Michael Ware: Afghanistan: 2002

TIME: Welcome to al-Qaeda Town

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-11-25T00:00:00-08:00

By MICHAEL WARE / ANGURADA with reporting by MARK THOMPSON / WASHINGTON

On a remote stretch of Afghanistan's border with Pakistan sits a thriving bazaar crammed with grimy shops and simple houses. Locals know it as Angurada, but it might as well be called al-Qaeda Town. In an audacious show of force by an organization that is supposed to be on the run, al-Qaeda, according to U.S. and Afghan officials, has claimed the hamlet as its own and is using the redoubt as a base for attacks on U.S. forces. Strangest of all, this is happening in Afghanistan proper, where the U.S. military has, in theory, freedom of action to move against al-Qaeda.

"This is al-Qaeda's strategic place now," says an Afghan intelligence officer, referring to Angurada. "From here they are attacking other places." American military officers operating in the area agree. "What you can see is that it's a meeting place and transition point for logistics, information and people," says paratroop intelligence officer Captain Patrick Willis.

The odd situation in Angurada has its roots in the Taliban period. When the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, one of its regional leaders, for reasons unclear, allowed Pakistan's Frontier Corps, a poorly paid militia that operates in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, to set up a checkpoint across the border. Angurada stands on the Afghan side of the international border, but it falls on the Pakistani side of a boundary that Pakistanis tend to prefer: the Durand Line, which in 1893 separated Afghanistan from what was then part of British India.

Three months ago, the Frontier Corps went further, presumably on behalf of al-Qaeda. Its troops moved to positions on a ridge sloping over the bazaar and dug eight sandbagged bunkers, fitting each with an artillery piece and two antiaircraft guns. Angurada was sealed off. Though woefully underfunded, the Frontier Corps in this case was able to distribute thousands of dollars to quell any local opposition. "Some people wanted to rise up against the militia, but the tribal elders who wanted to resist were paid off to stay quiet and accept it. Some elders and groups got as much as 100,000 rupees [$1,700], and the rest of us got either 5,000 rupees [$83] or 10,000 rupees [$170]," Shah Hakim Mizhdua, a local resident, told TIME before another man interrupted, barking, "Shut up! I haven't been paid yet." Told of the spending spree, Afghan intelligence officials had no doubt where the cash came from. "While we're broke, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are flush," says an intelligence officer in Afghanistan's Paktika province, which includes Angurada. Officials in Islamabad say the Frontier Corps has orders to grab any terrorist suspects but hasn't seen any.

On the other side of the ridge, U.S. special forces have established a firebase in the neighboring village of Shkin. For these men, the Angurada bazaar, only a few miles away, is treacherous. When they enter it, they come under fire. The firebase has been repeatedly rocketed. Laments Afghan Interior Ministry intelligence chief Niamatullah Jalili: "Al-Qaeda is using this town, and there's nothing we can do." U.S. forces are also frustrated at their inability to strike at the al-Qaeda operatives they know are inside. Says Colonel Roger King, spokesman for the U.S. military in Afghanistan: "It's not like they're wearing uniforms and staying at a base that we can watch."

--By Michael Ware/Angurada, with reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington

TIME: Will They Strike Again?

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-11-25T00:00:00-08:00

By NELLY SINDAYEN / MANILA; ANDREW PERRIN / BANGKOK; SIMON ELEGANT / KUALA LUMPUR; LISA CLAUSEN / SYDNEY; MICHAEL WARE / KABUL; TIM McGIRK / ISLAMABAD; MEENAKSHI GANGULY / NEW DELHI

At first sight, the video might be a routine tv ad for a luxury hotel, the camera dutifully following a waiter as he arrives at a room carrying a tray. But when the guest opens his door, the waiter whips out a pistol and calmly proceeds to blast the head off a papier-maché dummy. In other scenes, masked fighters abseiling down the walls of the "hotel" with grenades leave no doubt what this is: a training manual for an assault on a resort complex. The video, one of a batch of al-Qaeda tapes found outside Kabul this month, is a chilling reminder of the range of targets al-Qaeda and its proxies like Jemaah Islamiah are preparing to attack. With each new arrest -- last week Indonesian investigators nabbed Bali bomber Imam Samudra while the U.S. announced it had apprehended al-Qaeda's Persian Gulf chief Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri -- authorities learn more about how to thwart global terrorism. TIME consulted intelligence officials and security experts for this survey of Islamic terrorist networks and the threat level in Asia's possible target countries.

PHILIPPINES: High tension

Rocked by a slew of recent explosions and bombarded by warnings of more to come, the Philippines these days has something of a siege mentality. Even the gala Dec. 15 opening of the new, $500-million Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal has been indefinitely postponed by a worried President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. "The need to take extreme security measures cannot be overemphasized," Transportation and Communications Secretary Leandro Mendoza said in a statement.

Filipinos need no reminding that they are squarely in the sights of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), and the presence of U.S. troops may have made the archipelago an even more tempting target. A year ago, an explosion rocked the Metro Railway Transit, killing 22 and injuring hundreds of others. The attack was carried out by Indonesian Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, a self-confessed JI member with links to the Philippines' two major Islamic guerrilla groups, the MILF and the Abu Sayyaf. After his January capture in Manila, al-Ghozi said he carried out the bombings on the orders of JI operations commander Riduan (Hambali) Isamuddin. Equally worrying, recent Mindanao bombings suggest that Abu Sayyaf has returned to its roots as a purely terrorist organization rather than a kidnap-and-extortion gang.

Apart from obvious sites such as foreign embassies, Philippine intelligence officials say concerns about possible JI targets focus on a huge oil depot located in the heart of the city, not far from Malacanang, the presidential palace. The hit list also includes the Philippine Stock Exchange, major shopping malls and flyovers in Manila. Meanwhile in the south, where the overwhelming majority of the country's more than 3 million Muslims live, hardly a week goes by without some form of deadly attack.

How best to stop the terrorist attacks? National Police Superintendent Robert Delfin is surprisingly optimistic. "No matter the extent of their network, we can monitor them. We know the personalities." Parouk Hussin, Governor of the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao, is less sanguine. "Personalities may come and go," he warns. "The idea's harder to kill."

By Nelly Sindayen/Manila

THAILAND: Soft targets

Thailand has many. They read like a roll call of Asia's most popular tourist destinations: Phuket, Pattaya, Koh Samui. Thai authorities have been quick to hose down speculation that the kingdom is under threat of a Bali-style attack and have criticized Western governments for issuing travel advisories warning their citizens to avoid, or to take extreme caution, in areas where foreigners congregate. Yet the country is taking anti-terrorism measures. Bar patrons are being frisked, police patrols have been stepped up in places like Phuket, and soldiers are boarding boats for searches off southern Thailand. Even the World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM) has left nothing to chance. In late December more than 24,000 scouts will arrive in Thailand to take part in the 20th World Scout Jamboree, to be held at a naval base. More than 1,000 officers from Thailand's army, navy and police force will provide security during the two-week long Jamboree. "Though we do not consider it very likely, we have done our utmost to prevent a terrorist attack," says Lutz Kuhnen, assistant director of WOSM's risk-management unit. "But nothing is 100% safe." The government is most worried, say security analysts, about the country's lucrative tourism industry, which sees the arrival of more than 10 million visitors each year and contributes invaluably to the country's bottom line. There is no doubt that the embassy travel warnings have stung the industry. On the island resort of Phuket bookings are down 15% on the previous year and hotel cancellations are on the rise, a trend reported countrywide.

Fueling the unease is a spate of troublesome reports from the country's Muslim-dominated south. The region has been blighted this year by a series of bomb and arson attacks on schools and hotels and a rash of hits on local cops. Both government and intelligence agencies believe the violence is linked to the region's extortion and smuggling rackets, not international terrorists groups. But no one is taking any chances. While publicly dismissing the possibility of an imminent strike the government has at the same time bolstered security in some of the most popular tourist haunts, at airports and around its porous borders. "We are not a target for international terrorists," insists government spokesman Sita Divari, but he adds: "We are conscious and prepared."

By Andrew Perrin/Bangkok

SINGAPORE: Strict measures

Singapore's much-vaunted internal security apparatus still hasn't quite recovered from the shock of discovering a well-advanced al-Qaeda plot to detonate seven large truck bombs at embassies and other key sites in the city-state late last year. "They were absolutely horrified at how close the plan was to execution," says a source who has worked closely with the Singapore authorities on terrorism issues. Not that the authorities didn't swing into action with characteristic efficiency once the plot was uncovered. With nearly 40 alleged militants now in prison, Singapore officials insist there is no longer "any credible threat" from Jemaah Islamiah cells inside the island republic. But as terror expert Zachary Abuza points out, ultimately, a successful attack in Singapore remains top of the wish list for JI, even if achieving that takes years. "Singapore has enormous symbolic importance as the capitalist center of the region," says Abuza.

Such concerns were highlighted earlier this year when Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong revealed that Mas Selamat Kastari, the "most dangerous" of the 12 or so members of the Singapore Jemaah Islamiah cell who escaped arrest and fled the country, had been planning an attempt to crash a plane into Singapore's Changi Airport. The airport is now reportedly protected by anti-aircraft missiles, as are the huge refinery facilities on the island's southwest section of Jurong, where multinationals such as Shell and Exxon Mobil maintain large facilities. In mid-October Singapore deployed units of its armored division around the area as further safeguards.

By Simon Elegant/Kuala Lumpur

MALAYSIA: Meeting point

Malaysia can justifiably boast that it's ahead of the pack when it comes to cracking down on Islamic militancy. A month before the Sept. 11 attacks, police began making arrests, to date rounding up some 63 alleged terrorist wannabes. But while there's no doubt that Kuala Lumpur is now committed to crushing militancy within its borders, it is Malaysia's dirty little secret that years of turning a blind eye to the activities of radical clerics like alleged Jemaah Islamiah head Abubakar Ba'asyir allowed Islamic radicalism to put down deep roots in the Malaysian Muslim community. There is no arguing, either, with the fact that Malaysia was used by the likes of Abubakar and his alleged henchman Hambali as their haven for over a decade and eventually as a rendezvous for both regional and global militant conclaves organized by JI. Most notorious was the January 2000 meeting attended by up to 12 key JI and al-Qaeda figures, including Tawfiq bin Atash, top suspect in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in October 2000, two of the Pentagon hijackers, another key al-Qaeda figure Ramzi Binalshibhwho was captured in Karachi on Sept. 11 this yearand, of course, Hambali himself.

With the arrests continuinga senior militant was detained on Sept. 27 and police say they are still pursuing scores of othersthe authorities in Malaysia are "reasonably confident they have taken all possible measures to minimize the danger of an attack," according to one official source in Kuala Lumpur. A Western diplomat points out, however, that Malaysia's past record and continuing role as a meeting place for Islamic radicals (the country's policy of not requiring visas for visitors from Islamic countriesaimed at boosting tourism from the Middle Easthas yet to see any substantial changes) may ironically provide it some measure of protection against terrorism. The diplomat comments: "These people are not stupid. They've got a good thing going in Malaysia. They don't want to mess that up by bombing some expat hangout."

