Word: dostum
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...first, pivotal defeat of the Taliban, in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was greased by local Pashtun fed up with taking orders from "these village idiots from the south," as a foreign aid worker put it. Those fighters cut a secret deal with Alliance commander Rashid Dostum to allow Dostum's cavalry to pour through the Taliban front line. After that, the Alliance achieved its rout of the Taliban in typical Afghan fashion: by bribing Taliban commanders to defect...
...Around 900 Pakistanis were surrounded in a girls' school, Sultan Razinya, in the southeast of the city. Over three days, the Alliance commanders - Ustad Mohammed Atta, General Rashid Dostum and Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq - say they tried to persuade the Pakistanis to surrender. The Pakistanis refused. By Tuesday afternoon, the commanders had exhausted their patience, and warned civilians living in the area to move away. Then they attacked, and the fighting lasted four hours. The Alliance took just 175 prisoners...
...where the Pentagon believes Osama bin Laden and the Taliban's leaders have taken refuge. Even if they continue to roll back the Taliban in the north, the Afghan rebels won't be of much help in Kandahar. "The Northern Alliance can never control the whole of Afghanistan," says Dostum's aide. "We have no following in the south." That means only a U.S.-led force--made up of special-ops commandos, conventional troops or both--will be able to finish the job. To succeed, these soldiers will need to school themselves in the Afghan way of war. Because...
...after the Alliance commanders failed to coax them into surrender, a two-hour fire fight broke out, and all the Taliban troops were killed or captured. It was their last stand. The Taliban had set up no defenses inside Mazar, and by nightfall Friday the Alliance stormed the city. Dostum's men swept the streets, "trying to find Taliban fighters who have thrown away their guns and are pretending to be ordinary people," said a Dostum aide. "But most of them jumped into their pickups and left...
...While jubilant residents greeted the liberators by sacrificing sheep in the streets, the American response to the Alliance's triumph was muted. Privately, U.S. officials fretted that the three main factions storming the city could end up battling one another before the smoke could clear. Dostum, the charismatic warlord who governed Mazar until a Taliban offensive unseated him in 1997, is notorious for his inconstancy and ruthlessness, and he has no intention of ceding authority to the 37-year-old Atta, a rising military star. Atta has curried support like a small-town mayoral candidate, printing up posters of himself...