Into The Fray

By Romesh Ratnesar

Every war has its fateful pivot, when the high-altitude bombs lose their persuasive power and politics becomes a sideshow, when soldiers must hit the ground and fight and everyone else braces for something terrible. This war turned last Thursday night. Throughout the day, combat helicopters had carried U.S. special-operations troops ashore from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, anchored in the Arabian Sea off the southern coast of Pakistan. The forces choppered over miles of desert terrain to an airstrip at Dalbandin, close to Pakistan's secret underground nuclear-test site and just south of the Afghan border. There they prepared to be delivered into Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan to begin a furtive ground war in which no one knew exactly what came next.

The new stage of the war may have been prompted by a tidy piece of intelligence work. On Friday morning, Pakistani intelligence sources tell TIME, the Taliban eminence Mullah Mohammed Omar arrived in Kandahar, the regime's stronghold in southern Afghanistan. He had spent days holed up in a mountain fortress ducking U.S. bombs, and in the meantime his regime had been pummeled. When he got back to Kandahar, Omar fired two faithless deputies and passed the word that he would deliver the noon sermon at the Halqa Cherif mosque. The mosque houses a robe said to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad, so Omar must have figured the Americans would never bomb it. U.S. commanders may have known he was there. An eyewitness told TIME that American warplanes blitzed a convoy that may have been shepherding Omar as it left Kandahar, killing several Taliban bodyguards.

Hours later, more than 100 American commandos--led by Army Rangers--lifted off in helicopters and MC-130 Combat Talon planes from bases in southern Pakistan and Oman. A military cameraman videotaped the special forces donning fatigues (the camera zoomed in on a photo of New York fire fighters that commandos had packed in their gear to leave at their destinations), boarding aircraft and leaping out in Afghanistan. While a group of commandos seized a dry-lake airstrip some 100 miles southwest of Kandahar, other troops headed to Kandahar itself in pursuit of Omar and one of his command centers. The special forces didn't manage to snare Omar, but Pentagon officials said U.S. troops gathered valuable intelligence and destroyed a small-weapons stockpile at the airfield.

But not surprisingly, the Taliban has a different story. A Taliban soldier, Abdu Rahman, 30, told TIME that two combat helicopters arrived before dawn Saturday in the desert 10 miles east of Kandahar. As one hovered overhead, a few commandos poured out of the second gunship. Hundreds of Taliban fighters, who had responded to the earsplitting whir of the choppers, were crouching in the darkness. "We were ordered to wait until the Americans came closer. But nobody listened. We were all firing," Rahman says. The American forces "flew off like sparrows."

The Pentagon denies the Taliban's reports, but there were certainly other hazards. Returning from its mission and attempting to land in pitch blackness, one Black Hawk helicopter got caught on a sand dune near the Dalbandin runway, lost its balance and flopped over, killing two crew members and injuring three others, according to a Pakistani witness. American servicemen who returned safely to Dalbandin were so jittery that they refused to brief Pakistani military officers unless the officers removed their gun holsters before approaching the helicopters. Elsewhere in Afghanistan, bands of U.S. troops continued their covert search-and-destroy missions. The ground war was a day old.

The aims of this campaign have been no big secret--decapitate the Taliban, eliminate al-Qaeda's terror apparatus and seize Osama bin Laden. Administration insiders call the strategy "Taliban plinking" (echoing the "tank plinking" of the Gulf War): special forces plan to pick off one individual at a time, starting with Mullah Omar and working down the command chain of Taliban leaders protecting bin Laden. The first wave of lightning special-ops strikes was, as much as anything else, a psychological weapon designed to boost American spirits and faith in the government, silence suspicions that the public might go wobbly after seeing American blood shed, and send a message of ruthless resolve that can be heard in Afghanistan's deepest caves. In that sense, it also marked a beginning. So be prepared: after two weeks of heavy, mostly accurate yet increasingly irrelevant American air strikes, the war's pace and brutality will ratchet up fast--and so will the body count.

According to U.S. intelligence, chasing the Taliban and al-Qaeda will likely draw special-forces commandos into combat in the warrens of fortified underground tunnels and facilities scattered all over Afghanistan, from the Taliban strongholds Kandahar and Kabul in the east to Herat, near the country's western border with Iran. Many of the tunnels and bunkers were dug during the Afghan war with the Soviet Union but have been upgraded since a U.S. cruise-missile strike against al-Qaeda in 1998. U.S. soldiers have the military technology, such as night-vision goggles and breathing devices, to operate in this underground labyrinth, and U.S. bombers have pounded the network. But U.S. troops could face fearsome resistance once they actually venture down there. A former mujahedin commander based in Kandahar told TIME that one possible target would be a mountain complex in southwestern Afghanistan, built by bin Laden as an al-Qaeda base because of its proximity to the Pakistani border. The camp is nestled in a canyon lined with gunners--reportedly Sudanese--who are fiercely loyal to bin Laden. "The Americans are crazy to go in there," says the Afghan vet. "The Arabs are everywhere. It's like a scorpions' nest."