By Simon Elegant/Kuala Lumpur

AUSTRALIA: Southern front

"I'm a wrecknervous and shaky," one woman told the media after police wearing flak jackets and goggles raided her neighbors, a Muslim family living in the Perth suburb of Thornlie. Her jitters have been contagious in the uneasy weeks following the Bali attacks. First came the early November raids on houses around the country, part of an Australian Security Intelligence Organization push to uncover possible connections between Australians and Jemaah Islamiah. That was followed on Nov. 18 by the charging of one of the men raided, a west-Australian convert to Islam, with conspiring to blow up Israeli diplomatic missions in Australia. Jack Roche has protested his innocence, despite giving remarkably frank interviews to The Australian newspaper before his arrest describing his training in Afghanistan in the use of explosives and a meeting in Malaysia with terrorist chief Hambali to discuss the recruitment of JI operatives back home.

But it was the Australian government's upgrading of the state of alert, the day after Roche's arrest, that raised awareness of the domestic terror threat. The government of Prime Minister John Howard said its new informationlinked neither to the raids nor to Roche's casewas "general and non-specific as to target and timing" but suggested a terrorist strike could hit Australia over the next few months. In what is normally a wind-down time of year, with the summer holidays approaching, Australians are now being urged to stay ultra vigilant.

By Lisa Clausen/Sydney

AFGHANISTAN: Square one

Terrorism lives on. Peacekeepers in Kabul repeatedly stumble on banks of rockets aimed at their bases, the airport or the U.S. embassy. A week ago, Afghan security forces scuppered an attempt to destroy the main power station. American bases are rocketed an average of three times a week; four were recently attacked in one night. Yet another special forces convoy was ambushed on Nov 21. Two cabinet ministers have been assassinated this year, and on Sept. 5 an attempt was made on President Hamid Karzai's life.

All this is happening because al-Qaeda fighters are venturing out from training camps just over the border in Pakistan and from toeholds inside Afghanistan, and Taliban remnants are regrouping. Meanwhile, rural Afghans have grown disenchanted with empty promises of increased aid. Living conditions have improved little since the Taliban's collapse, providing fresh recruits for al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan. Until the harsh economic conditions are alleviated and Karzai's vision of a new, democratic Afghanistan is fulfilled, terror will persist.

By Michael Ware/Kabul

PAKISTAN: Den of terror

In Pakistan, al-Qaeda is thriving. Its tactic has been to contract out its terror work to local hirelingsand there are a multitude. Police are investigating links between Osama bin Laden's network and a spate of anti-Western attacks this past year: the kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, bomb attacks in Karachi on the U.S. consulate and on a bus full of French submarine technicians and massacres of Christians. President Pervez Musharraf pledged full cooperation to the U.S. in its search for al-Qaeda. But those orders are not always trickling down to the middle-ranking officers in his army and intelligence corps who sympathized with, and had close ties to, the Taliban regime.

For now, Pakistan is probably more of an actual terrorist sanctuary than a prime terrorist target. (Among other wanted extremists, Indonesian Hambali, Jemaah Islamiah's operations chief, has also reportedly sought refuge there.) The last thing al-Qaeda and its local supporters want is for Musharraf to have an excuse to crack down on the Islamic radical parties. After the strong showing in the Oct. 10 general elections, the religious parties will control Baluchistan and Northwest Frontier Provinceshideouts for al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives. These radical clerics may either put a stop to the FBI's investigations in these provinces outright, or at least thwart raids on al-Qaeda strongholds by refusing to let local police take part.

By Tim McGirk/Islamabad

INDIA: Watching and waiting

Indian investigators say the country is always at risk because al-Qaeda needs an existing support structure for communications and sanctuary, easily provided by Pakistan-based extremists fighting a jihad in Kashmir. The failed attack on Parliament last December, which ended with 14 dead including the five suicide terrorists, was an example of Kashmiri separatist terrorism. Now, security agencies are bracing for the next big strike, which they fear could target Western government or business interests. "We don't know what and where it will be," says an Indian intelligence official, "but it will certainly be dramatic."

There is another possible impetus for an attack. Gujaratis go to the polls in mid-December, and the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party's agenda is a barely disguised campaign against Muslims. A strike would serve as a warning that Muslims will not be cowed. "Once an attack happens, we will all say, 'That is so obvious, why didn't we think of it,'" warns the official. "That is what people are saying about Bali now."

By Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi

TIME: Losing Control?

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-11-18T00:00:00-08:00

By TIM McGIRK and MICHAEL WARE

If the U.S. has won the war in Afghanistan, maybe somebody should tell the enemy it's time to surrender. The bad guys are still out there, undetectable in the rocky, umber hills of eastern Afghanistan--until they strike, which they do with growing frequency, accuracy and brazenness. These days American forward bases are coming under rocket or mortar fire three times a week on average. Apache pilots sometimes see angry red arcing lines of tracer bullets rising toward their choppers from unseen gunners hidden in Afghanistan's saw-blade ridges. Roads frequented by special forces are often mined with remote-controlled explosives, a new tactic al-Qaeda fighters picked up from their Chechen comrades fighting the Russians. With phantom enemy fighters stepping up attacks and U.S. forces making little headway against them, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt compelled to acknowledge last week, "We've lost a little momentum there, to be frank."

Is Afghanistan slipping out of America's control? It's an especially relevant question at a time when Pentagon planners are holding up Afghanistan as a template for possible "regime change" in Iraq. Failure to pacify Afghanistan could make it tougher for the Bush Administration to sustain support for a new war against Saddam Hussein. "If Afghanistan falls," says an Army officer in Washington, "Iraq just got that much harder."

The fear of failure in Afghanistan has lately prompted some hard new thinking in both Washington and Kabul. General Myers' candid remarks to the Brookings Institution suggests the Pentagon is trying to be more creative in its pursuit of stability in Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for his part, flashed some atypical steel last week when he fired 15 provincial officials, all of them connected to powerful warlords, on charges of abusing authority, corruption and drug trafficking. Until now Karzai has avoided conflict with the various local potentates, who often ignore the national government.

Diplomats in Kabul say Karzai can enforce his announced purge only if the U.S. backs him. After all, two men on Karzai's list of wrongdoers--the intelligence chiefs of Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif--are tough characters whom the U.S. has used as proxies in the war against al-Qaeda. U.S. policy had been to avoid involvement in what it calls "green on green" fighting in Afghanistan: conflicts between militias at least theoretically loyal to the new government. But lately U.N. officials in Afghanistan say they have witnessed a sea change in the American attitude. The new stance was illustrated most vividly last month when U.S. paratroopers seized an enormous cache of weapons and ammo--42 truckloads full--belonging to Pacha Khan Zadran, a chieftain in eastern Afghanistan. Zadran was supposed to be a U.S. ally, but U.S. intelligence officers say Zadran was selling weapons on the side to al-Qaeda. U.S. officers suspect that some of the al-Qaeda rockets now careering into American forward bases near Khost came from Zadran's fire sale. The Americans destroyed many of the weapons they seized and gave the rest to the nascent Afghan national army.

Even without Zadran's stores, al-Qaeda and Taliban survivors clearly have the capacity to keep fighting. U.S. forces have managed to uncover a number of arms depots in the eastern part of Afghanistan, where the enemy is still active, still the weapons flow has not ceased. Says a senior Afghan military figure in Paktika province on the border: "Here, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have no shortage of weapons; they're channeling them in from Pakistan." Afghan intelligence officials believe the Taliban and al-Qaeda have set up a network along the border of what the military calls "enablers," those who provide money, hide weapons and spy on U.S. troop movements. The Taliban, they say, have secretly re-established councils throughout most of Paktika province.

Lately the enemy has grown better and bolder. A bunker at a U.S. base in Lawara was hit last month by an incoming rocket. There were no casualties, but it was the first time such a hit-and-run attack had scored. Six days later, a rocket was launched at the U.S. special forces' Chapman Army airfield at 10 a.m. It was the first daytime rocket attack since the Taliban's collapse.

The enemy is even contracting out jobs. In Kandahar, U.S. forces recently figured out that a rocket attack on their Bagram base in June was carried out by one of their own Afghan allies. The Americans had fallen behind with the payroll, and al-Qaeda offered the turncoat quick cash, according to Taliban figures connected with the commander. He now resides, according to an aide to the governor of Kandahar, in a prison cage in the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Catching the perpetrators of such assaults after the fact is usually all but impossible. After enduring a barrage of wildly aimed rockets on their Camp Salerno base last month, commanders of the 82nd Airborne Division decided to mount a helicopter-and artillery-backed assault of 520 infantrymen on a high mountain valley rumored to be used as an al-Qaeda staging post. Up in the valley, this massive invasion force encountered only a lone man, who popped off a few rifle shots and then fled. He was never caught.

General Myers, in his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, gives Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants credit for responding well to U.S. tactics, for instance, by improving their ability to communicate and move money undetected. "They've adapted their tactics," he says, "and we've got to adapt ours." In particular, Myers argues, "intelligence flow has to be a lot more exquisite than it's been." He says that in the early months of the war, the U.S. kept the enemy off balance with "bold" actions that carried "a large element of risk." Now, he says, "we've got to get back to the point where we can ... act ... faster than they can."

Of course, pursuing enemy elements more aggressively carries the risk of further alienating innocent Afghans who invariably get hassled during security sweeps. "No one ever forgets that American soldiers came into their house and trawled through their women's clothing. Nor do they forgive," says Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, who despite having served as the Taliban deputy interior minister, is a relative moderate. "Doesn't the U.S. realize that with every one of these operations, their enemy is not decreasing but increasing with fresh, embittered new recruits?"

Ideally, the U.S. would like to see Afghanistan pacified by the Afghan national army. But building that force is proving a slow, arduous project. Because regional warlords are loath to contribute soldiers and weapons to a military force that could be used against them later, the national army so far consists of only about 1,200 raw, poorly armed recruits. Says a State Department official, with understatement: "They are not yet ready to take the field." Given the vacuum of authority, Washington seems to be coming around to the idea that Afghanistan is a long-term project for the U.S. "We're going to have to be there for the long haul," says David Johnson, the Bush Administration's coordinator for U.S. policy on Afghanistan.

General Myers also suggests there is growing consensus in Washington that Afghanistan's needs require a greater commitment from the U.S. In the strip of Afghanistan stretching from Kabul eastward to the Pakistan border, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are still potent, the principal mission of the U.S. must for now remain military, Myers says. But in the remaining three-quarters of the country, it might be time to "flip our priorities," he says, and make reconstruction paramount. "That's what we're debating right now inside government." Myers says rebuilding Afghanistan would not be "a U.S.-only effort" and would require "a lot of help from the international community." But given that the war was driven by Washington, the initiative for a global effort to reconstruct Afghanistan will likely have to come from there too.

Repairing Afghanistan's infrastructure and economy might have the secondary benefit of improving security by reducing the ranks of malcontents and extremists. Mullah Khaksar says he has just returned from Kandahar, where young men fill the teahouses talking of their hatred for America. "I asked, 'Why are you here?' They answered that there was no work and no jobs; what else did they have to do?" He adds, "It's the only time they talk politics, when they are without work. Every unemployed man is the President of Afghanistan." Or a possible recruit for the enemy.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington and Kamal Haider/Maidanshah

TIME: Taunts From the Border

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-10-28T00:00:00-08:00

By MICHAEL WARE / PAKTIA

It was an impressive show of force. Under the cloak of darkness last week, Chinook and Black Hawk choppers dropped an entire battalion of 520 U.S. paratroopers into a remote valley in Afghanistan, just across the border from the rugged mountains of Pakistan, where al-Qaeda has re-established training camps. With dogs barking, cows chewing and a watchful camel resting, the heavily armed U.S. force trudged through irrigated fields and muddy Pashtun villages--cordoning off a 3.5-mile-long area and searching each of 150 residential compounds that dangle off the nosebleed hillsides by the Kakh and Khardala rivers. "We aim to get the maximum number of people on the ground at once," says Major Mike Richardson, paratroops operations officer. "It gives us shock value."

