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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...
...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...
...same coin. The Americans have always known that Paktia province, where the fighting is taking place, is bandit country. (Ironically, the new governor of the province, and Karzai's voice there, is an American citizen: Taj Muhammad Wardak spent the past decade in Los Angeles.) Shah-i-Kot was a well-known base for the mujahedin fighting Soviet forces in the 1980s; indeed, the Soviets never took the valley. The soft shale on the ridges is ideal for the construction of caves. One cave, visited last week by a TIME reporter, was at least 40 yards deep and high enough...
...while." In the war against terrorism, more American casualties are inevitable. One day, perhaps, Americans will tire of the slow drip of deaths--three here, five there--of the sort that old colonial powers like France and Britain once learned to endure. That hasn't happened yet; Shah-i-Kot marks the first time in many years that Americans have died in battle on a foreign field without a sense of outrage and shame at home. After 18 Army Rangers and special forces died at the battle of Mogadishu in 1993--the subject of the film Black Hawk Down--some...
...Qaeda leaders huddled in their caves in the Shah-i-Kot mountains last week, enduring allied bombs, howling snowstorms and temperatures that fell to 15[degrees]F, their counterparts were prosecuting the war from sunny Tampa, Fla. High-tech warfare allows General Tommy Franks and his Central Command officers to run the battle from MacDill Air Force Base, 7,700 miles from Kabul. The command center at MacDill monitors all the intelligence from the region and beams Franks' orders to his field generals. Last week he directed the largest fight of the war so far. A few days before Operation...