US aims to sway Pashtun leaders in country's south

Northern Alliance fighters walk through the front-line village of Rabat, near Bagram, 50km from the Afghan capital Kabul on Monday before attacking Taliban positions. PHOTO: AP

There are two wars in Afghanistan now, a northern campaign that is rapidly entering its final stages and a southern campaign that is just beginning.

As the flight of Taliban fighters from Kabul Monday night shows, managing the success in the north and ensuring that it supports the aims in the south is a daunting problem.

In more than a month of war, the Bush administration has struggled to make headway against the Taliban and the foreign fighters recruited by Osama bin Laden. And now that the Northern Alliance has swept across northern Afghanistan, the Bush administration is calculating that the advance will send a resounding message.

The administration hope is that the gains by the Northern Alliance will persuade Pashtun tribes in the south that the Taliban's days are numbered and that they should join forces with the American-led military coalition.

But Washington also has been worried that a breakdown of discipline or retribution by the alliance's fighters, many of whom are ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks, could alienate the Pashtuns in the south and prompt them to rally around the Taliban.

"?Pashtun tribal leaders are going to have to start calculating that the Taliban is going to fail. They ? will want to be influential in postwar negotiations ? They will be reading the tea leaves closely."

A Pentagon official

Washington's had been especially acute in the case of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, which Washington had wanted the Northern Alliance to surround, but not enter.

The alliance forces have promised to stay out of the capital as long as rival groups, particularly those supported by its archenemy, Pakistan, do not get there first. That spurred Washington to rush plans for an Islamic security force from Turkey, Bangladesh and Indonesia -- but as yet no Arab countries -- to keep order in Kabul in the vaccuum left by fleeing Taliban fighters.

But reports from Kabul that some Northern Alliance troops had begun to enter the city has raised the question of whether Washington's political strategy is being outpaced by the fast-moving events on the ground.

From the start of the struggle against the Taliban and bin Laden, the northern campaign has been the easier one, because the Pentagon had a proxy force in the different factions of the Northern Alliance. Those groups were eager to redouble their years-long struggle against the Taliban and accept direct support from the US military. US forces mounted bombing raids, deployed commandos to help call in airstrikes and organized the supply of weapons.

Allegiances the Taliban, whose political base is Kandahar in the south, were weakest in the north.

"Although the top leadership of the Taliban is very ideological and very religiously motivated," a Pentagon official said, "the farther you get from Kandahar and Kabul, the more tenuous these relationships and ideological fervor become. They've had to resort to very harsh tactics to control northern areas."

Fighting the protective cover of American air power, the Northern Alliance gains include Herat, the most important city in western Afghanistan and close to the border with Iran. The Shiite Muslim leaders in Tehran have long opposed the Sunni Muslim Taliban and supplied the Northern Alliance with weapons.

A Northern Alliance commander, Ismail Khan, captured Herat, his hometown, on Monday, apparently without a bloody fight. The alliance reported 6,000 Taliban defections.

Other include Chaghcharan, an important crossroads on the road that connects Kabul and Herat; Taliqan, a city in the northeast; a number of provincial capitals in the north; and, of course, Mazar-e-Sharif.

Taliban remain lodged in Kunduz, in the northeast where Taliban troops fleeing Mazar-e-Sharif and Taliqan are thought to be assembling.

Northern Alliance officials said they were keeping their fighters outside the cities that they have seized and sending in cadres of police officers instead to prevent looting that could give their campaign a bad name.

But there have already been some discipline problems. Reporters saw Northern Alliance fighters as they executed Taliban soldiers on the front near Kabul.

Kunduz also pose a test of the Pentagon's hopes of minimizing Northern Alliance retribution and enticing southern Pashtuns to America's side.

So will Kabul, which some Northern Alliance fighters were seen entering after Taliban fighters fled Monday.

A senior Bush administration official said Monday night that a great deal depended on how the alliance's fighters conducted themselves in the capital. If only a small number of the alliance's fighters entered for reconnaissance or other purposes, and if the alliance claimed the city in the name of all Afghans, the capture could be a plus.

"Now those Pashtun tribal leaders are going to have to start calculating that the Taliban is going to fail," a Pentagon official said. "They will be thinking about ways to come up with a Pashtun-dominated south at a minimum and will want to be influential in postwar negotiations as to which Afghans are going to rule. They will be reading the tea leaves closely."

But the move would work to the disadvantage of the American-led coalition if the alliance claimed the city for its own, engaged in heavy-handed occupation and there were reports of revenge killings.

Still, even if the Northern Alliance plays according to the US' rules, Washington does not expect the loss of Kabul to lead to a sudden elimination of the Taliban resistance in the south.

In a military sense, the conquest of the north can help in several ways. It will open up airfields and potential supply lines to any resistance fighters in the south.

Pentagon also said on Monday that Special Forces teams are working in the south. But their numbers are modest, and they are mostly involved in training and organizing arms for a southern insurgency that has yet to take shape or hold.

The only Afghan ally of the Americans in the south, Hamid Karzai, has so far waged a lonely struggle with American support.

Ultimately, if the strategy of winning over Pashtun warlords fails, Pentagon officials said, Washington will need to look more seriously at sending in many additional Special Forces or other ground troops.

"It might be necessary to apply military pressure down there," Powell acknowledged.