But on this particular occasion, the value was limited. Two complexes suspected of being al-Qaeda staging posts were discovered with caches of hundreds of rocket-propelled grenade rounds, mines and ammunition, but the enemy was nowhere to be found; the most threatening local seemed to be an old woman carrying a hatchet over her shoulder and complaining about her uninvited guests.

For the battle-ready members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, such small victories, as frustrating as they may be, will have to suffice. That's because the troops areconfined behind Afghanistan's border with Pakistan, unable to reach the concentrations of al-Qaeda survivors safely ensconced in camps in the mountains surrounding the town of Mirim Shah. From these retreats in Pakistan, al-Qaeda commanders can send out specially trained teams to lob rockets at U.S. bases and air fields. The most U.S. forces can do is disrupt the endless teams of terrorists popping into Afghanistan, closing off their transport routes and seizing weapons and equipment stashed for them by abettors inside the country. "This is the type of warfare that many folks don't have the patience to fight. Hell, I don't know if I'm patient enough," says Lieut. Colonel Martin Schweitzer, battalion commander.

In some ways, the U.S. may be using forces too big for their own good. In snippets of conversations intercepted by U.S. intelligence, al-Qaeda leaders have instructed cell members simply to lie low when Americans descend because "there's too many of them." Says Colonel James Huggins: "They won't confront us in our superior numbers," which makes them almost impossible to see.

In theory, the government of Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf is committed to routing al-Qaeda elements from redoubts within Pakistan. But Islamabad holds little sway in the tribal regions of the northwestern frontier, which are largely autonomous and which just voted in district governments with Islamist agendas.

The Pakistani Frontier Corps, which is responsible for guarding the border, is a ragtag, disorganized militia that isn't even part of the country's regular army or security forces. Recruited locally and often unpaid, Corps members are susceptible to al-Qaeda bribes. U.S. intelligence material suggests that the Corps has been infiltrated by al-Qaeda, with the terrorists sometimes donning their uniforms and venturing into Afghanistan. There is also growing evidence that al-Qaeda members have been posing as Afghan government troops to get around and attack U.S. patrols.

Some U.S. commanders think it is only a matter of time before the U.S. has to launch its own combat missions inside Pakistan. Until that happens, some think the military should consider using small squads of around 10 men to "bait them out," as one soldier suggested to another in a creek bed during the recent operation, adding, "Heck, I'll be bait." That, of course, might result in U.S. deaths, which could prove a propaganda victory for al-Qaeda. "You want to chase down every one of them, but do you want todo that on their terms or yours?" asks paratroops intelligence officer Captain Patrick Willis. Lately, it's not clear which side is dictating the terms, or even winning the battle.

TIME: Karzai's New Bunker

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-10-21T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE

On a Kabul street with no name but alive with honking yellow taxis, something curious is happening. A new construction site has sprung up just outside the grounds of the presidential palace, with a formidable wall of soil-filled shipping containers stacked two levels high. The swarms of Afghan laborers say they don't know what they're building. American engineers shoo away anyone who asks about it. But members of the palace guard, charged with protecting President Hamid Karzai, say the construction sits above an aging bunker complex and that U.S. forces from the 769th Engineer Battalion are refashioning it for the President. "We're building an underground bunker for Karzai," a member of the battalion told TIME.

U.S. forces have been overseeing Karzai's security ever since July, following the assassination of one of his top ministers. But a September attempt to kill the President has heightened concerns about his safety. Karzai's U.S. backers worry about the threats posed by Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants as well as by unyielding warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. And so the U.S., it appears, is helping the Afghan President dig in.

A map of the purported underground warrens, drawn for TIME by an Afghan palace guard, shows a tunnel skirting the stone walls surrounding the palace. Small chambers run off the subterranean passageway. According to palace guards, the refurbishment plans include not just the underground presidential bunker but also a facility for U.S. forces and barracks for the new Afghan national army. Whatever the ultimate uses of the bunker, work on it is proceeding at an urgent clip. "If the U.S. engineers are not patrolling when we're working at night, we can steal a little sleep," says a laborer, Ghulam Sakhi. "But if they catch us, they kick us awake. They're always pushing us to work very, very hard, day and night."

--By Michael Ware

TIME: Kabul: Tense Moments on the Palace Grounds

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-10-07T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE

The Special Forces soldiers assigned to protect president Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan have learned to trust no one. That lesson was made abundantly clear when a gunman dressed as a soldier in the newly formed Afghan army attempted to assassinate their charge in early September. It's not hard to imagine how a recent altercation between Special Forces and Afghan government troops nearly erupted into a bloody melee inside the Presidential Palace grounds — a confrontation that says a lot about the future of the American presence in Afghanistan.

On September 30 just after 8:00 am, one of Kabul's top generals, Bismillah Khan, commander of the city's garrison and a deputy to the defense minister, arrived at the Presidential Palace to meet one of the former king's advisers. The general and his bodyguard glided past an Afghan army checkpoint at the visitors' gate only to be stopped forty yards later by U.S. soldiers assigned to protect Karzai. The Americans wanted to search the car and the general, but Khan refused. When the U.S. soldiers attempted to physically remove him from the car, fifteen Kandahari mujahedin (bodyguards for the former king) cocked their weapons and took aim at the Special Forces. The other Afghan government troops followed. "It was one of those times when you realize a minute is actually sixty seconds, and that can be an awfully long time," Hayatullah Diani, a royalist official, told TIME. "I thought they were going to start killing each other."

Before the scene turned bloody, members of Karzai's office appeared and negotiations began. Khan was released and the Afghan troops lowered their weapons. What had flared in just seconds was over in minutes. Had violence erupted the consequences would have been catastrophic, ripping open divisions within the new government and unsettling allegiances with factions already feeling sidelined in the new order. The near miss also demonstrates just how delicate a balance the U.S. faces in Afghanistan between appearing as a force of safety for some and source of agitation to so many others.

The incident comes at a precarious time as Washington seeks a deeper engagement in the country, stepping up from combat missions to take on the complexities of nation building. That has meant supporting a relatively isolated president while pacifying, or at least deterring, his rivals. Building up Karzai is seen to have come at the expense of America's allies against the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, which dominates much of the government.

One of the biggest sources of friction comes from the creation of the Afghan National Army, a U.S.- and French-trained force to be commanded by the president, not the defense minister. Weapons, munitions and gear are being flown into a U.S. airbase north of Kabul, unloaded onto Special Forces convoys and distributed directly to the ANA. Already feeling threatened by Washington's support for Karzai, last week's incident has cemented the Northern Alliance's view of itself as a forgotten partner. But the U.S. military is making no apologies. "President Karzai's personal security team will continue to exercise the level of control necessary to ensure the physical security of the President," Central Command spokesman Col. Ray Shepherd told TIME from Tampa, Fl.

In the days since the showdown key Northern Alliance leaders have become vitriolic. "We're asking ourselves is this an Afghan palace or an American palace?" a senior general says. Western diplomats in Kabul are waiting to assess the fallout. "I can't gauge yet whether this is a very very serious thing or whether it will pass as just something that happened," says one. General Sharif's reaction is not heartening. "The U.S. has turned its back on us," he says, "So let me tell you something: the Russians helped the Vietnamese defeat America, then the Americans helped the Afghans beat Russia, and now is the time again for the Russians. America should not try to step forward here in Afghanistan."

Trouble is, that is precisely what Washington intends to do.

TIME: No Shortage of Suspects in Kabul Bombing

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-09-30T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE / KABUL

The stomach-clutching thud of an explosion rolled across Kabul at around 9pm last Saturday. It began with a flash in a small garbage pile on a grassy common outside a sprawling Soviet-era tenement. The building is home to several hundred families in the suburb of Microyan, and the detonation, only thirty yards from the ground floor apartments, shattered every window facing the park in the crumbling five-story block. Sleeping children woke terrified, coated in shards of glass. A three-year-old stood by her mother, her face laced with tiny cuts. Two or three people were reported injured, none seriously. For hours the tinkling of sweeping glass could heard up and down the corridors.

A government spokesman, on the scene within the hour, neatly coiffured and wearing a suit, blamed terrorists for placing the device "in an open field" behind "a defense ministry building." Media reports described it as a bomb in a residential area not far from the U.S. embassy. "We know who these people are who are against peace and stability," the spokesman, Omar Samad, said of the bombers.

But nothing is ever quite as it seems in Kabul. The defense ministry building against whose wall the bomb had been left was not an empty set of offices; it's the headquarters of Afghan military intelligence. At the time of the explosion General Zahir Akbar, the country's military intelligence chief, was at his large varnished desk scribbling orders on scraps of paper. Though the building was all but empty, it seems as if someone knew he would be there. "He was the target," one of his aides told TIME amid the debris of the general's office minutes after the bombing. "We had been expecting this explosion."

Gen Akbar is an urbane, educated and thoughtful military man who is currently teaching himself English. A Soviet-educated professional soldier, he had been one of many who left the communist regime during the Soviet occupation to join the resistance in the Panjshir Valley led by the charismatic Ahmad Shah Massoud. He fought in the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and was on the frontlines during last year's U.S.-led bombing campaign. In the new order of president Hamid Karzai, Akbar is a man on the rise. Though he owes his position to the powerful defense minister, Mohammed Qasim Fahim, it's possible others in the defense minister's circle perceive Akbar as a political rival. As the general's staff pointed out, U.S. officers and senior brass from the International Security Assistance Force that protects Kabul are frequent visitors to his busy headquarters. It suggests a level influence likely to cause jealousy in the internecine world of Afghan military affairs. "It was someone out to get the general," an aide said, dismissing the notion of terrorist involvement.

The possibility that the bombing may have been a play in a violent internal power game is not a possibility government spokesman Samad was prepared to contemplate. "This is not about rivalry," he told TIME walking away from the blast-scene on Saturday night. "This is not an issue of one general attacking a rival. It's clearly terrorists, they've just made threats in the last few days and now they're carrying them out. It's clear."

By Sunday morning, the office of military intelligence had accepted the government position that it was a terrorist strike. And despite having inspected the crater that night and concurring with an Italian officer from ISAF that a crude bomb had been planted, the general's staff said the device was a misdirected rocket.

But their amended version did not hold up for long

By 10am Sunday, ISAF confirmed a rocket had not exploded, according to a specialist ordinance team. The explosion had been caused by a bomb. "It doesn't appear to have been intended to cause serious harm," ISAF spokesman Squadron Leader Terry Hay told a briefing. "It seems to have been very much for effect."

An investigation is continuing, but with two cabinet ministers' assassinations and a string of Kabul bombings as yet unsolved or unexplained it's not expected any culprits will be found soon. And though the list of suspects, as in all these incidents, is long, an act of terrorism by re-grouping al-Qaeda or Afghan opposition forces cannot be discounted.

