Word: northerners
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...that's true." Across Afghanistan, people deserted the regime as soon as it started losing, exposing its shallow hold on them. "The Taliban showed they were good at enforcing beard lengths," says a Western diplomat, "and that's about it." The first, pivotal defeat of the Taliban, in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was greased by local Pashtun fed up with taking orders from "these village idiots from the south," as a foreign aid worker put it. Those fighters cut a secret deal with Alliance commander Rashid Dostum to allow Dostum's cavalry to pour through the Taliban...
...That's why the American targeting of Atef also served to deliver a pointed message to his boss. As American commandos did in northern Afghanistan, U.S. special ops in the south provided Pashtun tribes with advice, ammunition and weapons. But the immediate goal was to divine bin Laden's location with enough precision for the U.S. to deploy its forces?either technological or human, in the air or down into a cave?to deliver the final blow. All week American troops manned checkpoints on the roads running through former Taliban country, seeking clues to bin Laden's coordinates. Special...
...Taliban's disintegration will douse the flames of hatred in Afghanistan. But as a new world began to rise from the ruins of the Taliban's tyranny, there was cause for cautious optimism. Across Afghanistan, warlords scrambled to secure their own footholds, but for the most part, the Northern Alliance commanders avoided the widespread barbarism they administered a decade ago. And while America certainly has not finished the fight against terror, the punishment doled out by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan has made it more difficult for future bin Ladens to lure followers to join the jihad...
AFGHANISTAN Rush to Create Post-Taliban Government Opposition groups, diplomats and aid agencies scrambled to fill the political vacuum left in Kabul and other key Afghan cities abandoned by Taliban fighters under the twin onslaught of U.S. bombing and Northern Alliance advances. But there were ominous signs that warlords were reclaiming their traditional fiefdoms, threatening the country with fragmentation. Air strikes against al-Qaeda targets continued past the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as Taliban leaders remained defiant, and U.S. ground troops clashed for the first time with Taliban soldiers in the south. As British forces secured...
...later set off controlled explosions at a deserted farmhouse near Leeds. Police said the Real I.R.A., which opposes a Northern Ireland cease-fire, were the main suspects in recent attacks in Birmingham and West London. PAKISTAN A Miracle Rescue for Afghan Aid Workers Eight aid workers arrested by the Taliban in August on charges of promoting Christianity were freed last week after the city of Ghazni fell to Northern Alliance troops. Taliban forces took the two Americans, two Australians and four Germans with them in the retreat from Kabul. Abandoned in Ghazni, the workers were picked up by Northern Alliance...