Word: kabul
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Days later, Mazar-i-Sharif fell, then Kabul. Within a few more days, complaints about a quagmire gave way to talk of collapse. "The Taliban fell faster than we thought," Bush told TIME, looking back a few weeks later. "But it's not over. We still need to close...
Aides argued that Bush could show the Afghans and everyone else in the region that the U.S. was not going to install an occupation force or pick a puppet leader the way the Soviets had 20 years before. But the U.S. was not going to abandon Kabul either. Those combined assurances, they said, would promote stability. Slowly, Bush came around. "An end is not, you know, the demise of al-Qaeda," he told TIME. "That's not the end. The end is a stable government [in Afghanistan...
...head of Pakistani intelligence, who just happened to be in Washington. Armitage, in a tone that he himself described as scorching, dictated the U.S. terms: Seal the borders, provide overflight and basing rights, sever diplomatic relations with the Taliban, and cut off the flow of oil and gas to Kabul. In return, the U.S. would lift sanctions, encourage loans by the International Monetary Fund and--together with its friends in Europe and Asia--shower Musharraf with more financial aid than he would know how to spend. The U.S. would also quietly provide Musharraf with intelligence information about his enemies...
...leader, General Mohammed Qassim Fahim, seemed more interested in taking empty hills than in fighting the enemy. "The truth is that Fahim for the longest time wasn't moving," says a White House official. "He wasn't moving west into Kunduz, and he wasn't moving south into Kabul...
...thereafter, things started to click on the battlefield. The special forces were not just on the ground; they were also blending in, riding horses in a cavalry charge while using handheld lasers to guide bombers to their targets. The Pentagon began to bomb the Taliban front lines, north of Kabul--the step that got Fahim moving. As a White House official put it later, "We said, 'O.K., if you won't move till we start hitting targets in front of you, we'll hit targets in front of you.' And we started bombing the valley...