Around Kabul over the 72 hours leading to Saturday night's bombing, a 107mm rocket overshot one of the largest ISAF installations in the city and a search located twelve more that had misfired; a U.S. soldier was shot by a sniper; and in Gardez, two hours to the south, a video store was bombed and a rocket fired at U.S. special forces. These rocket attacks have become increasingly common, launched by timers as basic as a punctured water bucket fixed to drain at a measured speed and complete an electrical circuit, or as sophisticated as electrical boards rigged in Pakistan from VCR components and tripped by a mobile phone. Though the rocket arsenals are plentiful, the accuracy is far from guaranteed. And most Kabulis are probably grateful.

TIME: The Price of a President's Life

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-09-22T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE

What is a president's life worth? In Afghanistan it may prove to be as little as a pair of secondhand Toyota Corolla hatchbacks. That's the payoff Afghan intelligence officials believe was offered to Abdur Rehman, the man who attempted to assassinate president Hamid Karzai almost three weeks ago. The cars are said to have been waiting for Rehman across the border in Pakistan should he have succeeded and survived his bid to kill Karzai. He did neither. Instead, Rehman was gunned down after opening fire on the president's car on September 5, missing his target but wounding a provincial governor and a bodyguard.

When the shooting stopped that afternoon in the southern city of Kandahar the only clue to those behind the failed assassination was the dead gunman. Not much was known about him, except that he was a soldier, recruited into the government's ranks only weeks earlier and that he came from the vehemently pro-Taliban district of Kajaki, in neighboring Helmand province. Like thousands of others absorbed into military units or government positions in Kandahar since the fall of the Taliban regime in December, Rehman was not screened for Taliban or terrorist links. "That's what these people are doing, coming into the government through village connections or friends, that way there's no questions being asked," says a senior intelligence official in Kabul.

Intelligence operatives from Kandahar and the capital Kabul spent two weeks dredging over Rehman's past, scouring it for any hints as to who might have ordered or arranged the hit. An Afghan intelligence report, filed last week and examined by TIME identifies Rehman as Abdul Razaq, a Taliban assassin believed responsible for the murders of three opponents to the fundamentalist movement in Quetta in Pakistan in the mid-1990s. A veteran of the Kunduz and Takhar fronts during the Taliban's civil war with the United Front, Rehman was captured last year by the forces of northern warlord General Rashid Dostum. He was released earlier this year, most likely after his family paid the almost $900 ransom that was demanded to free each of the Taliban captives. Rahman returned to his village but soon after moved south to Kandahar. There he "used all his efforts to join the security forces and become a soldier", says the intelligence report.

Investigators say the dead hitman was connected to hardline Taliban commanders, such as Mullah Bradar and Abdul Wahid, still opposing government and U.S. forces in Afghanistan and suspected of hiding Mullah Omar. Their report may be met with some skepticism in Afghanistan, where speculation is widespread that Karzai's rivals within the government were responsible for the assassination attempt.

TIME: Putting Arms in the Afghan Army

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-08-19T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE

Almost daily, sniper bullets and small bands of fighters threaten American soldiers hunting al-Qaeda and Taliban members left behind in Afghanistan. But a more benign task entrusted to U.S. special forces stationed in Kabul--training the fledgling Afghan national army--is also proving dangerous. Funds for the endeavor are scarce, and weapons and ammunition are "not the quality you'd want at Fort Benning," says Lieut. Colonel Kevin McDonnell, who is responsible for the training. The Green Berets have resorted to tossing rocks to teach grenade handling and scrounging al-Qaeda and Taliban leftovers. Sometimes the troops launch risky operations in recalcitrant villages, engaging in fire fights to capture dusty caches of arms. "It's not a stretch to say they're putting their bodies on the line," says McDonnell. "It's simply the price of doing business in Afghanistan." From each hard-won haul, only a few items are usable. Soldiers have to sift through the duds, carefully X-raying weapons like mortars to identify ones worth salvaging. Funding from the U.S. Office of Military Cooperation is coming in waves: $6 million has already been spent, but a further $70 million has yet to be approved. The timeline is short, McDonnell says, but the Green Berets "were sent here to do this because they don't fold their arms and say it's too hard." Eventually, he says, "we will get the grenades." For now, rock throwing will be a way of "imparting principles."

TIME: Why Afghanistan's Leader Wants American Bodyguards

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-07-21T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE

To keep your friends close but your enemies closer is a difficult thing to do in Afghanistan, where it can often be hard telling one from the other. For President Hamid Karzai there can be no room for error, and so this weekend he dismissed his Afghan bodyguards and replaced them with 46 American soldiers. It's an ominous sign. "There are currently very credible threats against the President," says a Western diplomatic source.

The shift risks being seen as a slap in the face to extremely powerful interests in Kabul. In the first days after the Taliban's fall Karzai kept a small band of Pashtun soldiers from his Kandahari home close to him. But tensions with the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance forces, who fought the Taliban for close to six years and have now assumed control of much of the government, meant the future president had to send his soldiers away. Since then his personal security has been in the hands of the most formidable Northern Alliance commander in Afghanistan, defense minister Mohammed Fahim. Executive rule and the presidency rests with Karzai, but in a country where military might marks authority, a great deal of power resides with the general. And now some of his friends insist he's lost face. "It's an insult to the defense minister," says a commander loyal to Fahim.

But Karzai's switch of faith from Fahim to the Americans is not so much an indictment of the general's ability as it is an indication of a declining level of trust. "We know there could be a great political cost from doing this," says the Western diplomat, "but that price, no matter how much, will be less than losing the president." Two weeks ago Kabul lost a key figure to assassins' bullets, deputy president and public works minister Haji Abdul Qadir. The loss was of more than another politician; Qadir was Karzai's rallying point for the vast Pashtun south which feels excluded — and threatened — by the Northern Alliance. Though the Qadir killing is most likely related to the drug trade, local power plays or revenge against a mujahedin warrior who made many enemies, it has scared Afghanistan's political elite.

Karzai is not alone in taking extra precautions. Presidential spokesman Fazel Akbar told TIME a core of senior ministers has also adopted U.S. bodyguards. But, he says, it's all temporary and should not be seen by defense minister Fahim's supporters as a slight. "The Americans are helping to build the national army and now they are helping with security in the presidential palace; it's all the same thing," he says. Others don't see it that way.

"It doesn't create a good feeling for Afghans to see their president have foreign security guards, to see a president who doesn't have homegrown security," former Kabul mayor Fazel Karim Aymaq told TIME. "As the people see this it may create a longer term problem." A respected Northern Alliance commander loyal to Fahim, Aymaq was recently replaced as mayor, a move that has further antagonized Karzai's political rivals. Western sources cite incompetence and a lack of management as the reason and Aymaq concedes the president had questioned his performance.

Akbar insists that Afghans shouldn't read too much into this. "This will be only for a short time," he says. "It doesn't mean we want to give all security to the Americans."

TIME: A Man with Many Enemies

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-07-15T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE / KABUL

"I will be in the car soon," Haji Abdul Qadir told his nephew over the phone. "I'm coming in maybe 15 or 20 minutes." But Qadir, one of Afghanistan's five Deputy Presidents, as well as its Minister of Public Works, never made it home for lunch. In fact, he never made it to the street. Witnesses later said that two gunmen had been waiting outside the ministry compound's gates for half an hour. As Qadir's green Toyota Land Cruiser nosed its way out, the men, dressed in the clothing of Qadir's home province, leaped out of the bushes and opened fire. Qadir's driver floored the accelerator as bullets sliced through the windshield and panels of the car, hitting Qadir in the head. As the car collided with some metal poles lining the driveway, the gunmen continued firing into the rear window. When the vehicle finally crashed into a concrete wall, the men jumped into a taxi parked up the road and roared away.

Qadir, one of Afghanistan's most astute and powerful Pashtun politicians, had been a linchpin in President Hamid Karzai's effort to reconcile the country's largest ethnic group with the rest of the nation. His death increases the risk of ethnic division in a nation already suffering from civil violence. His passing also removes a moderate voice from Karzai's government, still struggling to impose its authority across Afghanistan.

Qadir's death marks the end of an epic of two remarkable brothers. Qadir had been the elder of the two; Abdul Haq, 12 years his junior, had been the favored one. Abdul Haq was a legendary mujahedin hero in the war against the Soviets. In America's battle against the Taliban, he became one of the few Washington selected to eventually lead the country. But Abdul Haq, for all his talents, was unlucky. He lost a foot in a land-mine explosion years ago; he lost his wife and children to Taliban assassins; and finally, last October, he lost his life when gunmen ambushed him while he led a mission to rally Afghans against the Taliban.

That left Abdul Qadir. As the Taliban collapsed, the former warlord returned to the family power base around the eastern city of Jalalabad. He took possession of property the Taliban had used as an ammunition dump: three buildings full of rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, tank shells and "enough AK-47 cartridges to last for 10 years," as one of his fighters told a TIME correspondent late last year. The ammo was enough to make Qadir, already rich from the opium trade, a power to be reckoned with not only in Jalalabad (where two other warlords laid claims to power in his absence) but in all of Afghanistan.

While it wasn't immediately clear who killed Abdul Qadir, he had lived a controversial life and left a long list of enemies. In 1996 he welcomed Osama bin Laden to the region and gave him refuge in the opium-rich area around Jalalabad. Some of Qadir's rivals say he took $10 million to give up Jalalabad to the Taliban. When the Taliban fell, he reclaimed the governorship and, as part of the "new" Afghanistan, helped lead a heavy-handed crackdown on narcotics.

Local traders and drug barons, many of whom had been supporters of Qadir, were furious. Moreover, although Qadir was vocal about the rights of the Pashtun, some viewed his cooperation with the Tajik-dominated regime in Kabul--and his lack of support for the reinstatement of Afghanistan's king, Zahir Shah--as a betrayal."My efforts have been to urge people here to have patience," Qadir told TIME in June.

His death illustrates the nature of public life in this nation. As his political and military fortunes mounted, so did the number of his enemies, some of whom had once been allies. Sooner or later, Qadir's luck was bound to run out.

--By Michael Ware/Kabul. With reporting by Anthony Davis, Matthew Forney and Simon Robinson

TIME: Losing the Peace?

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-07-15T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL ELLIOTT with MICHAEL WARE / KABUL

The Afghan province of Uruzgan, north of Kandahar, is brutal territory. Its villages have been racked by decades of war, and the summer heat can reach an inhospitable 120[degrees]. A few weeks ago, Abdul Rahim, a local chieftain in Uruzgan's Deh Rawod district, reclined on a pillow in the shade of a thatch awning and spoke of what it would take to bring hope to this blighted land. It's a simple list, really: a few roads, schools and hospitals. "Rebuilding this country is the way to deny it to al-Qaeda," he told TIME.

But Afghanistan won't be an easy place to set right. In large pockets of the country, military action continues unabated, with all its attendant risks. An American AC-130 gunship last week apparently raked a wedding celebration in the Deh Rawod village of Kakarak, about 70 miles north of Kandahar. Afghan authorities say more than 40 people were killed. President Bush called Afghan President Hamid Karzai to express his sympathy for those who lost loved ones, and the two leaders committed themselves to a full investigation of the tragedy. But the deaths prompted the first anti-American demonstration in Kabul, the Afghan capital, since the fall of the Taliban. A few days later, Haji Abdul Qadir, a Deputy President in Karzai's government, was killed in his car outside the Ministry of Public Works. Two gunmen, who had been hiding in bushes by the driveway, riddled the car with bullets. Qadir was one of the leading figures of Afghanistan's majority Pashtun community, and his death deals a grievous blow to the stability of Karzai's team.

