Bombs Away

By Romesh Ratnesar

On the front lines of the war, you learn about America's strategy by staring at the smoke. Above the peaks and ridges of northern Afghanistan last week, the plumes billowed thick and black in long, ragged lines--calling cards of the B-52 bombers that each dropped 25,000 lbs. of ordnance on Taliban positions. For Northern Alliance fighters scanning the sky from the Taloqan front in the far north to Jabal Saraj, near Kabul, those massive clouds of smoke, dust and debris could mean only one thing: the long-awaited American command to take the fight to the Taliban had at last arrived. "Finally the U.S. is doing something useful," said Mamor Hassan, a commander near the Taloqan front. "We have been waiting so long for this to happen. It is our dream come true." The Alliance is still bogged down outside the key cities of Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif, and there were reports of disappointment that America's big planes had missed targets and failed to dislodge the Taliban. But the rebels are excited nonetheless, ready to believe something has changed. "I'd never seen anything like this," says Baryalai, 29, a fighter in Jabal Saraj. "This was something quite different."

It isn't just Alliance soldiers who welcomed a change. One month into the conflict, the U.S. war effort is under siege from a global chorus of critics--chiming in everywhere from the streets of Quetta to the hallways of Congress--who say the campaign to crush the Taliban and seize Osama bin Laden is hurtling toward either humiliating defeat or inescapable quagmire; that U.S. bombs are doing either too much damage, not enough or both at the same time; and that the U.S. had better produce some "wins" soon, before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan (which begins Nov. 17) and the first snowfalls allow the Taliban to rally the public and replenish its forces. In short, the U.S. is fighting a perception of the war as ineffectual as much as it is fighting the war itself.

Among some congressional hawks, anxieties run high about the apparent timidity of the American strategy: too few troops, too much dependence on the Northern Alliance, precision bombing that's too precise to scare the Taliban but not precise enough to spare civilians. Behind closed doors--and always out of the President's earshot--some of these complaints have reached the Administration. "War is a miserable business," says Arizona Senator John McCain. "Let's get on with it." Fissures in the international coalition are becoming visible, with Europeans encountering more hostile public opinion. In Britain support for the war has slipped from 74% to 62% in two weeks. "The carping takes a toll," says an aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "especially if you don't have any Iwo Jimas to point to--and we don't have any yet."

"What are we doing, why are we doing it, how long will we be doing it?" Rumsfeld asked last week, running through some key questions during a Pentagon briefing. "Are we doing it in a way we're pleased or disappointed with?"

The Defense Secretary insists that all these questions still have happy answers. But he and his generals know battle plans are often the first casualties of battle. After weeks of bristling at complaints about the campaign's sluggishness, the Pentagon may have finally concluded that the best way to silence the grumbling is to heed it. Rumsfeld and his generals say there has been no abrupt shift in strategy. "We're in the driver's seat," says Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem. But now the commanders are stepping on the accelerator. As many as 100 commandos are already on Afghan soil and hooking up with Northern Alliance forces. The "forward air controllers" among them call in B-52 strikes to pound Taliban positions without hitting Alliance troops. Until now the Taliban's front lines have been spared the weight of American bombs, but last week the U.S. unleashed 80% of its firepower on Taliban soldiers in Mazar and Kabul. There's more to come. Rumsfeld promises a relentless carpet-bomb barrage and a four-fold increase in the number of special-ops troops on the ground inside Afghanistan. "The only way to win a war is to beat the other guy," says an Air Force colonel. "So we're hitting them harder than we were before."

It will be instructive to see whether the Taliban notices. The regime appears to be somewhat surprised--and more than a little cocky--to find itself still standing after a month of war with America. U.S. officials believe that the Taliban has exploited the slackening of support among some U.S. allies to dissuade defectors and lure new recruits. "They feel they have the means to actually win this," says a U.S. diplomat in Pakistan. A TIME reporter who spent three days in Kandahar last week interviewing key Taliban commanders and officials, including Tayeb Agha, spokesman for the supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, found the Taliban brass oozing bravado. No senior leaders, the officials claimed, have died from U.S. bombings. Omar and bin Laden, Agha says, remain safe. The propaganda message, which Taliban leaders may actually believe, is this: the U.S. has taken its best shot but has hardly bruised them. Said Akhtar Muhammed Usmani, the region's military chief: "We're waiting to fight the Americans--if they dare."

