NO WONDER THE TALE BAN RAN

Julian Manyon sees the devastation wrought by the B-52s, but says that the fall of Kabul is not the end of the struggle

Kabul THERE is a peculiar fascination in driving through the front line of an army that has fled in the night. For weeks we have peered through binoculars at a straight section of the Kabul road, empty except for a burntout tank, that led to the Taleban positions. Once, we had driven down it as far as we dared only to retreat rapidly in reverse gear when bullets sang over our heads and Northern Alliance soldiers shouted that the verges were mined. Now the Taleban had gone and we sped through a bomb-blasted landscape with little sense of fear.

Examining what remained, the wonder is that the Taleban army of amateurish zealots stood firm under the American bombing for so long. Vast craters dotted their defensive lines, while the village of Karabah which housed their headquarters looks as if it has been blow-torched from above. Mud buildings are flattened and trees reduced to eerie twisted stumps, the result of repeated B-52 strikes on one day, when I saw the bombers come in every five minutes to blast the same area with their sticks of bombs. There have been many doubts expressed over the effectiveness of the American air strikes, but few who have seen the results in front of Kabul would share them.

The Shomali plain where the Pashtun and Arab warriors of the Taleban chose to make their stand is a perfect stage for bomber pilots to display their black art. There is little cover — just flat emptiness, broken by mudwalls and dwellings. I can imagine no more terrifying experience than sitting in a poorly constructed bunker listening to the drone of jets overhead. It is indeed fortunate for the United States that the end of the Cold War has meant that the Russians no longer distribute their best surface-to-air missile systems to Third World countries. Their latest model would certainly reduce the lumbering B-52 to the status of a sitting duck.

The bombing undoubtedly weakened the Taleban and probably convinced them that there was little point in clinging to their trenches, but other uniquely Afghan factors — above all, the love of intrigue and betrayal — helped to bring about their startlingly swift retreat. At Qalai Nasro, a key Taleban stronghold linking the forces defending the Kabul road with those dug in beside the ruined Bagram airbase, the defenders apparently negotiated with the Northern Alliance for weeks. Well before the Alliance assault, it was agreed that the Taleban fighters would defect at the critical moment, and it is suggested unkindly that many of the corpses found in the area afterwards were those of Arabs and Pakistanis who stood in the way of the plan and were conveniently disposed of. Certainly, the local Alliance commander, the corpulent General Baba Jan, publicly embraced his Taleban opposite number when the stronghold fell, and allowed his men to keep their weapons and accompany him on a triumphal drive into Kabul.

The sudden fall of the Afghan capital has also demonstrated the curious effectiveness, when things go well, of the Alliance's mediaeval style of military organisation, which is based on warlords and the forces they muster. Few conventional military doctrines are observed, least of all the early start.

On the day of the Great Offensive, I rose in darkness and was heading towards the front line while the morning sun was just a fiery red glow behind the mountains. Offensives start in the wee hours, I had told my team, who reminded me of this as the morning wore on with barely a sign of activity. It was not until after ten o'clock that a small column of tanks and infantry moved down a dirt road towards the enemy, and not until noon that the guns began to fire. Meanwhile. at the position we were occupying a little further back, an angry row broke out between two groups of mujahedin soldiers over the advisability of taking part in the fighting. One man accused another of cowardice, whereupon the man so branded flew into a terrible rage and shook his Kalashnikov above his head. I was beginning to fear that honour might be satisfied by machine-gunning our party of foreign journalists when the more heroic contingent boarded their pick-up and headed for the sound of gunfire.

Backed by American air strikes, which pulverised points of resistance, the ancient Alliance tanks moved forwards until, as night fell, a commando we encountered on the road bellowed simply, 'The front is broken'; and so it proved.

Then came the élan that success brings to armies of this kind. From all over the Shomali plain emerged Alliance war bands determined not to be left out. One of our drivers succumbed to a rush of blood and abandoned us with his vehicle to join his commander in the stampede to Kabul. When we reached the city's outskirts the following morning, we were greeted by an extraordinary spectacle: a mile-long traffic-jam of Alliance armour and truckloads of infantry being restrained by a cordon of soldiers who, for the moment at least, were attempting to honour their leadership's pledge to the Americans that the Alliance army would not immediately enter Kabul.

Journalists were also to be kept out, and the deadlock lasted for half an hour, until the impatient commander of a couple of truckloads of soldiers ordered his men to disembark and simply marched them towards the cordon which, after a few minutes of angry argument, gave way. The troops began to pour through, and us with them.

We arrived in a battered city where the damage of successive wars has been patched up but not repaired, and the unpopularity of the Taleban was demonstrated by the welcome we received. Every time we stopped, crowds of people pressed forward to shake our hands, and cries of 'Thank you, thank you' rang in our ears. Afghan men may favour beards and wrapping their women in the absurdly restrictive chadar, hut enshrining these practices in law is not enough to make them love Taleban rule. Many spoke of the religious zealots with real hatred.