The Kakarak incident remains something of a mystery. American investigators found no bodies among the debris, though locals insist that's because the dead were buried quickly, in accordance with local custom. The Afghans blame the Americans for overreacting to celebratory shooting at the wedding; the Americans maintain that the AC-130 was responding to enemy fire.

There are, no doubt, plenty of people in Uruzgan who wish the Americans ill. Pentagon sources contend that in the past month American forces have been directly fired upon three times by Afghans who later claimed they had been "celebrating." Around Deh Rawod, says Marine Lieut. General Gregory Newbold, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "there is enormous sympathy for the Taliban and al-Qaeda." Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, was raised in the region, as were two of his top lieutenants, Mullah Dadullah and Mullah Bradar. All three are still at large. The Kabul government controls the area in name only, and few humanitarian groups have ventured into the hot, dusty hills. For weeks, small teams of American special forces have been operating around Deh Rawod, searching for the hard-core Taliban fighters who headed there at the end of last year.

At around 2 a.m. on July 1, an allied ground force of 300 to 400 troops, together with air support, was engaged in a series of operations throughout the Deh Rawod region. A B-52 bomber pounded a cave and tunnel complex; special forces on the ground discovered a weapons cache with thousands of rounds of armor-piercing ammunition. Allied sources in Afghanistan say that ground forces saw a mortar being covered with a tarpaulin in Kakarak and that later they were fired upon as they approached the village. At that point the soldiers called in support from the AC-130. (That night the gunship attacked no fewer than six sites.) American sources claim--and Afghan sources deny--that the plane was targeted by antiaircraft fire from inside the compound where a wedding celebration was under way. "Personnel on the AC-130 felt that the weapons were tracking them," said Colonel Roger King, a Pentagon spokesman at Bagram air base, north of Kabul. So the gunship--a flying arsenal loaded with machine guns and a 105-mm howitzer--fired on the compound. Subsequent comments by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did little to soften the blow. "There cannot be the use of that kind of firepower and not have mistakes," he said. "It is going to happen."

Whatever the rights and wrongs of Kakarak, the episode reveals just how tricky the war in Afghanistan has become. The U.S. may have won, in the accepted sense of the word, but the enemy hasn't surrendered. Since the battle of Shah-i-Kot in March, al-Qaeda and Taliban forces have split into smaller and smaller groups, which survive by mixing with civilian populations. That's exactly what a big, heavily armed superpower with a taste for making war from the air doesn't want; it makes the chance of accidents like Kakarak much more likely.

Such dramas add to a sense that the U.S. may be losing the battle for the hearts and minds of Afghans. That's especially true in the south, where most of the American military action is now concentrated and where U.S. propaganda has to contend with an overheated rumor mill in the teahouses and bazaars. Inevitably, Karzai is linked to America's mistakes. "In the eyes of ordinary Afghans," says a senior U.N. official, "this government's fate is intertwined with the American performance." Afghan exile Hamid, a Pashtun now in Quetta, Pakistan, says of Karzai, "He is nothing. Just the son of George W. Bush." Yusuf Hassan, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), remarks, "There's a sense down there, rightly or wrongly, of an occupied country."

Many of the south's majority Pashtun believe that Karzai's government is dominated by Panjshiri Tajiks who fought in the Northern Alliance alongside the Americans--though Karzai is Pashtun. About 1.1 million Afghan refugees have flooded back into the country since the beginning of the year--many more than aid agencies had predicted--but according to unhcr registries, less than a third of them have resettled in the Pashtun provinces, suggesting most Pashtun exiles are staying away.

The murder of Qadir, a Pashtun leader, will do nothing to soothe those fears. In a statement after his death, the U.S. State Department called him a "key leader in efforts to promote national reconciliation." American officials are anxious to avoid giving the impression that the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating beyond repair, though a State Department official concedes, "Overall, it's still dangerous."

Beyond that, officials in Kabul affiliated with the U.N. and other aid organizations are now worried that America's obsession with the dangers of Afghanistan and its single-minded pursuit of military objectives may even be making things worse. A few wells have been dug, some schools and health clinics have been repaired, but outside Kabul the expected flows of aid have not yet improved the lives of ordinary Afghans. Most remember that the Soviets enjoyed a honeymoon after they invaded the country in 1979. Soon enough, the locals turned against them.

"The window wasn't open for long," says an expatriate, back in Afghanistan for the first time since the 1980s, as he sits in a Kabul cafe. "And the Russians hadn't bombed wedding parties."

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington

TIME: Afghans Say U.S. to Help Wedding Victims

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-07-10T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE / KABUL

Although the U.S. military remains tight-lipped over any liability for the July 1 incident in which a number of Afghan villagers were killed at a wedding celebration in the remote mountain district of Deh Rawood during an American air attack on suspected Taliban positions nearby, Washington may be letting its money do the talking. "Verbally, at least, the Americans have admitted the attack was a mistake," says Afghan cabinet minister Mohammed Arif Noorzai, the man who headed the joint U.S.-Afghan investigation into the killings. And, he says, in a meeting earlier this week with Afghan officials in Kabul they did much more than that — they promised cash to allow the victims to be compensated.

Noorzai says when General Dan K. McNeill, the U.S. commander of operations in Afghanistan, and the American ambassador Robert Finn came to President Hamid Karzai's office they brought with them guarantees of massive assistance. "It's not compensation as such," says Karzai's spokesman Fazel Akbar. "It's support of the nation." This support consisted of $2 million dollars in cash to be given to Karzai. "There was the promise of cash aid but still we did not receive it," notes Akbar. The Minister Noorzai told TIME the money is to be distributed by the president "to the families affected by the bombing who have already suffered too much." As many as 48 people were believed killed and around 117 wounded in the incident.

The State Department won't say whether a cash payment is involved, but they will confirm some assistance is forthcoming. "We have decided to target some of the reconstruction assistance in that area," says State spokesman Richard Boucher. Afghan officials say villagers in the Deh Rawood district are soon to be the beneficiaries of a number of building and rehabilitation projects. American drilling teams are scheduled to dig much-needed deep wells at twelve district schools, and two high schools in the province's capital, Tarin Kowt, are to be renovated, as well as a small hospital in the dusty district where the raid went wrong. Also, a 50-mile road linking Tarin Kowt with the southern city of Kandahar will be built, reducing the journey from a tortuous five hours to less than 60 minutes. Aid to the area will also include completion of a large bridge spanning one of Uruzgan province's major rivers, a project begun by the Taliban regime but which today is marked only by a parade of concrete pylons across the riverbed. Most importantly, says Noorzai, Uruzgan dam will reach its full capacity with additional U.S.-financed construction. Not only does he expect the dam to fill the irrigation channels of local farmers currently being encouraged to switch from opium to corn and wheat, but it will be capable of generating hydro-electric power, much like Kajaki dam in neighboring Helmand province. "By starting these projects," says Noorzai, "some of the people of this province who are jobless will find work which will obviously be good for the economy."

U.S. embassy officials in Kabul declined to comment despite TIME's inquiries. But for an area of Afghanistan where hold-out Taliban commanders still roam free — among them, it is believed, the fundamentalist movement's leader, Mullah Omar — U.S. contributions in bricks and mortar may be the best bet of bringing the locals in from the cold.

TIME: A Killing in Kabul

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-07-06T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE

At a little after noon on Saturday in Kabul Yusuf Khan called his uncle, one of Afghanistan's four deputy presidents, to ask when he would be home for lunch. "I'll be in the car soon," Abdul Haji Qadir told his young relative. "I'm coming in maybe 15 or 20 minutes." True to his word Qadir drove out of Kabul's Ministry of Public Works — his new cabinet portfolio — at 12:40 p.m. But he never made it on to the street. Two assassins with AK-47 assault rifles were waiting in the bushes shrouding the driveway. As Qadir's dark blue Land Cruiser nosed out of the white grill gates they leapt up and opened fire. Two minutes later the gunmen were gone, Qadir lay dying and the country was once again in turmoil.

Much was riding on Qadir, a former mujahedin hero of the anti-Soviet resistance. As the leading representative of the country's disenfranchised Pashtun majority, Qadir was the centerpiece of President Hamid Karzai's maneuvers to integrate Pashtuns who have been effectively excluded from power by the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance that defeated the Taliban. Now that plan is threatened. "This has been caused by enemies of peace and stability," says Karzai's foreign affairs spokesman Omar Samad.

A warrior for more than two decades and the victor of an intense power struggle in his home province of Nangarhar, Qadir faced a myriad of political, local and business enemies. The best clues lie with the shooters seen lurking for 30 minutes prior to the attack outside the ministry compound. Young cigarette seller Habib Jan noticed them from his stall across the road. "As Haji Qadir was about to pass the gates these two guys in shawar kameez [the traditional clothing typical of Qadir's province] with white caps on their heads stood up and I saw Kalashnikovs behind their backs," he says.

Firing from about 20 feet away, the assassins gave Qadir no chance for escape. His driver, Jaffa, floored the accelerator as high-velocity bullets sliced through the windscreen and panels of the 4x4, hitting Qadir in the head. Turning wildly to the right, the vehicle collided with metal poles lining the driveway, tearing them from the ground. The gunmen continued firing, pouring rounds through the rear window as the car careered along the footpath and crashed into a concrete wall at full speed. Jaffa's lifeless body was later pulled from the wreckage. Blood and brain matter covered the 4x4's dashboard. White tufts of padding poked through holes in the Qadir's passenger seat headrest. Black prayer beads were coiled on a console soaking in blood.

Because crime scence security was non-existent — a policeman sat in the driver's seat and used the bloody steering wheel to drive the limping vehicle away — few answers are likely to be found in the destroyed interior. More, however, may be gleaned elsewhere. One question is what happened to the guards on the gate, eight to ten of whom were taken into police custody as witnesses. Doctor Zia, the chief of police district nine, which covers the ministry compound, said that the guards had left their post for a lunch break at the time of the attack. They belonged to Qadir's predecessor as Public Works Minister and had not been replaced.

TIME: 'We Were Better Off Under the Russians'

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-06-10T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE / KANDAHAR

The Afghan commander laughed at the way the Americans were going about their work. U.S. troops, he said, were obsessed with finding caches of Taliban documents to help track down their fugitive enemies. The commander's friend explained the mirth by pulling out his own identification card: a small passport-like book made by the Taliban and authorized with a Taliban stamp. It was issued April 16, long after the fall of that regime. It's a legitimate document, and the man isn't an enemy -- the local government doesn't have money for stationery, so decrees and papers are still being printed on leftover Taliban stock.

That's one, tiny example of how every encounter, from simple visa checks to complicated special ops, is fraught with the potential for misunderstanding, confusions and, in military parlance, snafus. Take the raid on the village of Band Taimore, 80 kilometers west of Kandahar. On the night of May 24, helicopters raining machine-gun fire descended onto the village wheat fields. The mission was a success. U.S. forces killed Haji Bajet, 70, a supporter of Taliban leader Mullah Omar since 1994, who also had links with Akhter Mohammed Usmani, the probable heir to the still-fugitive Omar.