The U.S. and its allies have started taking up that challenge, with more devastating air strikes on Taliban soldiers, more U.S. commandos, and a broad new public relations offensive to refute the Afghan rulers' audacious claims. The Taliban's successful propaganda stunts accusing America of indiscriminately killing civilians--such as a tour of various rubble piles in Kandahar last week--have suddenly made the selling of the war strategy almost as crucial as the strategy. The White House and Downing Street have created new Coalition Information Centers, campaign-style spin shops in Washington, London and Pakistan aimed at countering Taliban claims as soon as they are issued. And this week President Bush will make his plea to give war a chance, as he meets with Tony Blair of Britain, Jacques Chirac of France and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and delivers three speeches on war and terror--including his maiden address to the U.N. General Assembly, scheduled for Saturday.

When he goes before the world, the President will need to provide evidence that the military component of his campaign against terrorism is delivering more than just ruins. The Administration craves some kind of victory in Afghanistan that Bush can wield as a trophy in New York. Military officials told TIME they are monitoring several cave compounds in the mountains between Kabul and Kandahar where they believe bin Laden may be holed up. Last week U.S. warplanes began pummeling the area, hoping to kill bin Laden or at least collapse passageways inside the cave to effectively immobilize him. "For all we know," an officer says hopefully, "he could already be dead."

But Administration officials will settle for less if they can get it. Last week's thundering B-52 raids emboldened Northern Alliance soldiers, who a week earlier had despaired of America's inexplicable restraint. General Abdul Nasir, a senior Alliance officer based near Kabul, told TIME that a strike last Wednesday took out three Taliban tanks, 15 trucks and two artillery pieces. "Compared to bombing in earlier days, these strikes were particularly effective," says Nasir. "It's clear the enemy took heavy casualties." Other Alliance commanders said the B-52 strikes in their areas had been far less accurate and deadly--the Taliban soldiers are so dug in that even carpet bombing can't dislodge them. "When the U.S. bombs fall," says Shahjan, a deputy commander in Farkhar, near the Taloqan front, "the Taliban just run into caves in the hills." And when the bombers move on, the Taliban soldiers emerge, largely unscathed. That may change as more U.S. targeting specialists take the field. Last week, news that U.S. troops dressed in civilian clothes and baseball caps had been spotted at a helicopter pad north of Kabul buoyed rebel spirits.

Analysts say that 10,000 pro-Taliban troops may mass to defend Kabul, which means further U.S. bombing still must precede a Northern Alliance assault on the capital. An offensive is more imminent in the vital crossroads city of Mazar. Kudratullo Hurmat, an aide to Northern Alliance commander Ustad Mohammed Atta, says, "The U.S. bombing is helping a lot. We're ready for a big offensive in the next two or three days." Fresh AK-47s, rockets and tanks supplied by Russia have found their way to the Alliance. Atta's forces remain bogged down 10 miles from the city, and two previous advances have been repelled by the Taliban's force there. But a Taliban representative interviewed by TIME last week admitted to nervousness about a U.S.-backed assault on Mazar. The Taliban fear that Mazar will be the first in a succession of falling dominoes, providing a base for the Alliance to clear a northern tier of opposition territory and open up supply routes from Uzbekistan. The Taliban warns of savage combat in Mazar that could ensnare American special forces. "The best Taliban fighters are in Mazar," says the official. "They've pledged not to leave the city alive."

That's the kind of slit-throat warfare the Pentagon tried to prepare the public for early in the conflict. But so far there hasn't been much of it. Some planned commando infiltrations have been sabotaged by sandstorms, sleet and Taliban resistance. Bad weather caused the crash last Friday of an MH-53 Pave Low helicopter in northern Afghanistan, injuring four crewmen. U.S. F-14s blew up the wreckage of the downed helicopter to prevent its secret equipment from falling into hostile hands. Pentagon officials dismissed Taliban claims that it had shot down the helicopter and killed all on board.

The halting rhythm of the military operation has complicated the Pentagon's sales effort and exposed some early assessments as naively optimistic. Nonetheless, the American public's support has stayed aloft. "It's not a tough sell right now," says a top Rumsfeld aide. "If you had an election on the war in America, we'd win it hands down because the wounds are fresh. But they won't be fresh six months from now."

