Anti-Taliban Forces Have ‘Own Plan’

Impatient with a U.S. bombing strategy that they believe is designed to prevent their advance to Kabul, anti-Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan have decided to go it alone and launch a large-scale offensive on all fronts.

If the Northern Alliance succeeds in mounting an offensive and seizing the capital, it would be a major defeat for the Taliban, but it could also complicate U.S. policy, which seeks a broader coalition government for Afghanistan.

The Northern Alliance’s military commanders, eager to take advantage of Taliban defections and crumbling resistance in some provinces, met this week and agreed on a major attack within two weeks.

“We’re not working to America’s plan. We’re working to our own plan,” said Gen. Abdul Basir, one of the commanders. “We agreed that we should advance and attack simultaneously on all fronts.”

The alliance commanders complained that the United States has refused their entreaties for airstrikes against the Taliban’s main front line north of Kabul. But they said they saw no reason to be restrained by the Americans’ hesitance.

“We have our own program. We have no agreement that we won’t attack while they’re bombing,” said Gen. Fazel Ahmad Azimi, another commander.

In Washington, Bush administration officials said they don’t want to see the Northern Alliance take power unless it’s as part of a broader coalition that also includes opposition groups from southern Afghanistan.

“We don’t believe any single faction can form a stable government in Kabul . . . including the Northern Alliance,” a senior U.S. official said.

U.S. officials point out that the alliance is dominated by members of Afghanistan’s ethnic Uzbek and Tajik minorities, and is widely disliked and feared by the country’s largest ethnic group, the Pushtuns of the south.

The Northern Alliance appears to have achieved significant military advances since the U.S. airstrikes began Sunday. The alliance announced Thursday that it had seized control of Ghor province in the mountainous, lightly populated center of the country.

Delegations of commanders from the Taliban side have reportedly been crossing to Northern Alliance territory to negotiate their defections. And a major Taliban supply route north from Kabul has been severed.

Seeking to capitalize on those signs of disarray among the Taliban, Northern Alliance commanders want to sweep in and fill the vacuum. But the opposition suffers serious logistical and supply problems and may find it difficult to mount an attack on all fronts against the tough force of several thousand Taliban fighters on the battle line north of Kabul.

Some Bush administration officials are skeptical of the alliance’s claims. “The Northern Alliance isn’t anywhere near as close to taking Kabul as they’d like you to believe,” said one. He said it is too early to consider aiding the alliance with airstrikes.

But Gen. Azimi said the Taliban was collapsing before the Northern Alliance offensive even began.

He claimed that he had met a delegation of 10 Taliban commanders Tuesday and they had agreed to defect. Another delegation reportedly visited alliance officials in the northern town of Charikar on Tuesday to negotiate their defections.

“I’ve known these people for 23 years,” Azimi said. “Even in times of combat, they would get in touch with us and say: ‘We’re ordered to shoot at you. We can’t do anything about it,’ ” he continued, underscoring the tribal alliances, loyalties and betrayals that are so much a part of Afghan warfare.

“Once we begin to storm, they’ll put up our flag and join our ranks. They’ll open up the front, capture the Arab and Pakistani fighters and open up the road for further onslaught.”

According to an internal Northern Alliance report, 12 Taliban soldiers died in the Northern Alliance attack on Chaghcharan, the main town in Ghor province, about 225 miles west of Kabul.

Most of the Taliban commanders in the district joined the opposition, the report said, but seven who opposed the attack were captured.

Ghor, a mountainous province, has never been entirely under Taliban control but is not near any strategic supply routes. Azimi, however, said Northern Alliance forces could use Ghor as a base to launch attacks on the neighboring province of Badghis.

“We’re running on the heels of the enemy,” he said.

He said negotiations with Taliban commanders to defect helped minimize combat casualties.

Gen. Basir said 23,000 anti-Taliban forces are readying for the offensive, which he said could happen within days.

These include 12,000 ready to attack the front line north of Kabul. The offensive would begin as soon as U.S. bombing ceased.

The opposition has had a change of heart on the importance of the capital in its plans.

Earlier, Northern Alliance officials had said Kabul wasn’t a priority. But Azimi said Kabul is important because it is the capital.

“It will be a simultaneous attack on all fronts,” Basir said.

Pakistan, which helped the Taliban topple the Northern Alliance from power in Kabul in 1996, has been vocally opposed to allowing the alliance to retake the capital. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has said the Northern Alliance must not be allowed to get any mileage out of the U.S. military campaign. Other Pakistani officials have warned that a Northern Alliance triumph in Kabul would turn into a blood bath.

U.S. officials, seeking to encourage the Northern Alliance to keep fighting while they also cement a new relationship with Pakistan, have been more measured in their comments.

“The Northern Alliance is capable of causing a whole lot of trouble for the Taliban, and we support that,” one official said.

“The Afghan people are going to have to sort out which among the opposition groups will have what role in a post-Taliban Afghanistan,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.

But one U.S. official, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, offered a prescription for how a postwar Afghanistan might be organized: a federation.

“As we’ve studied the situation, the Afghan experience seems to show that when the government is roughly a loose federation, it seems to work, with a very high degree of local autonomy,” he told reporters.

“We’ve had discussions with some of our coalition partners about the eventual shape of an Afghanistan,” Armitage said. Another official acknowledged that Pakistan is one of the countries that has discussed Afghanistan’s future with U.S. officials.

*

Dixon reported from Shirkat and McManus from Washington.