruise missiles and bombers are not going to solve this problem," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week. In an assessment of the Soviet Union's defeat in Afghanistan written for the U.S. Army in 1996, a retired Afghan general and his American co-author were blunt. "A guerrilla war," they wrote, "is not a war of technology against peasantry. Rather, it is a contest of endurance and national will. The side with the greatest moral commitment will hold the ground...Tactics for conventional war will not work."

In this place and facing this enemy, the Pentagon's preferred war-fighting method--the deployment of massive air power followed by overwhelming force on the ground--is irrelevant. Special forces are going to carry a greater share of the burden than in any war ever waged by the U.S. Already, sources tell TIME, a number of Delta Force commandos and CIA agents, together with members of the elite British SAS 22nd regiment, are in eastern Afghanistan, conducting strategic reconnaissance of targets linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Special-operations soldiers are thought to be acting as spotters for the bombing raids; a senior diplomatic source in Paris says a small number of French intelligence agents in Afghanistan are also helping identify targets. A Green Beret contingent is on its way to act as liaison and to train officers with the Taliban's opponents in the Northern Alliance.

For President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and their soldiers, the moment of pivot has come. They have always known that soon enough this war would be waged not from the sky but on the ground; that fierce fights would take place in caves and canyons; that throats would be slit and bodies mutilated. "Our guys are going to be in the killing business," said an Army special-forces veteran last week. He didn't have to add the obvious corollary: if Osama bin Laden and his supporters are to be rooted out and destroyed, our guys are going to be in the dying business too.

If the war is now real for Americans, it is no less so for Afghans, even though those who live in that Texas-size country have been fighting the Soviets or one another for more than 20 years. The bombing was "a normal thing for us," said Mohammed Hashim, 23, who was in the Interior Ministry in the wrecked capital of Kabul at the time of the first attacks. "The women and children went out into the street. In Kabul there's no safe place to hide from bombs anyway." That's why some got out of town; October is the time of the grape and melon harvest in Afghanistan, so trucks laden with fruit lumbered for 24 hours down the road from Kabul to the markets in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar. In Jalalabad, just up the Khyber Pass from Peshawar, 60% of the population is thought to have fled to the relative safety of mountain villages or across the border into Pakistan. By the weekend there were reports that civilians--how many was a matter of wild dispute--had keen killed in a strike on the eastern village of Karam. And on Saturday the Pentagon confirmed that a smart bomb dropped from an F-18 had missed its target at a Kabul airfield and hit a civilian neighborhood. U.S. officials estimated that four may have died.

If civilian casualties are a constant of war, so is politics. In that respect Afghanistan is no different from anywhere else. The air campaign makes the point. Last week's bombing was carried out by the B-2s from Whiteman, B-1 and B-52 planes based on Diego Garcia--a tiny island in the Indian Ocean--and Navy F-18s flying off the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and U.S.S. Enterprise. Cruise missiles were fired from surface vessels and submarines (including, on the first night of the attacks, a British one). The attacks hit more than 60 targets, such as air-defense systems, weapons dumps and training camps run by both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Pilots had it as easy as anyone flying a mobile-weapons platform ever will. "My crews," said a lead B-52 pilot who would identify himself only as "Woodstock," "didn't encounter any threat that we weren't prepared to deal with and nothing that put us unduly at risk." Navy Lieut. Commander "Chris," who piloted an F-18 from the U.S.S. Enterprise on a six-hour mission to Kandahar, said, "The amount of resistance we've seen in this theater is significantly less than you would see in Iraq, significantly less than we saw in Kosovo."

After six days, the bombing slowed, in part for observance of Friday prayers at mosques. When it was resumed at a steady pace early Saturday, the conventional wisdom grew that Afghanistan is not, as they say in the Pentagon, a "target-rich environment." Rumsfeld made the point in his inimitable style. "We're not running out of targets," he said. "Afghanistan is."

