Word: northerners
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...visitors, but they can conceal tightly bound units with a fighting philosophy that places greater importance on energy conservation and brutal surprise than on sheer military muscle. "We must make sure that we pick the right time to fight," says Mohammed Kabeer Marzban, a warlord who controls the northern town of Khoja Bahauddin. "Otherwise we will have wasted our soldiers in vain." As the conflict wears on, learning the strange art of Afghan warfare will be critical to American success...
...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 within minutes. And the unclogging of the roadways leading into Mazar will help the U.S. build a "land bridge" from Afghanistan's northern border with Uzbekistan that the allies can use to pour in ground troops for an all-out assault on the Taliban...
...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...
...Pentagon would prefer to continue blasting Taliban lines with B-52 carpet bombs while the Northern Alliance does the dirty work on the ground. Though the number of U.S. sorties flown daily last week dipped from 100 to 75, the bombers were able to hit harder and with more focused rage. U.S. special-ops spotters deployed to the front more than doubled last week to almost 100 men. Target guides on the ground allowed the U.S. to pulverize Taliban troops in the north with a pair of BLU-82 "daisy cutters"--15,000-lb., minivan-size killing machines carried...
...weapon's intent--like the cluster bombs the U.S. began unleashing a few weeks ago--is to terrorize enemy troops into surrender. The Pentagon believes such intimidation is beginning to take hold. Though the Northern Alliance claimed massive enemy desertions, U.S. commanders know better than to count on a collapse of the Taliban's fighting zeal...