Rising Above The Ruins: Nation-Building.(World Trade Center and Pentagon Attacks)(The Fight Ahead)

The gorges of Ghorband form a natural fortress. To get to the dugouts along the front lines, you take a road that snakes around towering crags, above a river valley of astonishing beauty. Mud-brick and stone villages cling to the hillsides, approachable only along a series of switchback paths, every turn guarded by watchful boy-soldiers. Just beyond the village of Ruyoq is the beginning of enemy territory. After a dizzying climb above the village, you come to the first of a series of sangars--emplacements carved into the scree. Abdul Quayum, a local commander for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, creeps up to one outlying dugout and peers through a firing slit. Just there, he says, in the massive cliffs a few hundred yards away, are Taliban positions. To a foreign eye, they are invisible. "Without our help, the Americans will not be able to do anything," says Quayum, who has spent his life in these mountains. "It is difficult for me to imagine how Americans can fight here."

In Afghanistan, Quayum's observation passes for a warm invitation to join forces. But from Washington last week, there was some uncertainty about what the new "twilight war" on terror might look like, and who would be part of it. At one point, President George W. Bush practically urged the Taliban's opponents to join with America, saying the best way to bring terrorists…