That was not entirely true. Politics intruded on the air war and, for the first week at least, prevented some targets from being attacked. To the north of Kabul, troops of the Northern Alliance have been preparing for an offensive; their people are hungry and spoiling for a fight. Baba Qool, a refugee from the village of Hazarbagh who is in a camp under the troops' protection, lost his wife, three sons and two daughters when the Taliban--with Pakistani, Uzbek and Uighur Chinese troops in its force--raided the village last year. One old woman was rolled in a mattress, doused with gasoline and set on fire. The Northern Alliance's commanders thought their chance for revenge would soon come; the American bombers, they hoped, would target the Taliban forces massed against them.

In the first week that didn't happen. What had once been the expected strategy for combat--U.S. forces assisting the Northern Alliance in a proxy war against the Taliban--seems to have been put on hold as potential leaders squabble over the shape of a postwar government. Indeed, last week, from Kalai Sharif, a village held by the opposition just 25 miles from Kabul, those watching the bombardment of the capital could witness a rather more prosaic light show: the beams of four-wheel-drive pickup trucks, each of them loaded with Taliban fighters. They were moving toward the Northern Alliance's positions--not to fight but to find shelter. "The closer they are to us," said Khademudin, commander of the village, "the more secure they feel." On Friday at the Taloqan front, 150 miles farther north, where exhausted, poorly equipped Northern Alliance fighters took heavy casualties when they lost their city last year, one local commander sipped tea, munched cashew nuts and complained about the Americans. "They have not bombed the front line yet," he said. "Please, can you tell me, what is going on?"

Easy: international politics. To conduct the war in Afghanistan, Washington needs allies in the region. Bombers can fly from Diego Garcia and aircraft carriers, but the helicopters vital for close-in work--to say nothing of the soldiers who will do it--generally need bases nearer to the action. So far, the U.S. has made more headway than expected; last week Washington signed a forces agreement with Uzbekistan allowing for the long-term stationing of American troops and aircraft in the Central Asian country. Khanabad, an air base 125 miles north of the Afghan border, has become the staging-post for U.S. forces in the region. More than 2,000 members of the 10th Mountain Division are based there, and American and British special forces have used it as a jumping-off point for missions.

The price the Uzbeks are extracting for basing rights is modest. They just want some assurance that the Americans won't drop the region like a cigarette butt, as the U.S. did after the Russian army was defeated by the Afghan mujahedin 10 years ago. Pakistan is a different matter. The support of Islamabad is vital because of Pakistan's links to the Taliban and its proximity to the war zone. But in return, Pakistan wants Washington to put the brakes on the Afghan opposition.

So far, the U.S. has secured the use of two Pakistani bases, at Pasni on the Arabian Sea and at Jacobabad, where a fleet of U.S. helicopters and a Marine contingent have already landed. (Ostensibly, their mission is limited to search and rescue and the evacuation of Americans endangered by protests in Pakistan, though the Pentagon seems relaxed about the constraint. "There's not that much difference between a search-and-rescue and a search-and-destroy mission," says an official.) The price for this help? Islamabad won't tolerate a postwar government in Kabul dominated by the Northern Alliance.

In part, that's for ethnic reasons. The Taliban is dominated by the Pashtun, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group and one that straddles the border with Pakistan; the Northern Alliance troops are predominantly from Afghanistan's other minorities. And in part, it's because of the memory of the years from 1992 to 1996, when warlords held Kabul and did little else other than wreck it and fight among themselves. The Northern Alliance's fighters, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said last week, were responsible for "all kinds of atrocities. I think their return would mean a return to anarchy and criminal killing." A senior British source lends some support to this position. Those fighting the Taliban, he says, are "good guys to the extent that they are helping us meet our objectives," but "will have to change their ways very substantially to be able to form a government." Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented gross violations of human rights by the Afghan opposition, though it's fair to say that no group in the region--including Pakistan's government--has clean hands. We're not in Kansas.