American officials are also worried that the special forces may come under fire at the point of attack. The MC-130 Combat Talons that drop commandos and the AC-130 Spectre gunships that pulverize anyone standing in their way may still have to dodge the Taliban's 200 antiaircraft Stinger missiles left over from the Afghans' war against the Soviets. Last week there were no reports of Stingers being fired at U.S. warplanes, but that wasn't necessarily good news. "Our concern," an Army officer says, "is that they may be saving them for the choppers." Despite their firepower, special-ops troops are also vulnerable to the unforeseen hazards of combat. A ground raid planned for early last week near Kabul was scrapped because of a dust storm.

For days Administration officials and military commanders hinted that ground troops were about to move. The number of U.S. warplanes in the skies above Afghanistan last week doubled to about 100 a day, but it had been clear from the beginning that air strikes alone wouldn't budge the Taliban or get Washington closer to bin Laden. With fixed military targets dwindling and reports of civilian casualties mounting, American and British leaders started to catch heat in the Arab world and within their own governments for failing to conjure up a strategy beyond bombing Afghanistan into whatever came before the Stone Age. Airdrops of food and leaflets and transistor radios intended to assist the Northern Alliance and turn ordinary Afghans against the Taliban have not had the desired effect. In Peshawar, an expert on the region said one leaflet warning the Taliban of the deadliness of American bombs ("We'll put it right through your window") only incited them more. "We're losing the war of public opinion, the hearts and minds," grumbled a senior Pentagon official. "The Islamic world day by day is growing more angry and skeptical." Then there was the anthrax scare at home. While not the sole trigger, it made a decisive show of force abroad seem more urgent. "It's symbolically time to do more," a State Department official said early in the week.

Anyone wondering whether that meant ground troops needed only to spot the AC-130 gunships that had started flying lazy circles over Afghanistan, hammering targets below at will. If the skies were safe for AC-130s, it followed that low-flying choppers could deliver commandos into enemy territory. Inside the Pentagon, military planners conceded that the air war was producing diminishing returns. And so Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began dishing out the rhetoric. On Monday he stressed that American forces should "develop relationships" with anti-Taliban forces on the ground. B-52s "are powerful and can do certain things within reasonable degrees of accuracy," noted Rumsfeld, "[but] they can't crawl around on the ground and find people." The next day the Defense Secretary went to Whiteman Air Force base in Missouri as reports flew that special forces were already on the ground. His hints were as broad as the grin he flashed when servicemen bellowed training chants behind him. "The safest way one can deal with an issue like that is not to get involved in discussing it," he said before turning to Missouri Congressman Ike Skelton and suggesting they eat lunch. On the other side of the world, crew chiefs made final walkarounds of the helicopters, listening for signs of mechanical trouble. When they heard nothing, they gave their pilots a thumbs-up.

"Your mission is difficult," Rumsfeld told the 2,000 airmen and women in Missouri. "Our enemies live in caves and shadows." U.S. and British special-ops forces don't just face treacherous, mine-riddled terrain. They will have to confront wily, weathered adversaries in a place where it's often impossible to tell who's on your side. "These folks are pros. They're clever. They've been around a long time," says Rumsfeld. "They've probably changed sides three or four times, and may again." The Taliban has also shown an ability to withstand hits against strongholds and replenish its forces. The U.S. has cratered many runways in Afghanistan, destroyed more than a dozen Taliban airplanes and helicopters and eviscerated the regime's air defenses. But sources inside Afghanistan say the Taliban's military has not been mortally degraded. And while Rumsfeld said, "we do see snippets of intelligence information suggesting part of the Taliban is starting to decide that they'd prefer not to be part of the Taliban," there were also signs that some are committed to fight to their death. Young militants streamed across the Pakistani border near Chaman hoping to join the fight. At the strategic northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, Taliban fighters waged pitched battles against the local opposition forces of the Northern Alliance. "The morale of the Taliban is fine," an Afghan aid worker from Kabul told TIME. "In face of rockets and bombing, the Taliban are humble. But they feel they are capable of handling anything the Americans can do on the ground."