But it wasn't a whistle-clean success -- if such a thing is imaginable in Afghanistan -- and in the raid's aftermath, anti-U.S. sentiment is rising around strategically important Kandahar.

During the raid, 55 men were taken prisoner. A week later, all but five were released and allowed to return home. When the men were being rounded up, according to villagers, American soldiers bound and shoved the village women. That was an affront. Naibo, a middle-aged mother with cropped black hair, hands and feet scored from years of labor, says troops used plastic handcuffs to tie her hands and a torn turban to gag her. "I felt certain they were going to kill me," she says. "I was whispering the prayer before dying from the Koran." Other women made similar claims. A villager produces his daughter Maba, 7, to act out how she says she was bound. "If they touch our women again we must ask ourselves why are we alive," says Shir Mohammed Stad. "We will have no choice but to fight back."

But it is the death of a child the Americans never even saw that has really galvanized the village. When little Zarghunah woke shortly after midnight on May 24, the roars of choppers and their machine guns frightened her. The six-year-old ran from the outdoor platform where her family was sleeping on the warm summer night. Zarghunah, still half-asleep, stumbled across the uneven ground of the family compound, forgetting about the open well. Her father found her later, nearly 12 meters down the shaft, her body broken, wet and lifeless. Zarghunah loved red dresses and a grown farm dog she called Puppy. "She was the laughter of our house," says her mother.

About 600 people have lodged complaints about the incident. "They are responsible for this loss of life and must answer for it," says a Kandahar police official of the American forces. A gathering of Muslim clerics across the border in Quetta, Pakistan, last week condemned the U.S. and called for retribution. The raid -- a necessary one by U.S. calculations -- has been added by Afghans to the other, larger accidents during the American campaign: the bombing of a wedding party in December in Paktia, the slaughter of 21 friendly Afghan troops in Uruzgan in January, and the killing of three Afghan soldiers near Gardez the day after the Band Taimore prisoners were freed. Even pro-U.S. figures are worried about public reaction to the accidents. "If America continues to make mistakes, the people will resist," says Khan Mohammed, Kandahar military chief and one of the most powerful warlords in the region. "Only two or three more and their patience will break." Afghans are famously hospitable. But history shows they don't take kindly to invaders or foreign forces that stay too long. The Americans may be wearing out their welcome. As one villager in Band Taimore mutters: "We were better off under the Russians."

TIME: Making Friends in Afghanistan

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-06-08T00:00:00-07:00

By MICHAEL WARE / KANDAHAR

The Afghan commander laughed. The way the Americans were going about doing their work, he thought, was hilarious. U.S. troops, he said, were finding caches of documents with Taliban markings and stamps and using those papers to identify and pinpoint enemy operatives. A man seated near the commander explained the fighter's mirth by pulling out his own identification card: a small passport-like book made by the Taliban and authorized with a Taliban stamp. It had been issued April 16, long after the Taliban fell. But the card is legitimate, and the man isn't an enemy. The local government just doesn't have money for stationery and so decrees and documents are still being printed on existing Taliban stock. If you must have an I.D., you'll have to be Taliban for now. But watch out for those Americans.

You can't go by appearances in Afghanistan. Even military successes must be suspect. Take the raid on the village of Band Taimore, about 50 miles west of Kandahar, where the U.S.-led alliance runs an airbase. On the night of May 24, helicopters roared into the village, unleashing machinegun fire as they landed in the wheat fields. The mission was a success. U.S. forces killed Haji Bajet, a pioneer supporter of Mullah Omar since way back in 1994. Haji Bajet, 70, the village elder, was also linked to Akhter Mohammed Usmani, the man who may be the designated heir to the still-fugitive Omar. But the aftermath of the raid is a whispering campaign against the U.S. presence that is engulfing the strategically important region around Kandahar, just across from the sensitive Pakistani border.

On the night of May 24, 55 men were taken prisoner in the raid. A week later, all but five were released and allowed to return home. But it is the affront to the women that has fueled the anger against the Americans. And the women themselves are not being quiet about it. Naibo, a middle aged mother with short cropped black hair under the shawl covering her face and scored hands and feet from years of labor, says soldiers used plastic handcuffs and a torn turban to tie her hands and gag her. "I felt certain they were going to kill me," she says, "I was whispering a prayer from the Koran." Other women have similar claims. A villager produced his daughter Maba, 7, to act out how she says she was bound. "If they touch our women again we must ask ourselves why are we alive; we will have no choice but to fight," says villager Shir Mohammed Stad. The U.S. military denies handcuffing or mistreating the women or children.

But it is the death of a child — whom the Americans never even touched — that still stuns the locals. When little Zarghunah woke next to her brothers and sisters shortly after midnight on May 24, the roars of choppers and rat-tat-tat of machine guns frightened her. The six-year-old ran wildly into the night. As her confused family scattered from the outdoor platform where they slept on summer nights Zarghunah, half asleep, stumbled as fast as she could across the uneven ground of their mud-brick compound. She did not see the open well. Her father found her some time later, nearly 40 feet down a shaft as wide as the worn tire at its mouth; her body broken and wet and lifeless. Her family remembers that Zarghunah loved red dresses and a farm dog taller than she that she insisted on calling "Puppy." Says her mother, "She was the laughter of our house."

"They are responsible for this loss of life and must answer for it," a Kandahar police official says of the Americans. About 600 people have complained to Kandahar government officials about the incident. A gathering of Muslim clerics across the border in Quetta, Pakistan, last week condemned the American forces and called for retribution. One villager in Band Taimore mutters an insult, "We were better off under the Russians." The raid — a necessary one by U.S. calculations — is ranked by the Afghans among other so-called American atrocities: the bombing of a wedding party in December in Paktia, the slaughter of 21 friendly Afghan troops in Uruzgan in January, and the killing of three Afghan soldiers near Gardez the day after the Band Taimore prisoners were freed. Even allies are urging restraint. "If America continues to make mistakes, the people will resist. Only two or three more and their patience will break," says Khan Mohammed, Kandahar military chief and one of the most powerful warlords in the region.

At Kandahar airbase American and Canadian forces say they have been forging better ties with the locals. Two weeks ago, says Major A.C. Roper, spokesman for the 101st U.S. Airborne Division, a local farmer warned a U.S. military patrol of a newly planted mine on the road they were about to use. "It's an example of the effectiveness of these relationships," Roper says. But, he adds, "we also realize not every villager would have taken that action."

THE AUSTRALIAN: From Front Line to Front Row [Interviewed at Australian Fashion Week]

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-05-18T00:00:00-07:00

Marion Hume talks to Time magazine foreign correspondent Michael Ware

By MARION HUME

MAY 8, 2002 : Former model turned actor Elle Macpherson with Time Magazine journalist Michael Ware
in Sydney 08/05/02 during Australian Fashion Week.

LAST week, Michael Ware went to some fashion shows. A month ago, the Time magazine foreign correspondent was undercover in former Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan, where clothes had the power to save his life. He accepted The Australian's invitation to come to Fashion Week out of curiosity.

"It intrigued me. I'm a foreign correspondent and fashion is a world that is obviously very foreign to me," says Ware. "I've always had a preconceived notion of the fashion industry. Can it be as empty as it really appears? I wanted to compare it [with] the places I go and the things I see.

"The first thing that struck me was that the accreditation badges [delegates wear around their necks] are strikingly similar to the one I wore at all times in East Timor. My identity card looked like this one [for Bar Bazaar]. But it didn't say `Be famous, Be someone, Be seen.' That's a treat."

Colour? "It can save your life. In a combat situation, decisions are made on the split second. That first glimpse can be a defining moment. Take Timor. There, the Indonesian military-backed militia wore red-and-white headbands and armbands, and a sight of that and you knew you were approaching a dangerous situation,'' he says.

"Alternatively, in Afghanistan the signature turban of the Taliban is of a particular kind of dark black silky cloth, which is much longer and so much puffier than other turbans. As soon as you see one, you automatically know, even if he's not Taliban, then he is not far away from it, so it's a dangerous situation.

"I ended up adopting Afghan dress once I had grown my beard. I studied what the Afghan men wore and how they wore it, and it helped me to be able to stay alive. Sometimes the gun can't protect you. What can is looking like everyone else."

At Fashion Week, Ware bristled when he spotted stylist Kelvin Harries dressed in a boy scout-military-looking shirt.

"My eye was immediately drawn across the crowd. You become acutely aware of uniforms in my world because they can signal change in a situation, either making it more friendly or more dangerous. I had to catch myself, tell myself there was no reason to worry.

"A uniform can have dire consequences. Here it represents benign authority and security. But for others it is not a fashion statement.

"The single most disconcerting thing that I experienced at Fashion Week was the really gaunt looks on some of the model's faces. That emotional blankness had a resonance for me. It compared to what we call the thousand-yard stare, when people who have been through terrible situations look straight through you. The look on some of these models had that vacancy.

"I know it is passe, but the dire emaciation of these women conjures immediate associations for me or anyone else who has ever been to a refugee camp. The only other people I have seen like this have been struggling to live. I don't want to be overly judgmental but it does make me angry. I think we've got no right to make ourselves this thin.

"I don't want to be hypercritical. But the fluff and the pap that goes with all this! It is decadent, frivolous and vacuous. I've listened in to conversations and they seemed to me to lack a sense of proportion. But then I reminded myself we are in Sydney, Australia, in the Western world.

"But it could get too much. One of the photographers working this week was an old shooter mate of mine from East Timor. Then the next minute I was literally standing next to Elle Macpherson. I had to go outside and have a couple of cigarettes just to help myself come to terms with the unreality of it."

At the shows, Ware was noticeably jumpy. Sitting next to him at the Grand Marnier 5 show, I was aware his body was moving the whole time.

"I tried to concentrate on sitting still. I felt self-conscious. The other reason is going to sound a bit prudish, but the visible breasts made me really uncomfortable. When I got back from Afghanistan, I had gone four months without hardly seeing a woman, except for a few in the burka. South Afghanistan is a conservative stronghold, so when I came home, for the first 10 days I had trouble coping, not just with crowds but with displays of flesh.

"I didn't know where to look. How my Afghan friends would have reacted was playing through my mind as well. They would have been salivating.

"They are 25, 30-year-olds who have never had sex with a woman.

"We talked about everything, from Islam to weaponry.

"But when it came to sex, they would ask the most simple things. But then, even those who were married might have had 13-year-old brides they had never seen naked.

"Discarded Western magazines would turn up at the American air base and you were free to help yourself. I saw a US Vogue and I took it into town and there was an obsession about it. The guys loved it. It got to the point that that magazine was kept in my room and one of the Afghans elected himself as its guardian -- he called himself the librarian -- and he would note who was taking it out and when it would be returned. When I left Kandahar it was the first possession they grabbed.

"The ones who could read English were studiously poring over the text and they would ask, 'What is that?', 'Who would buy that kind of thing?', 'How much does it cost?', 'Would you go to the bazaar to get it?' and I would explain about boutiques. But they could never understand why these women would shame themselves so much.