Northern Alliance commanders bitterly blame Islamabad--or rather, Washington's determination to keep Musharraf on board--for the fact that they haven't been given the green light. On Saturday U.S. bombs hit targets in Taloqan, far to the north. "The Taliban is kaput," said a soldier up there, with a Soviet-era RPG launcher slung over his soldier. But it's not; the Taliban's front lines outside Kabul still haven't been attacked. In fact, its position there has been reinforced; an extra 500 men and 20 tanks arrived toward the end of last week. The mood among Northern Alliance commanders on the front is turning ugly; they are talking of plans to march on Kabul with or without U.S. approval and air support, and they are openly complaining that American tactics have been ineffective. This disillusionment and frustration with the U.S. spells danger. The Taliban may be deeply unpopular with many Afghans, but it is local. Says Nancy Dupree, a veteran observer of the country, now based with relief agencies in Peshawar: "It's the first thing you learn about the Afghans. They will fight among themselves until kingdom come, but as soon as an outside force comes in, they will come together." Opposition leaders now sound much more nationalistic and less friendly to Americans than they were a week ago. If the U.S. sends in ground troops, says Haji Almaz, a 23-year war veteran who is a commander on the Kabul front, "the Afghan people will greet them in exactly the same way as they welcomed the Soviets."

A standard Afghan greeting for Soviet troops was to skin prisoners alive. Afghanistan is not for the fainthearted; Richard Kidd, a West Point graduate who has been in and out of the country for more than a decade, warned his classmates in a recent e-mail: "Sometime in this war I expect we will see videos of U.S. prisoners having their heads cut off." In conventional battle, the Taliban's soldiers would not scare the Army football team. Their air force is destroyed, they have few heavy weapons, and, says Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan army, they are so undisciplined that in past battles, "they have rushed to the front line to share the glory and spoils." The U.S. Army would exploit snafus like that in a flash.

Only problem: the U.S. Army is not going to fight a conventional battle with the Taliban. Afghans may be fervent, but they are not stupid. For a price, some will switch sides and join the forces allied to the Americans. In Afghanistan's wars, the liberal application of bribes to local warlords has always been a deadly weapon. But to take out key leaders of the Taliban, let alone find bin Laden and his top associates, money won't be enough. Special forces are going to have to do the dirty work.

It won't be easy. The U.S. has three options for running commandos into Afghanistan. It can use the bases in Pakistan or Uzbekistan; it can establish a temporary camp in Afghanistan; or it can use the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, now loading up in Oman, as a base for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Army's commando chopper unit. The first is politically sensitive; nobody's eager to do the second; so even though forces may use Pakistani bases for refueling and emergencies, the Kitty Hawk, sailing in the Arabian Sea, is likely to be the primary base of sustained special operations.

Once in theater, much of the work of tracking down bin Laden and his lieutenants will fall to the supersecret Delta Force. Forming into 15- to 21-man troops or four- to six-man teams, they will chopper into place, flying into canyons under cover of darkness. Then, protected by Kevlar body armor, they will fast-rope to the ground, bending under the weight of night-sighted M-4 carbines and grenade launchers, carrying radios and handheld global-positioning gear. Some of the teams will feature snipers; others will race across the desert in specially equipped dune buggies; yet others will practice their mountaineering skills, crawling over Afghanistan's rugged mountains. For many search-and-destroy missions, the aim will be to get in and out so fast that forces stay on the ground in Afghanistan for less than an hour.

Will it all work? The helicopters will be vulnerable to the 100 or so shoulder-launched, CIA-purchased, Soviet-war-era Stinger missiles still in the hands of the Taliban. The Stingers have one of the greatest records of any killing machine ever invented; a 1989 U.S. Army study found that the Afghans took down 269 Soviet aircraft with them in 340 attempts. But less high-tech weaponry will serve just as well; in 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. soldiers were killed, including six Delta Force commandos who tried to rescue airmen from two Black Hawk helicopters downed by rocket-propelled grenades.

And then there is--apart from the skinning alive--Afghanistan's most frightening contribution to modern warfare: the cave. Afghanistan's limestone cliffs are honeycombed with them, many with multiple entrances and all of them capable of being booby-trapped. Pentagon officials are convinced that bin Laden and his top associates are holed up in caves and that they might move to a different one every day. Some are big enough to be seen in satellite images, and the Air Force has already targeted them. EGBU-28 bunker-buster bombs can drill like masonry bits through 20 ft. of stone before detonating, and B-2s dropped the behemoths on several caves last week. Pentagon officials got excited when secondary explosions from inside the caves continued for hours after the initial attacks. Fuel-air explosives are also handy; an explosive aerosol can be injected into the entrance of a cave and then ignited. Anyone left inside will suffocate and be fried to a crisp.

