Word: mazar
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...sighs of relief. The U.S. had yearned for a battlefield victory in Afghanistan that would vindicate five weeks of aerial attacks, bolster confidence in the Pentagon's strategy and puncture some of the Taliban's swelling resolve before winter sets in. While the Alliance's siege of Mazar may not have satisfied all those aims, it did give the U.S. campaign a welcome adrenaline jolt. And its significance ran deeper: in its quick betrayals and shifting tempo, primitive clashes and unanticipated results, the battle for Mazar-i-Sharif offers insights into the ways people fight in this forbidding land. Afghan...
...Last Thursday, in his first pentagon briefing since the war began, Centcom chief General Tommy Franks came as close as the Pentagon gets to revealing specifics about its strategy: he acknowledged that the Pentagon was "interested" in Mazar-i-Sharif. Two out of every three bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes last week fell on Taliban lines guarding Mazar. The critical prize was the airport, three miles east of the city; Atta told TIME that "taking the airfield is the same as taking Mazar." The runway may serve as a base from which U.S. jets will be able to strike targets...
...which is to say there is still a long way and a lot of bloodletting to go. Mazar had barely been liberated last Friday when Dostum's forces overran the towns of Tashkurghan and Hairatan and zeroed in on Kunduz, one of the last Taliban strongholds in northern Afghanistan. A senior Alliance official told TIME that the Alliance now controls the northwest and has advanced as far south as Pul-i-Khumri?100 miles away from the capital, Kabul. The official said Taliban soldiers stranded in Kunduz and further east in Taloqan have been cut off from fresh supplies...
...Taliban resolve has caused mounting anxiety among U.S. military strategists, particularly because until last week the Northern Alliance showed few signs of war readiness. Three weeks ago, near Mazar-i-Sharif, a rebel charge was turned back by a Taliban counteroffensive because the Alliance's four rival commanders failed to coordinate their attacks. In the north, the Alliance's loose-knit guerrilla bands are plagued by ethnic infighting, inexperience and customary drug use. The preferred narcotic is a potent, pungent hashish that is smoked by Alliance and Taliban soldiers alike from dinner until midnight. Alliance soldiers say they make...
...exploiting Taliban vulnerability. "These folks are aggressive," U.S. Marine General Peter Pace said Wednesday. "They're taking the war to their enemy?and ours." For the Alliance, the war's critical turn came early this month when U.S. B-52s began hammering Taliban front lines dug in near Mazar and Kabul and further north, along the Tajik border. Despite U.S. frustration with the Alliance's sluggishness, the complexity of waging war in an alien, booby-trapped environment gave Pentagon strategists little choice but to embrace the rebels as a proxy ground force. For the first time, the Pentagon last week...