Word: warlords
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...They won. According to accounts given to TIME by Alliance officials, 3,500 rebels serving under Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, 47, pushed the Taliban out of Kishindi with a 16-hour assault that left 200 Taliban and an unknown number of Alliance troops dead. To the west, forces loyal to Ustad Atta Mohammed, another Alliance commander, lost 30 men in a barrage of Taliban tank fire but seized the outlying village of Aq Kuprik. From there the Alliance's long-promised and much delayed march on Mazar-i-Sharif gathered an irresistible momentum. Some Taliban soldiers ran and hid, others...
...sides often appear formless to 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...
...Afghanistan became a hotbed of terrorism precisely because of the warlord culture that overcame and then replaced the Soviets. Rival mujahedeen factions turned on each other after seizing Kabul, launching a civil war that killed some 50,000 Afghanis. But by then the U.S. was no longer interested in Afghanistan. It paid little attention, too, when its longtime regional ally, Pakistan, organized the Taliban takeover in the hope of ending the civil war on Pakistan-friendly terms. Nor when Osama bin Laden, star fundraiser and organizer of the Arab volunteers who had fought alongside the mujahedeen returned to Afghanistan...
...October 8 Lazed in the sun, trying not to notice the jackhammer noise of the generator, then hung around the Defense Ministry guest house, waiting one and a half hours for the chronically tardy Dr Abdullah the foreign minister. Then, after interviewing a cook - formerly with Dr Abdullah the warlord (I wonder if he knows. I don't think I'll mention it), we headed back to the hills for the bombing...
...While jubilant residents greeted the liberators by sacrificing sheep in the streets, the American response to the Alliance's triumph was muted. Privately, U.S. officials fretted that the three main factions storming the city could end up battling one another before the smoke could clear. Dostum, the charismatic warlord who governed Mazar until a Taliban offensive unseated him in 1997, is notorious for his inconstancy and ruthlessness, and he has no intention of ceding authority to the 37-year-old Atta, a rising military star. Atta has curried support like a small-town mayoral candidate, printing up posters of himself...