But that's if the Americans get lucky. Whereas U.S. special forces have recently revised their training for the sort of urban jungles they had to cope with in Mogadishu, there has been little or no training for Afghanistan's terrain. "We're going to figure out this cave business as we go along," says a former special-forces commando. In much the same way, they will figure out what to do if they catch up with bin Laden or another al-Qaeda leader. In that event, the special forces would have to choose between a "snatch-and-grab" mission--tossing their target into a helicopter and getting out fast--or a "blow-and-go," in which case the captive would be killed. Sources tell TIME that the Pentagon and State Department had made plans last week to fly FBI agents to a Navy warship in the region, ready to arrest bin Laden or any other al-Qaeda operatives caught alive. The FBI blocked the plan, claiming it didn't have agents to spare for arrests that might never happen.

All these plans assume that the leadership of al-Qaeda remains in Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence officials are convinced that bin Laden is indeed still there. But sources tell TIME they are worried that other leaders of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban may have slipped out of the country, or be trying to. Their favored destinations are thought to be Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. (U.S. officials are also trying to check movements into Somalia, Chechnya and Sudan.) In all three of the likeliest havens, the CIA has been working with local officials to round up the members of extensive al-Qaeda cells, while U.S. diplomats have been pressing their host countries to bolster surveillance at airports and border checkpoints. No U.S. special-forces operations have been launched against cells outside Afghanistan as yet, but in a letter to the U.N. Security Council on the war last week, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte pointedly noted that Washington reserved the right to take "further actions with respect to other organizations and other states."

For now, however, the focus remains on Afghanistan. In the mountains and deserts, winter is approaching; with its onset, said Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British defense staff, "things will slow down a bit." But only a bit. The war may be won by small teams of dedicated warriors, but by most standards this is going to be a pretty big show. The Pentagon intends to send more troops to the region next week. Some of them could come from the 23,000 U.S. troops, including special-forces units, now participating in Operation Bright Star maneuvers in Egypt. Another contingent might be supplied by Britain's 3 Commando Brigade, currently on exercises in Oman.

The soldiers, brave and resourceful though they may be, will be able to do little to head off a looming humanitarian disaster. Afghanistan is one of the poorest, most war-racked and drought-ridden places on earth. So far, humanitarian drops of food by U.S. planes have had little impact on the food shortage. A man from Nangarhar province who arrived in Peshawar last week told doctors that some people in his village were afraid to open the food parcels; during the Soviet war, many Afghans were maimed by toys and packets of cigarettes dropped from planes--and booby-trapped with explosives. Other refugees have been snapping up the rations, but even if everyone were willing to eat them, the roughly quarter-million U.S. food packets dropped last week couldn't begin to blunt the nation's hunger. Though the country's borders are officially closed, refugees are beginning to trickle over the mountains into Quetta and Peshawar.

But the traffic goes both ways. On the road to Kandahar, teenagers from as far away as Karachi are flocking to join the fight against America. "Why do you want to enter this hell?" warned a Taliban soldier at a roadblock. Who knows? Because of religious conviction? Because it's home? Or because, like young men before them for a thousand years, the youths felt, at the prospect of war, a summoning up of the blood. There'll be plenty of that before we're through.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Paul Quinn-Judge/the Kabul front, Hannah Beech/the Taloqan front, Helen Gibson/London, Terry McCarthy/Peshawar, Tim McGirk/Quetta, Ghulam Hasnain/Spin Boldak, Michael Fathers/Tashkent, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington

TIME.com Read Tim McGirk's reports from Pakistan, "Where Osama is a Rock Star," at time.com/mcgirk.com

With reporting by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Paul Quinn-Judge/the Kabul front, Hannah Beech/the Taloqan front, Helen Gibson/London, Terry McCarthy/Peshawar, Tim McGirk/Quetta, Ghulam Hasnain/Spin Boldak, Michael Fathers/Tashkent, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington