After Shah-i-Kot: The Next Campaign

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland, Sora Song, Deirdre Van Dyk

As U.S. troops finish mopping up in the Shah-i-Kot Valley of Afghanistan, commanders are turning their gaze to the next possible battleground for U.S. action: the central province of Uruzgan. The province, north of Kandahar, is "saturated" with al-Qaeda and Taliban troops, a senior U.S. military officer says. And the province has one other important attraction: it is the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, whose whereabouts are still unknown. Could Omar be hiding in Uruzgan? U.S. officials believe it is a good possibility. Unlike Osama bin Laden, Omar is not a world traveler and tended to remain close to home even when running Afghanistan, U.S. officials say. He could have retreated to familiar ground.

But a campaign in Uruzgan would not be easy. Unlike their now dead or dispersed comrades in Shah-i-Kot, the al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Uruzgan are rigorously refusing to clump together into fat, tempting targets for the U.S. military. By spreading themselves across the snowcapped ridges and orchards and limiting their mass to about 100 warriors (including family members), they can "avoid detection and compromise," the senior U.S. officer says. U.S. intelligence has detected four or five groups of that size in the region.

If the al-Qaeda and Taliban have got smarter in Uruzgan, there's hope that the U.S. troops have too. The last major U.S. military foray into the region was a nighttime raid conducted Jan. 24. The Americans killed at least 16 Afghans and captured 27 more--but none of them turned out to be al-Qaeda or Taliban. Says an army officer: "That was a mistake we can't afford to make again."