Disappearing With Hardly a Fight
Taliban Cedes Large Swath of Territory Much the Way It Took Control
By Molly Moore and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 14, 2001; Page A20
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 13 -- In the end, the Taliban lost more than half of Afghanistan in much the same way that it came to power: with barely a fight.
Today, with the opposition Northern Alliance in control of Kabul and roughly half the country, the Taliban's estimated 40,000 troops have scattered. According to military officials and witnesses' accounts, the fighters are melding into craggy Afghan mountains, streaming south toward Kandahar, their movement's birthplace, and returning to their home villages.
Some of the radical Islamic militia's fighters quietly vanished from city streets days before Northern Alliance forces arrived. Others waited until combat seemed imminent, then gathered their weapons and pulled their vehicles into retreating convoys that seemed to dissipate in the desert dust. Intelligence officials said today that the majority of troops have become phantoms in the Afghan landscape.
When the Taliban formed in 1994 amid the chaos of factional warfare, it swept across the country with remarkable swiftness -- not by annihilating its enemies but by buying them off, co-opting or outsmarting them. Persuasion, treachery and momentum brought them to Kabul in two years, far more quickly than prolonged combat would have.
With most of the Taliban forces in retreat, military officials and analysts here said it is unclear how many are regrouping in preparation for guerrilla warfare in the countryside and how many have simply deserted the militia that imposed one of the world's harshest interpretations of Islam on its impoverished people.
Military officials and Afghan specialists said a broad confluence of events spurred the unexpected pace of the Northern Alliance's success.
Daily airstrikes by U.S. warplanes, intensified in recent weeks around key cities, ravaged the Taliban's ability to communicate, move and fight. Intelligence officials and reports from inside Afghanistan described the Taliban communicating by handwritten commands dispatched with couriers on horseback and getting battlefield intelligence from BBC news broadcasts.
U.S. aerial attacks reportedly also had damaged ammunition reserves, supply lines and -- in the past week -- unnerved front-line troops with large-scale bombing not used in the first month of raids.
"They're in total disarray," a Western diplomat said. "Their military backbone is apparently broken."
But Pakistani military officials and representatives of aid organizations who have worked with the Taliban are far more cautious.
"They are making a tactical retreat," said an official of a foreign aid group with extensive experience in Afghanistan. "By moving out of the city and into the mountains, they can decide the terms of engagement for themselves."
Aid organizations monitoring Kandahar reported that large numbers of troops from across Afghanistan appeared to be gathering in the city today, but left quickly with sacks of food and weapons that they appeared to be stockpiling in the mountains.
In addition to the bombing, other factors also sped the Taliban's retreat.
Interviews with commanders on several fronts over the last several days suggest that northern Afghans -- an ethnic mix of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras who resent the southern, Pashtun-dominated Taliban -- were eager to oust their rulers.
Shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Taliban executed five officials in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif for plotting a coup. On Friday, Mazar-e Sharif became the first city to fall to the Northern Alliance.
While opposition commander Ismail Khan was still making his way toward the western city of Herat on Monday, thousands of residents already had taken up arms and were trying to force Taliban troops out of the city, according to Northern Alliance officials.
With Khan's force still five miles from town, "they called and said 'Come on in,' " said Mohammed Hasham Saad, the opposition Northern Alliance's envoy to Uzbekistan.
"What did the Taliban do for Afghanistan?" Khan said today by satellite telephone in Herat, where he was governor until the Taliban ousted him in 1995 without much more of a battle than he needed to reclaim the city Monday. "They killed people, they had a terrible regime."
Khan reportedly told the city's residents that he would reopen girls' schools that the Taliban had shut down and would allow radio and television programming that was banned by the radical Islamic militia.
Rapid shifts of allegiance also have occurred within the Taliban's ranks. Many of the local commanders who joined the Taliban during its rise in the 1990s are now reportedly turning their backs on the movement.
"Afghans never want to be on the losing side," said a longtime Afghanistan observer here. "Everyone is staking out positions."
While the Taliban's fighting force, believed to number from 30,000 to more than 40,000 men and boys, now appears to have scattered widely throughout the south, intelligence officials said they still are having difficulty accounting for many of them.
Officials speculate that vast numbers of fighters may have simply returned to their families and home villages in the face of what they considered a lost cause. According to former fighters who fled to the north, much of the Taliban's rank and file had been forcibly conscripted, often in house-to-house sweeps, and had little will to fight.
Intelligence officials and Afghanistan observers are particularly baffled by the whereabouts of the estimated 4,000 to 8,000 Arab, Chechen and other foreign troops reported to have been fighting with the Taliban.
For several days, intelligence reports and eyewitnesses in Afghanistan had said thousands of Taliban soldiers appeared to be leaving their posts in major cities and moving to remote locations. A Pakistani journalist who four days ago sneaked into Jalalabad, a major city in western Afghanistan that had been home to many of the Taliban's Arab troops, said he roamed the city for 12 hours but spotted only one small group of Taliban soldiers.
Pakistani intelligence sources said today that they have received credible reports that scores of Taliban troops, including Arabs, have entered Pakistan's southern Baluchistan province since Monday, saying they had been ordered to abandon Afghan cities and prepare for guerrilla operations based in Pakistan.
Alliance commanders said today that hundreds of Taliban fighters who retreated from Mazar-e Sharif and Taloqan appear to be gathering around the northern city of Kunduz. Officials said that foreign fighters were among the troops there.
"Many local [Taliban] commanders have defected," Northern Alliance official Saad said, "but the real Taliban and the Arabs are resisting until the last bullet. They are fighting until they are killed or captured."
Special correspondent Kamran Khan contributed to this report.
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Best Regards, J.T. |
