The Unfinished War.(Afghanistan)(Brief Article)

At the tail end of operation Anaconda, some American victories were a bit Pyrrhic. One platoon from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division was mopping up Al Qaeda positions along a ridgeline dubbed the Whale last week when they came across a fortified bunker. They blasted the structure with antitank rockets and M-16s. They plunked grenades down "spider holes," man-size pits guarding the entrance. Manning the point, Sgt. John Wightman, 26, of Phoenix, Arizona, charged through the entrance, assault rifle blazing, and saw a figure in a white T shirt. "I blasted it, like, five times, and it kept coming at me," he said a few minutes later, as he headed out on another cave-busting patrol. "I was thinking, this motherf---er won't die." The enemy turned out to be some terrorist's underclothes, flapping on a clothesline.

The question now is whether Qaeda and Taliban fighters are as resilient as their laundry. There's little doubt that two weeks of intensive airstrikes and ground combat have effectively eliminated resistance in the Shahikot Valley. But claims that the fighting is finished--"the war is over; there is no more Al Qaeda in Afghanistan," one senior Afghan commander declared last week--are premature. Despite estimates that as many as 700 enemy fighters had been killed, fewer than 10 corpses have been found on the battlefield. (U.S. commanders insist they intercepted radio requests for hundreds of wooden coffins, even though Afghans normally bury their dead in cloth shrouds.) Even friendly Afghan commanders say that hundreds of guerrillas could have escaped, including up to 150 Chechens who reportedly slipped the noose. While the fighting still raged, Taliban commanders were already sending boastful emissaries across the border into Pakistan. "We have made a point," one told a prominent Pashtun leader in Peshawar. "We have proved we can stand up and fight the Americans. We have no reason to fear."

Anaconda, in fact, may only be the first fire fight in the kind of guerrilla war that planners have feared ever since U.S. troops were deployed in Afghanistan. In towns and villages throughout eastern Afghanistan, leaflets known as shabnamas, night letters, have appeared, accusing the United States of having killed tens of thousands of civilians. "I'm fighting with my pen, not my Kalashnikov this time," says one pamphleteer, a former mujahedin commander. Sources in ...