Mazar's capture is war's first victory

The capture of Mazar-i-Sharif delivers the first tangible victory for the American-led campaign after more than a month of war.

If the Northern Alliance maintains control of the strategically important city, it will cut off Taliban forces to the east. It will open up a land corridor for relief aid for millions of hungry Afghans. And it will provide the US military with a potential staging ground for military operations inside the country.

It will also provide a badly needed public relations boost for a military operation that has been long on airstrikes -- more than 8,000 bombs have been dropped -- but devoid of gains on the ground.

"I don't think there is any doubt at all that the military momentum is now moving against the Taliban," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Friday, eager to exploit the first bit of good news.

Still, for all of the applause in Washington and London and the very substantial setback the loss of the city represents for the Taliban, its conquest is not a knockout blow.

Located the steppe in the northern part of Afghanistan, Mazar-i-Sharif is far from Kandahar, the Talibans' political base in the south. So to prevail in the conflict, the US military will have to find allies among the Pashtun tribes in the south, help equip and arm them and provide them with air cover so that they also can take on the Taliban.

And US military will have to find a way to get its special operations forces, which have not carried out a raid since Oct. 19, back into the fight. In the end, the US may even have to dispatch a significant number of ground troops, an option that the Pentagon has not ruled out but which the Bush administration is clearly hoping to avoid.

The successful attack on Mazar-i-Sharif was a direct result of the Bush administration's decision to aid the Northern Alliance. The city, in fact, was a target from the opening days of the US military campaign, when a garrison of Arab and other foreign fighters recruited by Osama bin Laden, was bombed. But in recent days the US military has made a concerted effort to bomb the Taliban forces that were defending the city. American commandos near Mazar-i-Sharif, in turn, called in the airstrikes and helped plan the attack on the city itself. The US military even delivered food for the Northern Alliance's horses.

The attack on the city involved three groups of Northern Alliance forces: fighters led by General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek warlord; fighters led by Commander Mohammed Atta, an ethnic Tajik, and fighters led by Commander Haji Mohaqia, who is an ethnic Hazari.

The Taliban took flight from the city, apparently fearing they would be killed in a wave of reprisals for thousands of the murders the Taliban carried out when it took the city. American air power should ensure that the city remains in the hands of the Northern Alliance.

The capture of Mazar-i-Sharif could lead to the rout of Taliban forces from the northern tier of the country. Taliban forces in Kondoz and Taloqan will find themselves cut off from supplies. Taliban forces in the neighboring provinces of Samangan, Sar-e Pol and Faryab will also be vulnerable.

After consolidating a victory in Mazar-i-Sharif, the Northern Alliance plans to advance toward Herat in the west and the capital of Kabul to the south under the protective cover of US air attacks, said Haron Amin, special envoy in Washington for the Northern Alliance.

The seizure of the city is also expected to help improve the flow of international aid. Aid can be trucked south from Uzbekistan to Mazar-i-Sharif, which could become an important hub for distributing food and relief supplies. Pentagon officials said the first preference is to have the Northern Alliance or non-American members like the Turks guard the "land corridor" from Uzbekistan. But they did not exclude that marines might be brought in from their ships in the Arabian sea to provide security.

Mazar-i-Sharif has a large airfield that could become a staging areas for US forces inside Afghanistan. "Having access to an airfield inside the country allows for new freedom of movement," Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, spokesman for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff said.