They are about to find out. At the beginning of the air campaign, the Administration carefully calibrated the war to mesh with diplomatic efforts aimed at cobbling together a successor government to the Taliban. But that political alchemy can't be ordered off the shelf. The West must first broker a consensus among Afghanistan's multitude of opposition groups. In Pakistan last week, Colin Powell seemed to get behind Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's proposal that a governing coalition would include Taliban "moderates"--members of the majority Pashtun tribe in the south who could be convinced, or bribed, to peel away from the regime. Rumsfeld signaled that the Pentagon no longer intends to eradicate Taliban forces wholesale. "It is going to be a lot easier to try to persuade a number of them to oppose the Taliban and to oppose al-Qaeda than it is to in fact defeat them." With winter coming and none of the necessary deals for a future government imminent, U.S. and British strategists have reordered their priorities: they will go after bin Laden and his lieutenants now, try to erode the Taliban's ability to fight back and worry about Afghanistan's future later.

Complicating strategy is the fact that U.S. and British ground forces have injected themselves into the middle of a civil war. For all the talk of common cause between the U.S. military and the Northern Alliance, the two would-be partners have largely marched out of sync. The air campaign has delivered a sobering message to the hodgepodge of fighters seeking to oust the Taliban: their hopes won't always mesh with the Administration's broader aims to smoke out terrorists and keep a fragile international coalition onboard while doing it.

But the U.S. is also looking for ways to defuse the combustible synergies that exist between bin Laden's organization and the Taliban. One of the Pentagon's prime targets during the air campaign has been the barracks of the Taliban's 55th Brigade at Mazar-i-Sharif. The brigade's commanders come mostly from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and its members are Arabs who were reeled into Afghanistan by bin Laden to train in terrorist camps. The "Afghan Arabs" are the Taliban's elite militants and ideological shock troops, sometimes dispatched to cajole reluctant elements of the Taliban's 45,000-man army to fight against the infidels. (Slackers have been known to get shot.) After serving time in Afghanistan, many members of the 55th pursue careers as international terrorists working for the al-Qaeda empire. "The 55th is the point where bin Laden and the Taliban overlap," says an Army intelligence officer. "It's the one big target we can hit that will do damage to both."

The northern outpost of Mazar-i-Sharif, which the 55th helped conquer for the Taliban three years ago and where some 10,000 Taliban troops remain dug in, has thus become a vortex of swirling war aims. Should the city fall to the Northern Alliance, the opposition would gain control of a vital airport that could be used as a staging ground for alliance troops and possibly U.S. special forces--and alliance commanders believe that once they win Mazar, Taliban resistance in the north will roll up. Early last week Ustad Mohammed Atta, the 37-year-old general commanding the alliance there, predicted that the city would be captured by midweek. But the Taliban counterattacked hard, and by Friday alliance forces were running low on ammunition. The alliance's interior minister told TIME that his forces had committed "a military mistake" by advancing too far forward without protecting their own lines. The battle had reached a stalemate, and the alliance put its hopes into convincing Taliban fighters to defect. They might remind them of what happened the last time around: in 1997 anti-Taliban forces in Mazar exterminated more than 1,000 Taliban troops by loading them into truck containers and driving them into the desert to be shot. In the heat of the containers, dozens of the men had died by the time they got there.

In an indication of how nasty the U.S. is prepared to get in order to win this war, about a dozen U.S. military officers met in the Darisuf Pass with General Abdurrashid Dostum, the ruthless Uzbek strongman who controlled Mazar before the Taliban's assault. Dostum--whose army includes a cavalry of 700 armed locals mounted on ponies--is considered one of the Northern Alliance's most opportunistic and cruel leaders, but moral distinctions have bent to battlefield imperatives. The U.S. has provided some air backup to forces such as Dostum's, bombing Taliban troops in Mazar, Kunduz and Taloqan and hoping that Uzbek, Tajik, Hazara and assorted other ethnic warlords will soon assert control over Afghanistan's northern territories.

For now, that seems as far as Washington is willing to go to prop up the alliance. Given the alliance's own history of brutality, the Administration is wary of allowing it to gain too much steam in the race to succeed the Taliban--which would unsettle the U.S.'s jittery ally in Islamabad. Some Northern Alliance fighters carped that by trying to pacify Pakistan and keep the rebels in check, the U.S. has blown its chance to lead a broad-based, multifront assault that would dislodge the Taliban. "This is a very complex area," counters a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official. "I mean, Afghanistan makes Bosnia look homogeneous, O.K.?"

Try telling that to the 3,000 or so anti-Taliban mujahedin who a few weeks ago flocked to Jabal-us-Saraj, just north of Kabul, and crowded its streets as they prepared to march on the capital. Last week the crowds had vanished, and alliance commanders complained bitterly about the U.S.'s failure to strafe Taliban front lines defending Kabul and allow the rebels to make a move on the city. Horan Amin, the alliance's representative in Washington, says that "from certain quarters in the State Department, we have been told that they would not be happy for us to head toward Kabul." Alliance military officers boast that they could take Kabul even without American backing, but their own politicos have instructed them to stay put. The limited ordnance U.S. warplanes have dropped on or around Taliban lines outside Kabul--by week's end they had unloaded only half a dozen bombs--left alliance troops fuming. "It's a joke," said General Said Khel, one of the men who would marshal an advance on Kabul if the attack takes place.

An additional danger for American forces entering Afghanistan is that resentment of the U.S.'s perceived disengagement from the plight of the alliance will fester into outright opposition toward any American meddling in Afghan affairs. "We do not need the Americans to help us anymore," says Mohammed Farazi, an operational commander with alliance forces in the Dast-e-Qale region. "They should let us fix our country by ourselves." Aid workers from Kabul told TIME that a sense of disillusionment is growing there too with the way the U.S. has handled the war. "People are stunned to see nothing is happening politically," says one, "as the impact on the people is getting worse." Even in northern Afghanistan, anti-Taliban country, locals are incensed at news of civilians in Kabul and Jalalabad killed in air strikes. "If the Americans care about us," asked Faisal Benawar, an almond vendor in the town of Yang e-Qale, "why are they killing innocent Afghans?"

The best chance for containing anti-Americanism lies in achieving U.S. goals in Afghanistan as quickly as possible. Though Taliban representatives claim that the regime's leaders are alive and well, evidence suggests that American military power has both the Taliban and al-Qaeda on the run. Early last week the Pentagon deployed the AC-130 flying howitzers for a withering cannon assault on Taliban targets in and around Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. Pentagon planners have sliced the country into "engagement zones" near Kabul and Kandahar, green-lighting U.S. pilots to attack any military targets in those designated "kill boxes" at any time of the day. In Kandahar last week the headquarters of the regime were deserted; locals said Taliban officials were hiding in mosques and in civilians' homes.

Even before Saturday's reported blitz against Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader had hit the road. American officials privately confirmed reports that a Predator drone armed with Hellfire missiles had earlier missed Omar's convoy by minutes. In Kandahar local residents said U.S. missiles demolished part of his house. Since then, he has bounced from one mountain hideout to the next. Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, indicated that it took him two days to travel from Quetta, just across the border, to Omar's hideaway. But inconvenience has not demoralized the Taliban chief, Zaeef told TIME: "He and the Taliban fighters are excited."

Lodged, presumably, somewhere in the canyons and dugouts of an Afghan mountain range, Osama bin Laden waits for the reckoning. If he has heard by now that U.S. special forces are on the prowl, the news was delivered by a courier; Pentagon officials say they have cut off al-Qaeda's ability to communicate by phone. Last week U.S. pilots hit at least one bin Laden deputy: a bombing raid near Jalalabad killed Abu Baseer al-Masri, an Egyptian Islamic militant said to be close to bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Until American commandos actually capture or kill their prized prey, guessing where bin Laden has made his cave or whether the U.S. will find it will remain a fool's game. But the arrival of ground forces on the scene has at least returned some clarity of purpose to a campaign that was starting to get lost in the fog. For now, discussions on less immediate matters--like what shape a post-Taliban government should take or whether states such as Iraq and Syria should be targeted for their past complicity in international terrorism--will be held behind curtains. Domestic politics intruded on grand strategy last week. The more besieged the public feels about terrorist threats, the less willing it will be to wait for the game to play itself out. That's why, despite the obvious risks, the Administration couldn't hold off much longer before putting American boots on the ground.

But victory in this war will require steadfast hearts and steely stomachs. Patience remains America's most potent weapon in its fight against reckless foes unafraid of their own obliteration. In Kandahar last Thursday, on the eve of U.S. ground attacks there, the local mood brimmed with contempt for the Taliban and their terrorist guests and with anticipation that their hold may soon disintegrate. "Taliban and [Afghan] Arabs are fools," said Abdul Ghafoor, 45, a Kandahar resident. "Fools don't think when they burn themselves." If so, they had better watch out, because the fire has started.

--Reported by Hannah Beech/Dast-e-Qale, Massimo Calabresi, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, Michael Fathers/Tashkent, Helen Gibson/London, Ghulam Hasnain/Kandahar, Terry McCarthy/Islamabad, Tim McGirk/Quetta, Paul Quinn-Judge/on the Kabul front and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Peshawar

TIME.com Read dispatches from Northern Alliance territory at time.com/quinn-judge

With reporting by Hannah Beech/Dast-e-Qale, Massimo Calabresi, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, Michael Fathers/Tashkent, Helen Gibson/London, Ghulam Hasnain/Kandahar, Terry McCarthy/Islamabad, Tim McGirk/Quetta, Paul Quinn-Judge/on the Kabul front and Rahimul