"I live with my girlfriend at Bondi Beach. A beach is hard to explain to people in a landlocked country. They'd say, 'What do people wear?' and I would describe a bikini and a one-piece, and after the titillation factor I would get very serious questions: 'Do you take your woman to this place?', 'So other men can see your woman in these clothes?' On two separate occasions, men asked me, 'How do you resist the urge to want to kill those men?'

"To put this in context, one of my friends lives with his mother, father, uncles, cousins. His male cousin is his best friend. He can't even talk to his female cousin. If he did, his uncle would be honour-bound to take retribution, either flogging, humiliation, even death. It is about the avoidance of sin. To avoid sin, you avoid the temptations that lead to sin.

"Something else at the shows took me back to the war zone, although on a totally different scale. Getting in is a bit like passing a checkpoint. In my world, when they say no, they mean no. The authority comes from the gun. You have to do everything in your means to either bluff, bullshit, bribe or avoid to get to where you want to go and I had precisely that experience at Morrissey.

"The place was packed, it was a long way to get through the approved channel, so we went through a gate, through the technical area and, at just the right moment, we popped out and the show started. I thought, this is exactly what I do all the time.

"I have respect for fashion journalists. Not for the life of me could I put up with this circus. When I've spent five days travelling to a place that is extraordinarily difficult to get to, at much risk, to get an interview and a fashion story gets in instead, well, I understand the reader has only a certain stamina for what I do.

"Put it this way, you come really quickly to an understanding of what things really are worth dying for. Sometimes it was just water off a duck's back. But sometimes it made me want to go up and shake someone. It just reminds me of the privileged state we live in.

"It has taken me quite some mental effort to come to terms with some of the events here in the [past] few days. People say: 'It's good to see you in the real world' but this isn't the real world. Fashion is very much the unreal world.

"Yet it's part of life. It's not something we should completely denigrate and refuse to give any concentration to at all. We should just not be exulting it beyond its proper context. Fashion Week to me has been a fun experience. What's great is that what I see at a fashion show is not going to live with me late at night.

"At the same time, it is a little depressing. I've gone home after these extravaganzas each night trying to put the pieces back together. In conflict situations, while they are never black and white, you feel you know what's right and what's wrong. Here, there's a nagging guilt. This has been an emotional experience for me. I'm really glad I've been here and I've had an insight into what, to me, is a different universe. But it has been a very up-and-down ride."

TIME: On the Mop-Up Patrol

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-03-25T00:00:01-08:00

By MICHAEL WARE / SHAH-I-KOT

The attack comes a little before 5 a.m. Sporadic machine-gun fire has been heard throughout the night, and in the early hours of the morning, a hilltop observation post tells the team of U.S. special forces that there is suspicious movement south of the perimeter. Then comes small-arms fire, followed by the whoomp of an incoming rocket-propelled grenade. Tracers show a stream of outgoing rounds in reply. Afghan soldiers fighting with the Americans send their own RPGs into the night. The local Afghan commander, a short, stern man called Ismael, says they were plundered from a store of Taliban weapons he has discovered. His men try to fire illumination rounds, but two of three pop straight up. "We're helping the enemy more than we're helping ourselves," a U.S. soldier says with a laugh. The special forces are hamstrung by a lack of information; radio batteries in the forward positions have drained. "Walk in a direct line to the hill and head up to the observation post and get me information on what's out there," the American commander orders an Afghan patrol. "And take these batteries."

A band of perhaps 10 al-Qaeda fighters is testing the position's defenses. After a huddle, the U.S. soldiers send a small Afghan patrol out to meet the intruders. Minutes later four special forces follow the locals to give guidance and backup. Another commando organizes 10 Afghan soldiers into a quick reaction force. The Afghans fight al-Qaeda's probing force about half a mile from the camp, but in the end the enemy melts away. "They can hide and come back anytime they want," says a special-forces soldier who gives his name only as "Oklahoma Chris."

As recently as March 12, Pentagon officials said the battle of Shah-i-Kot, the bloodiest skirmish in the five-month war, was winding down. But late last week, as TIME spent a day and a night with a team of U.S. special forces and their Afghan allies, it was very much alive. True, the U.S. force numbers are way down from the 1,000 or more who fought in the battle's first stage, and the bombing, though occasionally heavy, does not match the scale seen two weeks ago. But let there be no doubt: the enemy is still there, and he is resourceful. "Now it's hard-core guerrilla warfare," says a special-forces soldier. Shah-i-Kot seems made for this kind of fighting. After two weeks of battle, the mountainsides are scarred black; vehicles, barely recognizable, litter the trails. But on the rises and in the lees of this mountain redoubt, there is still movement. Columns of Afghan troops roll forward and then halt, fanning out soldiers as figures scarper away into the cover of the rocks ahead.

Those fighters sometimes seem to be the only things that move. In Shah-i-Kot you will rarely find a goat or a donkey or even a dog. Clusters of abandoned or destroyed mud-brick houses stand silent. Just a few weeks ago, these high-walled settlements were home to al-Qaeda fighters and their families. Now they look like a kind of Dresden transferred to a tiny, medieval world. In the village of Sarkhankhel, charred headstones are all that remain of many houses; crumbled walls carpet the ground. It's as though a finger of retribution reached from the sky and pointed to every house, one by one by one. But the bombs didn't take all who lived here. "We've searched many structures," says Oklahoma Chris, "and there is evidence of unhurried packing. Nothing was left behind."

In this hostile terrain, American and allied forces are still taking fire. Together with the Afghans whom they have trained, they crawl up steep ridges to bunkers whose ragged inhabitants refuse to give in, or go after foes slithering away toward the rocks. Small teams of about a dozen commandos are establishing outposts deep in enemy territory, working with Afghan units near 120 strong. In daylight, movement is relatively easy, but the night is more dangerous. Perimeters are set around open camps and, save for the unseen cover from the air, it's a long, lonely wait for whatever may come.

Late in the afternoon on March 14, 20 Afghan troops are led by an American soldier in an attack on a small cave atop a ridge less than 800 yds. from their camp. Through telescopic sights al-Qaeda fighters can be seen scurrying along the rise. As a bomber approaches, the human silhouettes vanish. Explosions rip the earth, and one plane is replaced by another in an aerial tag team; at dusk the smoky white skywriting burns to an incandescent orange. But as so often happens in this war, no kills are recorded or prisoners taken. With light fading, the special forces set Afghan sentries. "We want RPGs there, there and there," says an American officer. In twos and threes the local soldiers traipse out to their positions, carting machine guns and small duffel bags. Those not on duty mingle around canvas tents; one group is ordered to put "that goddam fire out." The U.S. soldiers don night-vision goggles, and the Afghans pin squares of tape to their beanies to identify themselves as friendlies--and then wait nervously for those who are nothing of the kind.

The U.S. forces have learned to respect their adversaries. "Small-sized teams can do a lot of damage," says special-forces soldier "Alabama Chris," wearing a Crimson Tide cap with his camouflage pants. The enemy can slip away easily: surrounding Shah-i-Kot are countless villages that offer succor to al-Qaeda fighters. "Part of the focus is to seal off their supply routes, or what we call rat lines," says Alabama Chris. That isn't easy. Covert supply routes between villages run along dried-up creeks. Cave entrances to the bunkers can be almost impossible to detect. Subterranean complexes have been discovered between buildings in the middle of villages. The arsenal on hand is formidable. "If it's man portable or can be carried over the mountains on donkey, then most likely they've got it," says Oklahoma Chris. South of the valley, Afghan forces trained by the Americans have set up roadblocks to prevent fighters' escaping over the mountains to Pakistan. Balaclava-clad soldiers search every vehicle and passenger while the barrels of heavy machine guns and RPGS poke through windows. "We intend to make sure none of them escape," local warlord Pacha Khan Zadran tells TIME.

That's a fine sentiment. But it begs a question: How many al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters survived the battle of Shah-i-Kot to fight another day? The Pentagon has boasted of hundreds dead, but they aren't evident in the valley. In Sarkhankhel, only three bodies are visible. Farther upstream, another lies in pieces in a garden. The special forces are cagey about numbers. "Even if we did have them," says a soldier, "we wouldn't be authorized to disclose them." But the Americans insist that the death toll is high. "I've seen them," says Alabama Chris, of al-Qaeda corpses. "I can definitely corroborate that what we've done in the valley has been effective." At the company HQ, another American commando reflects for a while about how many dead al-Qaeda fighters he has seen. "All I can say," he muses, "is that business has been good." That may be; but this business isn't over.

TIME: Reporters' Notebook

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-03-25T00:00:00-08:00

By MICHAEL WARE; CATHY BOOTH THOMAS; JAMES CARNEY

MICHAEL WARE has been in Afghanistan for TIME since December. Based in Kandahar, he has been at the Shah-i-Kot front for the past two weeks.

"If I'm traveling into the Taliban heartland, I normally join a vehicle full of soldiers, about eight or nine men armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and heavy machine guns to deter any unwanted attention. The trick I've adopted lately is wearing an Afghan costume and speaking a little Pashtu. It's allowed me to sneak in and out of the front lines with Afghan troops. But it has its downside. Soldiers think I'm Afghan and treat me like an Afghan. I've been manhandled and roughed up, and then I've had to reveal my identity.

"As it is, I spend much of my time hanging out with Afghans, watching Indian movies with the local mujahedin in Kandahar, eating what they eat, sleeping where they sleep, now dressing as they do. In Kandahar, I live in the Noor Jahan hotel, room number two. It's the one where a lot of local commanders, their bodyguards and other dubious characters come looking for Mick. Michael is too difficult for them to remember. A month ago, when I was quite ill with a stomach flu, they were constantly there, believing that it was good manners to visit with a sick friend. I was continually excusing myself to throw up. They prescribed hash and opium, saying they would cure anything. I politely declined."

CATHY BOOTH THOMAS, our Dallas bureau chief, has chased after the Pope, Fidel Castro, Hollywood celebs and Enron. Last week she was after the hottest consumer-electronics company in the world.

"I'd just been through accounting arcana to cover the Enron and Andersen stories, so I thought Samsung was a blessing in disguise. Then I started running into terms like DRAMS and SRAMS, TFT/LCD and DLP, CDMA and TDMA, GSM and GPRS. So in two days I had to be up to snuff on enough of the lingo to find out why Samsung was so hot in chips, TV monitors, computer monitors and cell phones. Now I know what a DLP TV is. (Hint: it's thin, looks good on a tabletop and makes Saturday-sports fanatics ecstatic.) Samsung Telecommunications America opened the doors to its rather unglamorous headquarters in Richardson, Texas, and showed off the phones that will be debuting this week at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association trade fair in Orlando, Florida. (Note to my editor: I'd like the Q105 with the one-button Web-access feature that delivers info at 546 KBPS, as fast as dial up at home.)"

JAMES CARNEY, half of our White House team, was with the Vice President on his highly scrutinized diplomatic mission last week.

"Traveling with Dick Cheney through the Middle East was like being in the eye of a hurricane: chaos loomed in the distance, but overhead the skies were clear. At least the Vice President and his aides kept insisting they were. Day after day, Cheney doggedly maintained that the explosion of Israeli-Palestinian violence wasn't interfering with the goal of his mission: persuading Arab allies that the next target in the war on terror should be Iraq. But like the rumble of far-off thunder, the evidence suggested otherwise. Everywhere he went--Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia--Cheney encountered blunt opposition to the idea of ousting Saddam Hussein by force. Before they would consider joining such a campaign, Arab leaders demanded, the U.S. would have to use its influence to restart the peace process, preferably by leaning on Israel's Ariel Sharon. After Cheney got an earful from so many presidents, kings and sultans, it's no wonder he spent the day Friday among less obstreperous friends aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. 'This is the highlight of my trip,' he told the cheering crew. No doubt he was telling the truth."

