The Northern Alliance was on a roll. By late Tuesday (Afghan time) it seemed to be pressing onward without stopping for a breather. Opposition fighters were said to be advancing eastward from Kabul along the main highway toward Jalalabad, a key Afghan city not far from the Pakistan border. And in the southern outpost of Kandahar, the traditional seat of Taliban power, eyewitnesses said some–but not all–Taliban fighters had packed up their weapons and evacuated in vehicles toward Uruzgan, the home province of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
A welter of unconfirmed reports speculated that fighting had erupted in Kandahar itself, that the city had fallen–and even that Mullah Omar had fled the country. None of these rumors could be independently corroborated, but the Reuters news agency said Tuesday that Mullah Omar had urged his fighters not to behave “like a slaughtered chicken which falls and dies.” “You should regroup yourselves, resist and fight,” the Taliban leader was quoted as saying in a Pashto-language radio address monitored by the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press.
It is not yet clear whether the Taliban retreat represented a decisive loss of morale or an orderly withdrawal that may be the first stage in a new phase of guerrilla war. What is clear, however, is that the spectacularly speedy Northern Alliance offensive has left a worrisome political vacuum in Kabul. Now the urgent problem is how to accelerate the political process of setting up an alternative government before the uncertainty gives rise to anarchy, looting and revenge killings in a repeat of the bloodshed that erupted after the 1992 ouster of the Soviet-backed communist regime in Kabul.
The key to this may lie with anti-Taliban Pashtun commanders both inside and outside Afghanistan, who were scurrying to try to protect Pashtun interests in the wake of the Northern Alliance blitzkrieg. Many Afghans distrust the Northern Alliance because it consists largely of ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, whereas Pashtuns–who made up the Taliban–comprise 40 percent of the population and are the largest single ethnic group.
In the Pakistan frontier city of Peshawar, one exiled Pashtun leader, Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, huddled with other commanders from the four provinces of eastern Afghanistan, the area around Jalalabad, in a day-long strategy session Tuesday. “We have sent a delegation to the Taliban authorities in Jalalabad asking them to hand control to us,” Zaman told NEWSWEEK. “If they say yes, we’ll go to Afghanistan immediately to help establish law and order. If they refuse and say no, we’ll go to Afghanistan to fight. Either way, we’re going in.”
Concerns about maintaining law and order were visceral and real. The strategic northern outpost of Mazar-e Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance last Friday, when some men celebrated by shaving their beards and women abandoned their head-to-toe burqas–and even burned them. Most of the residents are Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras with an ethnic affinity with the Northern Alliance fighters, so it was not surprising that the Taliban Pashtuns retreated so swiftly. Still, at least 200 hardcore pro-Taliban mujahedin–mostly Arab, Chechen and Pakistani fighters–were holed up in a school and near an airport, vowing to fight to the death, according to a Taliban official. And unconfirmed reports suggested that hundreds of people had already been killed in the battle for this key northern city. The capture of Kabul seems likely to bring further bloodshed–and greater uncertainty.