To the dismay of my interpreter, I accosted a group of veiled women and enquired what they thought of the Taleban. Men standing nearby muttered angrily at my shameful behaviour, but one of the women wanted to be heard. Gesturing with her arms underneath the heavy blue robe, and speaking through the bird-cage grille that concealed her features, she told me that the Taleban were cruel. 'They beat us,' she said simply. I asked her if she wanted to continue wearing the veil now that they had gone. 'No,' she replied. 'Let those who want to wear it do so, but I don't want it.' At that point a bearded man a few feet away raised a stick as if to beat her, but was restrained by the others. We beat a retreat to our pick-up and pressed on through a city where it seemed that on this day of liberation only men could celebrate.

Gunfire rang out as Alliance soldiers pursued Taleban stragglers in the hills around the city, and in a ditch we found the body of a man who showed all the signs of having been killed in an act of vengeance. 'Pakistani, said a group of people who watched and occasionally kicked the stiffening body. In Kabul, justice can be swift, and none administered it more harshly than the Taleban. By mid-morning I found myself in front of the small raised booth, built for traffic policemen, which in 1996 served as a gallows for the corpse of the pro-Soviet ex-president Najibullah. His body was suspended there after he was castrated and dragged behind a jeep when the Talchan first entered Kabul. At the foot of the structure which, in their eyes, was apparently historic, the Taleban had laid their latest symbol of success. Lying on the pavement was part of the undercarriage of an American helicopter which was damaged in the undistinguished US commando raid on Kandahar. It was hardly an impressive sight, but the fundamentalists, believing in no graven images, have left no real mark on Kabul apart from further ruin and despair.

Their departure, at least, was a well

organised affair. Their security chief in the capital. Mullah Vanas Akhanzadeh, clearly saw the writing on the wall and left shortly before the Alliance began their offensive. The villa he had occupied was demolished by a US air strike as Alliance troops advanced on the city, but the Americans were 48 hours too late, and all I found at the flattened house was the owner, a Kabul businessman, bemoaning his loss. 'The Taleban refused to pay rent,' he told me. 'They said that if they saw me anywhere near the house, they would shoot me.' Next door, less heavily damaged, was the residence of the former Taleban governor, Abdul Manan Niazi, who fled to Kandahar more than a month ago, leaving behind only a collection of religious tracts, a book on learning Arabic, and crates of ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades in the basement.

The Taleban fighters left more hurriedly but not, apparently, in disorder. They removed the remaining serviceable tanks from the bases which had been repeatedly bombed, and they collected their wounded from the military hospital. Then the turbaned warriors took the road east, leaving behind the question of whether they intended to mount continued resistance or whether Taleban power will now collapse like a house of cards.

To fight on, the Taleban will have to show a flexibility which may be alien to them. Under the bombing, it may simply be impossible for them to hold any of the major cities. To endure, they will have to resort to long-term guerrilla warfare in the mountains, the deadly attrition of hit-andrun attacks. But the Taleban have little recent experience of such warfare, and the Americans have been wise to keep their foreign presence on the ground as invisible as possible, lest the sight of alien invaders inflames Afghan passions. Aeroplanes at 30,000 feet make unsatisfactory enemies, and the Taleban now risk facing an additional danger: being branded as losers by their fellow Pashtuns and seeing their key commanders abandon or betray them. Washington will now be hoping that Afghan hard-headedness asserts itself, and that the Pashtun tribal mainstream will now come to see the Taleban leadership and even Osama bin Laden as a costly inconvenience best done away with.

For Washington, the dramatic victories of these days have brought satisfaction but also political difficulties. They, too, suffered an Afghan betrayal when the Alliance broke its promise not to send its troops into Kabul. The Alliance may well argue that they had to preserve public order, but the result, for all the soft soap generated by the foreign minister Abdullab, is that they have seized power, and America's declared aim of building a broader coalition will become more difficult. All this may not matter if the Taleban disintegrate rapidly; but if they are able to come through their present crisis, they may find a Tadjik—Uzbek alliance government in Kabul to be a fine recruiting sergeant in their heartland.

The Kabulese now find themselves again under the sway of a government which many detested in the chaos and civil war of the early 1990s but which they may now see as the lesser of two evils. The Alliance has immediately sought to address its reputation for corrupt and anarchic behaviour. On the day of their arrival, soldiers were ordered not to punish civilian looters but instead stood guard over piles of booty they had managed to recover, waiting for someone to come and claim it. But it is likely that the warlord system runs too deep, and, if our experience over the last few weeks is anything to go by, commanders will soon lose interest in building a stable government and will instead start arguing over the spoils.

I am finally installed in the Kabul Intercontinental, the object of reverie for so many weeks. Curiously, however, conditions barely differ from the hovel we occupied in Jabal-us-Siraj. On the fourth floor of this war-ravaged hotel, there is no running water, the ceiling is stained and bulging, and the toilet is filthy and does not flush. The only decorative feature in my room is a bullet-hole in the plate-glass window. But the staff are cautiously friendly and some are even shaving off their beards. Above all, there is a bed and, with the Northern Alliance capturing much of the road network, there may even be a way out.

Meanwhile, I understand that John Simpson is claiming credit for liberating Kabul, on the grounds that he was the first journalist to enter Kabul. I hate to disabuse him, but I believe that the lion's share should go to that equally venerable and magnificently proportioned war horse: the American B-52 bomber.

Jidian Manyon is ITN's Asia correspondent, This article is also reproduced for ITN online and can be seen at www.itn.co.uk.