TIME: Encountering the Taliban

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-03-23T00:00:00-08:00

By MICHAEL WARE / KANDAHAR

General Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, calls the recent assault on Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants in the Shah-i-Kot Valley an "unqualified and absolute success." But he concedes that pockets of resistance remain and promises to go after them unceasingly. The British last week pledged to help, committing 1,700 troops to the effort. Who are these holdouts, and what are their aims? To find out, TIME embarked on a search for surviving Taliban fighters who refuse to yield. It required weeks of negotiation with Taliban commanders, who finally proffered an invitation to meet with two of them. "They will talk," said an Afghan contact, "but not in Afghanistan, somewhere safer."

The journey begins in Kandahar on a rainy weekday morning. After a long drive, we reach a Pakistani checkpoint. The 4x4 is discarded for motorbikes, on which we travel along back paths across the border. Once we get inside Pakistan, a car, indistinguishable from the swarms of similar models around it, picks up the travelers and cuts through the slow traffic of the border bazaar. It proceeds along a back road to the outskirts of town. "There are many Talibs here," says a guide. "Everyone knows, but everyone protects them."

The car stops at a green iron gate at the mouth of an anonymous compound. Once bona fides are established, a man called Mullah Palawan steps outside a small door and beckons his guests inside. "You are welcome," he says, casting cautious eyes up and down. In a long, high-ceilinged room where half a dozen men rest on cushions, he is joined by another man, who agrees to be identified only by his titles, Hajji Mullah Sahib, meaning, roughly, Honorable Mr. Cleric Sir.

These men are Taliban. Part of an unrepentant hard core, they are hunted in their own country and supposedly barred from Pakistan and denied access by the hundreds of troops who guard the border. Yet here they sit, sipping sweet green tea, untroubled, gregarious and masters of their domain. Mullah Palawan, who commanded an armored corps in Herat before his flight to Pakistan, has spent the morning browsing through the bazaar. Hajji Mullah Sahib, once a Taliban ideologue and functionary in Kandahar, passed the time at home chatting with friends and neighbors. Both seem to go about their daily business without a care in this bustling gateway to Afghanistan.

Mullah Palawan is a large, jovial man. He tries to keep his face stern but breaks out in cheeky smiles when he thinks no one is looking. Hajji Mullah Sahib is a drawn, rakish figure. Conversation stops when he enters the room. In the past, his religious scholarship lent authority to the Taliban. He and others like him from the regime's theological vanguard preached the righteousness of Mullah Omar's government, and thousands listened. They still do in the Pakistani madrasah, or religious school, where he teaches today.

Hajji Mullah Sahib does not so much converse as lecture. Afghanistan's woes, past and present, he argues, are the fault of malign interference by the Soviets and the Americans. Operation Enduring Freedom, he says, is a pretense for manipulating Afghan affairs. In a blink he dismisses the argument that the U.S.-led coalition aims only to eradicate al-Qaeda. "If the Arabs were terrorists, why didn't America just catch them?" he asks, instead of launching all-out war?

The men in this room, and others who are regrouping in Afghanistan and Pakistan, boast that they are preparing to pounce on the U.S. invaders, and that they have allies. "Our neighbors are also terrified of the United States, and they want to make trouble for America," warns Hajji Mullah Sahib. "Now they are sending us money, guns and men." On this score, he's right. Iran has been sending supplies and munitions to disgruntled Afghan commanders who are not being paid by the new government. In Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual center, a government commander says disaffected elements of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency have been covertly assisting al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives with logistics, escape and safe havens.

The anti-American forces, by various accounts, are also finding support from a coalition of disparate groups within Afghanistan. These include the Iranian-backed Hezb-i-Islami movement, which before the Taliban came to power was one of the most dangerous factions among the Afghan mujahedin, and Ittehad-i-Islami, which has a few thousand underfunded troops in southern Afghanistan. These groups once opposed the Taliban, but Afghan intelligence sources confirm that the old disputes have been sidelined in the face of a common enemy: America and its Afghan allies. Astad Abdul Halim, Ittehad-i-Islami's Kandahar commander, blasts the province's U.S.-backed governor, Gul Agha Sherzai. "If Sherzai continues the bad acts he is doing now," he says, "there will be a time very soon when we will attack."

The recent Shah-i-Kot offensive, far from deterring the opposition, has emboldened it. Applauded in the West as a victory for the international coalition, the operation has been celebrated by Kandahar Talibs as an American failure. "How many bodies are there?" asks a former Talib, mocking U.S. claims of a major victory and citing eyewitness accounts of only a few Taliban and al-Qaeda corpses. "With all their power, the Americans could not capture our fighters," he says.

If anyone doubts the ardor of grass-roots support for the anti-American militancy in southern Afghanistan, Kandahar's cemetery for al-Qaeda fighters bears unequivocal testimony. Hundreds of mourners have descended on the graveyard from as far away as Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul and Uruzgan province. What began as daily homages have grown into all-night vigils. Men, women and children sleep by the graves. Devotees recite the Koran throughout the night. The paralyzed, ill and blind flock to the site seeking miracle cures, which many claim to receive. Men mumble, repeating scripture until they fall into a trance, swaying and convulsing, talking in tongues. "Do not speak English here," says a Talib accompanying a TIME correspondent. "They will kill you the instant they know you are a foreigner. These people are so angry."

In its propaganda from the underground, the Taliban has subtly shifted tack, redrafting its cause from a religious to a nationalist one. Hajji Mullah Sahib makes sure he hits the buttons. "Those working against America now are not Taliban," he insists. "They are Afghan." Kandahar's bazaars reverberate with claims that former Taliban Defense Minister Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, who is thought to be in hiding, has issued a secret call to arms. True or not, the tale is meeting with approval in many quarters. "For the moment, we need food and more weapons, but we are willing to fight," says a former Talib. "When America goes, we will take back Kandahar in three days."

From his Pakistani hideout, Hajji Mullah Sahib claims that former Taliban who have been absorbed into the Kandahar government--and there are many--maintain the rage. "They still do not want America in Afghanistan," he says. "No one does. I can tell you these commanders are working against America now and always will." Murmurs of endorsement rise up from the chorus of elders around him. "If all those with the government were happy with America, how could anyone be attacking the U.S. air base [in Kandahar] and getting away with it with such impunity?" he asks, referring to at least six probes of the airport's defenses in the past three months.

Although the Kandahar government has made dramatic announcements of Taliban surrenders, many of the trumpeted capitulations have turned out later to have been shams. In Baghran in the southwestern province of Helmand, formidable Taliban General Abdul Wahid, known as Rais the Baghran, was said to have given up around Jan. 5. The next day, TIME met with the resolute Wahid. Most of his arsenal and troops remained intact. To this day he controls the district. After surrendering to the Kandahar governor, Jalalabad commander Mullah Salam Rakti retreated to his home base in Qalat. A day later, government soldiers sent to his residence found it locked and abandoned. "He has gone into hiding with his men," says a Qalat local. "Even his own village doesn't know where he is." At one point the Taliban's Herat police chief Mullah Abdul Samad and, later, Mullah Obaidullah entered negotiations to turn themselves in. "They were told by the governor that they could go home, but then the Americans wanted to take them, so they escaped again," Hajji Mullah Sahib says. "So we have no intention of surrendering."

U.S. and British forces will spend the coming weeks and months trying to pin down those with a similarly recalcitrant view--if, that is, they can be found, sifted from the supporters who hide them, feed them and join their ranks. This fight is likely to be patchy, frustrating and drawn out. "The world again sent the firewood for fighting in Afghanistan," says Hajji Mullah Sahib. "And sure enough it ignited. The smoke of this fire will linger for a long time."

TIME: In Afghanistan, Shutting Down Taliban Support

Cynthia@mickware.com — 2002-03-13T00:00:00-08:00

By MICHAEL WARE

No army exists in a vacuum. One reason the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces holed up in their Shah-i-Kot stronghold have been able to last so long is that they have had crucial help from sympathetic locals. So this week, as the assault by Afghan forces to move the terrorists out of their base shifted into high gear, a team of Australian commandos conducted a raid designed to cut off some of that support. The mission came Monday, as an Afghan force of more than 350 footsoldiers led by General Zia Lodin and backed by six tanks and American air cover stormed up the western reaches of the terrorists' domain. Elements of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division swept down from the north. The plan: to drive the remnants of al-Qaeda's fanatical militia into the southern and eastern killing fields set by U.S. and Australian Special Forces along the most feasible escape routes.

That same afternoon, further south near the tiny village of Shayk Mali, two teams of Australian commandos ventured from their isolated camp at the bottom of a desert gully. In eleven all-terrain vehicles the Special Air Service troops crossed a dry riverbed and low ridges embroidered with sharp-edged stones to reach the village of Gardit Khahi in Armah district. Though they'd patrolled the hamlet at the foot of the mountains many times in the past month, their arrival took the villagers by surprise. "They had many weapons and were ready to fight," said 21-year-old Akram the next day.

The Australians had good reason to be on their guard. The people of Armah have been supporting al-Qaeda and Taliban there from the beginning of the fight. Even during the height of the offensive a week ago intelligence reported fighters coming down from the peaks at night to rest, resupply and seek medical attention. Last Saturday extra checkpoints were thrown up along the edge of the battlefield to deny them access. But checkpoints mean nothing in Gardit Khahi. Here, all that's between al-Qaeda and the village of 30 farming families is a single, passable mountain. "But we don't help al-Qaeda," villager Haji Amin Khan maintains, "because if we do the Americans will bomb us."

When the Australians drove in late in Monday afternoon they knew precisely what they were looking for. One team went to a large new compound on the top of a hill. The other continued about a mile and a half further to the Taliban district office. "We don't know what they were looking for," elder Haji Tazha Gul told TIME. But there are clues. The compound the SAS raided is empty, but nonetheless grand, and clearly beyond the means of the impoverished farmers. At the district office SAS troops destroyed an anti-aircraft gun. Ammunition was seized from a storeroom. Elsewhere, bedrolls were neatly stacked along a wall. The blankets were new and expensive, the pillows and mats ornate. Again the locals said the office, a former Taliban headquarters, had been unused. Yet signs of life were obvious.

There's more than recuperating fighters to worry about at Gardit Khahi. The village borders one of the three major exit roads from Shah-i-Kot. Running through snow-clogged passes, the unstable road is littered with mines, many left over from the war against the Russians, but villagers say al-Qaeda and the Taliban have laid fresh ones. To the east and west of Gardit Khahi U.S. Special Forces maintain blocking points to prevent al-Qaeda escapes. Tuesday attack helicopters were diving low over houses and heavy bombardment continued just a short distance up the mountain. Residents say it's impossible to sleep at night with the ear-cracking explosions. "It was fighting and bombing all last night," said Haji Amin Khan. "We heard the sound of heavy weapons from American soldiers on the ground, and the noise of bombardment. And we could hear the sound of heavy weapons some ways away from the al-Qaeda side."