A handicap for this Administration is that it has no credible uniformed stalwart to make the case for the war on a daily basis--as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf did during the Gulf War. And so the sober, 69-year-old Rumsfeld has become the Administration's go-to guy. With Dick Cheney mostly at his undisclosed location, Rumsfeld is the government's resident grownup, an acerbic spokesman who can convey condescension and playfulness in the same breath, as he did last week when chiding a reporter for "beginning with an illogical premise and proceeding perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion."

Rumsfeld's aides say he is unruffled by criticism of the war's progress, in part because it has come from all sides. "There are starting to be some questions, like [Senator Joseph] Biden suggesting we risk being viewed as a high-tech bully and McCain wanting us to do more," says a top adviser. "So we're in the middle, which is a pretty good place to be." But the disgruntlement impressed Rumsfeld enough for him to devote much of his briefing Thursday to a history lesson on the deliberate pace of previous U.S. wars, and to pointedly remind his audience of what precipitated the conflict: "The smoke is still rising from the World Trade Center." The White House has given Rumsfeld the job of reassuring nervous members of Congress; he spends two hours every day in meetings with the press and lawmakers. "I wouldn't do it if I didn't think it was important," he says.

Late last week he began a mission with stops in Russia, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to defend the war and buck up support among coalition partners. On the agenda in Uzbekistan will be an expanded U.S. use of bases there as America begins to contemplate something it very much wishes to avoid: inserting a substantial ground force into the region.

One of the chief complaints leveled at Rumsfeld and the Pentagon's strategists is that they failed to predict or prepare for the Taliban's ability to withstand an aerial assault. Western and Pakistani military officials openly hint that an American ground force may be required to remove the Taliban and install a successor government. Military commanders are exploring the idea of grabbing territory inside Afghanistan to use as a staging area for hit-and-run attacks against al-Qaeda. Seizing and holding an airstrip would involve as many as 15,000 troops, and there's little chance of inserting them before spring. Waiting that long would provide a psychological and material boost for the Taliban, which will use the winter months to regroup. But the U.S. never had much choice. Even if the military had begun mobilizing to fight a ground war on Sept. 12, it's doubtful that it would have been ready to launch one by now.

In Pakistan many analysts say the U.S. went into combat too soon, without first blanketing Urdu-language media outlets with the American case for intervention. Instead, since Sept. 11, thousands of impressionable Pakistani militants have volunteered to fight with the Taliban. "We don't understand politics," says Janzeb Khan, an unemployed 25-year-old in Peshawar. "We just see what is happening in Afghanistan, and we know it is right for every Muslim to join them in this war." It's no wonder that a senior Administration official greeted news of the U.S.-British propaganda machine with fatalism. "It's a great idea," the official said. "Too bad no one thought of it a month ago."

Ultimately the allies' efforts to sell their war strategy will work only as well as the strategy itself. And inside the war rooms, there is a growing belief that the strategy for winning this war requires at least as much ruthlessness as the carpet-bombing B-52s displayed last week, and probably much more. A senior U.S. official in Pakistan says American ground forces will ultimately need to mount lethal raids in the heart of Taliban country, to prove to the regime that the U.S. is willing and able to cut them down. Facing off against the Taliban on its turf won't be easy, and the human toll could be horrific. But that's the point in a merciless war. Last week Rumsfeld acknowledged as much when he defended the military's use of flesh-shredding cluster bombs on Taliban trenches. "They are being used on front-line al-Qaeda and Taliban troops," he explained, "to try to kill them." Americans rarely hear so blunt a sales pitch. From here on in, they'd better get used to it.

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Mark Thompson and Karen Tumulty/Washington, J.F.O. McAllister/London, Hannah Beech/the Taloqan front, Anthony Davis/Jabal Saraj, Alex Perry/Tashkent, Johanna McGeary/Peshawar and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Kandahar

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Mark Thompson and Karen Tumulty/Washington, J.F.O. McAllister/London, Hannah Beech/the Taloqan front, Anthony Davis/Jabal Saraj, Alex Perry/Tashkent, Johanna McGeary/Peshawar and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Kandahar