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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...
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...
...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...
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...
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...