Word: combatting
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...first week that didn't happen. What had once been the expected strategy for combat--U.S. forces assisting the Northern Alliance in a proxy war against the Taliban--seems to have been put on hold as potential leaders squabble over the shape of a postwar government. Indeed, last week, from Kalai Sharif, a village held by the opposition just 25 miles from Kabul, those watching the bombardment of the capital could witness a rather more prosaic light show: the beams of four-wheel-drive pickup trucks, each of them loaded with Taliban fighters. They were moving toward the Northern Alliance...
First he must weather the gathering crisis that could flash into ungovernable riots at any provocation. Last week he agreed to let U.S. forces use two Pakistani air bases, while assuring his countrymen they would be used only for logistics, not combat. Although Washington forewarned him, the President will take heat from all sides now that the U.S. has issued a freeze order on the assets of the Rabita Trust, a three-decade-old Pakistan charity reportedly enjoying support from top officials, including Musharraf. The U.S. said Rabita's secretary-general was a founder of bin Laden's al-Qaeda...
...Hours later, more than 100 American commandos--led by Army Rangers--lifted off in helicopters and MC-130 Combat Talon planes from bases in southern Pakistan and Oman. A military cameraman videotaped the special forces donning fatigues (the camera zoomed in on a photo of New York fire fighters that commandos had packed in their gear to leave at their destinations), boarding aircraft and leaping out in Afghanistan. While a group of commandos seized a dry-lake airstrip some 100 miles southwest of Kandahar, other troops headed to Kandahar itself in pursuit of Omar and one of his command centers...
...surprisingly, the Taliban has a different story. A Taliban soldier, Abdu Rahman, 30, told TIME that two combat helicopters arrived before dawn Saturday in the desert 10 miles east of Kandahar. As one hovered overhead, a few commandos poured out of the second gunship. Hundreds of Taliban fighters, who had responded to the earsplitting whir of the choppers, were crouching in the darkness. "We were ordered to wait until the Americans came closer. But nobody listened. We were all firing," Rahman says. The American forces "flew off like sparrows...
...According to U.S. intelligence, chasing the Taliban and al-Qaeda will likely draw special-forces commandos into combat in the warrens of fortified underground tunnels and facilities scattered all over Afghanistan, from the Taliban strongholds Kandahar and Kabul in the east to Herat, near the country's western border with Iran. Many of the tunnels and bunkers were dug during the Afghan war with the Soviet Union but have been upgraded since a U.S. cruise-missile strike against al-Qaeda in 1998. U.S. soldiers have the military technology, such as night-vision goggles and breathing devices, to operate in this...