Limited U.S. Raids Remain a Boon to Foes of Taliban

Two bombs falling in Afghanistan’s war don’t amount to much, yet for opposition fighters watching from a village rooftop, the heavy blasts were pleasant sounds just the same.

The bombing, however, was earth-shattering only in the literal sense. When U.S. warplanes bombarded the Taliban’s front lines here for the first time Tuesday night and early Wednesday, the limited airstrikes didn’t impress those who felt the shock waves in this village about 1 1/2 miles away.

Even the children here are hardened veterans. They played and worked in fields of ripe cotton and corn stubble Wednesday afternoon, within easy range of Taliban guns, as the muffled crump of artillery fire on another front blended into the background noise of life in the line of fire in Afghanistan’s north.

Mohammed Saber, 38, a soldier in the opposition Northern Alliance who first went to war when he was 13, watched the U.S. punish his Taliban enemy from the night sky. The strikes ended in minutes, leaving him to wonder what the point was.

“This is nothing,” he said through an interpreter. “This is the least the Taliban has suffered. We have seen so much fighting, we can’t compare these [American] attacks with that. This is too easy.”

Except for his gray vest and white collar, Saber was dressed in black, down to his sneakers. His hair was black, and so was his bushy beard, and his eyes were accented with black eyeliner to ward off evil spirits.

He has a lot to worry about. His two wives and his 5-year-old son live with him near the front line. If the Taliban is only wounded, and not destroyed, it could strike out from the foothills like an angry beast. “We would be happy if there were more than 5,000 jets to get rid of the Taliban,” he said.

Opposition fighters and commanders complained that the first U.S. airstrikes on front-line Taliban forces here were so limited that they did nothing to stop the regime from pounding back with its heavy guns in an artillery duel that lasted at least an hour.

“We wondered why the American jets came and bombed just one or two times,” said opposition commander Mohammed Salim, a veteran of the decade-long moujahedeen war against Soviet troops. “It must be continuous. The Taliban would only last one day if they were constantly bombed.”

The Northern Alliance has complained since airstrikes began Oct. 7 that the U.S. was pulling its punches against the Taliban regime to avoid handing control of the capital to opposition forces dominated by minority Tajiks and Uzbeks. The Taliban draws its support from the country’s Pushtun majority.

But the alliance also knows that it didn’t stand a chance against the Taliban before the air war began and that the airstrikes have brought opposition fighters to the verge of retaking the strategic northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. So the Taliban’s Afghan enemies are very careful not to sound ungrateful for the gift of American air power.

“When two people are fighting with each other and a third one comes and beats one of them up, the winner must be happy,” Northern Alliance soldier Mohammed Ahref, 30, said as a distant machine-gunner fired a few bursts at the Taliban lines.

The first short, sharp airstrike on a front-line Taliban camp about 25 miles northeast of Kabul, the Afghan capital, came about 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. The second came about 3 a.m. Wednesday, opposition fighters said.

Northern Alliance troops encamped in farmhouses with cracked mud walls in the valley below were waiting for the bombs to fall and immediately joined in the assault by launching an artillery barrage, Salim said.

The Taliban, ignoring the risk of drawing more fire from U.S. warplanes, blasted back with artillery guns that the U.S. strikes had failed to knock out.

Evidence of the battle lay scattered in a courtyard of the farmhouse that serves as a barracks for Saber’s fighters. Just a few yards away from the window of a crying child, dozens of spent artillery and mortar shells littered the ground from where opposition fighters had fired at the hilltop Taliban positions.

The Northern Alliance says it is coordinating its attacks on the Taliban with U.S. forces but won’t divulge precisely how, and commander Salim would say only that his men were ready to fire when the U.S. warplanes struck.

The start of airstrikes on the Taliban’s Kabul front has renewed speculation that the opposition forces may be preparing to launch an offensive on the capital, but its military and political leaders have sent conflicting signals in recent days.

Gen. Mohammed Fahim, the alliance’s military leader, convened a war council of his top commanders Monday night, and they agreed to put their forces on high alert for an offensive on all fronts within three days, Salim confirmed Wednesday.

But so far, fighting along the front lines north of Kabul has been limited to sporadic exchanges of artillery and machine-gun fire. And alliance commanders convened for another secret meeting in the Panjshir Valley on Wednesday.

Salim said he wouldn’t be at the meeting. Instead, he speeded off in a pickup truck crammed with about a dozen of his heavily armed men to attend to other business.

“I’m going to solve my own problems,” he said.

On the farmhouse rooftop, gunnery officer Said Ahmad fingered a string of red plastic prayer beads as he squatted to stay out of the Taliban sights. Bits of straw poked out from the dried-mud wall behind him.

Cobs of corn were drying a deep orange on another part of the roof, where the sun also baked cow patties into plate-sized discs. The soldiers’ wives use the patties to cook meals. The discs will also warm them when winter sets in over the next few weeks.

Ahmad, 38, pointed to the dirty mattress where he spends each night at his rooftop outpost, waiting for battle. He cursed the Taliban and Osama bin Laden for making his life so miserable.

Just then, there was the sound of jet noise high overhead. Everyone on the roof tilted their heads back, raising hands to shield their eyes from the blinding afternoon sun, to see a long jet with a broad wingspan. It looked like a B-52 bomber.

“America,” one of Ahmad’s men said as the jet passed in a slow straight line, leaving four white vapor trails against a deep blue sky. Within seconds, the plane was gone, and the only sound of war was the artillery fire, far away.