Opposition Blundered, Leader Says

A leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance admitted Wednesday that his forces had botched their best chance to capture a strategic city in northern Afghanistan by expecting too much from U.S. airstrikes.

The alliance now expects to be bogged down for weeks around Mazar-i-Sharif as it tries to recover from the military blunder and struggles to rearm.

“Our war in Mazar-i-Sharif wasn’t a real war. It was a mistake,” Mohammed Yunis Kanuni, the Northern Alliance’s interior minister, said in his Panjshir Valley office Wednesday. “Our forces’ plan was to attack from four sides on Mazar-i-Sharif, but one side went very far ahead toward Mazar and the other sides were stopped.

“Why? They weren’t serious about this. All of the moujahedeen thought the Taliban would be finished by the [U.S.-led] bombing.”

Last week, the Northern Alliance had said it was on the verge of taking Mazar-i-Sharif and that its troops had reached the city. In a clear sign of diminished expectations, the alliance’s top official in neighboring Uzbekistan said Wednesday that the anti-Taliban army is “not in a hurry” to capture the city.

“Our forces are not ready in one week to capture Mazar-i-Sharif,” said Mohammed Hashad Saad, the alliance’s acting ambassador in Uzbekistan. “In one month there will be a change, maybe.”

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has said that the capture of Mazar-i-Sharif is a top military priority because of its location near the border with Uzbekistan.

Mazar-i-Sharif sits at a major crossroads connecting Afghanistan with the Uzbek city of Termez as well as linking the eastern and western parts of Afghanistan. The city has two airfields that could be used for U.S. military operations and the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Critical Shortage of Weaponry Cited

The stalled offensive was complicated by several factors, including the limited U.S. airstrikes and a critical shortage of weaponry. But the anti-Taliban army’s ad hoc alliances have also left it vulnerable to possible fissures: The two chief commanders leading the opposition’s offensive on Mazar-i-Sharif, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and Gen. Ata Mohammed, were fierce enemies just a decade ago and now are supposed to be key allies in the drive to seize the city.

After leading his forces to the edge of the city last week, Ata has pulled back to a distance of about 50 miles from the city, although some of his troops remain in the hills near the city, Saad said. Dostum and his forces are now about 40 miles from the city, he said.

That means both commanders are now farther from Mazar-i-Sharif than another major force of Northern Alliance troops is from Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Ata said there was no action on his front line Wednesday.

“Today’s situation was quiet. There was no fighting in our area,” Ata said when reached on his satellite phone Wednesday night. “There was fighting Tuesday for a few hours. There was also bombing in our area then. They dropped three bombs. We hope to move ahead in the coming days and capture some territory.”

U.S. warplanes have carried out some bombing raids on Taliban troop positions south of Mazar-i-Sharif in recent days, but the Northern Alliance says the airstrikes have not been sufficient to clear the way for the advance of the opposition army.

The United States is coordinating its air assault with the Northern Alliance and is attacking the right targets, said Saad, the alliance official in Uzbekistan. But the U.S. needs to step up the bombing raids, he said. “It is useful but not enough,” he said.

The fighting in the north is now concentrated around the town of Keshendeh about 40 miles south of Mazar-i-Sharif, he said.

Saad denied reports that the offensive had faltered because of a long-simmering dispute between Dostum and Ata. Instead, he said, Ata was forced to halt his advance because of strong resistance from the Taliban and a shortage of supplies.

Saad also denied that it was a mistake for Ata to attack the city when three other units, including Dostum’s, weren’t in a position to advance.

Saad asserted that Dostum and Ata have put their earlier rivalries aside and are now coordinating their campaign. “They are talking every day,” he said.

Dostum’s goal now is to try to move north and encircle the city on the western side, Saad said, while forces under Ata will try to cut off the Taliban on the eastern side.

“Then the time will come to push the Taliban out of Mazar-i-Sharif,” Saad said.

Kanuni, the interior minister, also tried to smooth over reports of a rivalry between the former foes.

“This has been changed along with Afghanistan itself,” he said. “Gen. Dostum was against all of us, against the government, and now he works with us. And in the local area [around Mazar], Gen. Dostum and Gen. Ata were enemies. Now they are working together.”

Ata’s troops fought their way almost into the center of Mazar-i-Sharif, Kanuni said, only to be forced to retreat when his allies failed to advance on other fronts. But the interior minister refused to point fingers at any commanders and said the blame lay “with all of us.”

“All the moujahedeen thought: ‘The Taliban are finished. We will go all the way to Mazar-i-Sharif,’ but they were too optimistic by far,” Kanuni added.

One of the biggest problems for the alliance force is obtaining supplies and ammunition. The troops trying to take Mazar-i-Sharif are effectively cut off from supply routes by the Taliban forces. It has been impossible to reach the forward units by land or air, Saad said.

The Northern Alliance has appealed to the United States to help bring in materiel. “We’ve asked the United States to be more active in supplying these forces,” he said. Russia is supplying the alliance with weapons, but the road from the north already has snow on it, and it will close for the winter sometime next month.

Unlike a national army, with unified command and control, the Northern Alliance is a loose and sometimes fractious collection of regional and local commanders, often little more than warlords who jealously guard their turf.

The Taliban suffers a similar problem, with some commanders willing to defect if the price is right, or if they simply want to escape a losing battle. But the Taliban has an advantage: the power of its harsh interpretation of Islam to mobilize martyrs for the cause.

Skillful Military Strategist Killed

The Northern Alliance’s former commander, Ahmed Shah Masoud, was legendary for his ability to motivate his fighters, even when their backs were to the wall. But he was killed by assassins posing as television journalists days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Masoud’s death didn’t shatter the alliance, as the plotters must have hoped, but it did deny the anti-Taliban opposition a skillful military strategist who deserved a large part of the credit for defeating Soviet troops in 1989 after 10 years of occupation.

When the Soviets pulled out, they left behind a Communist government headed by President Najibullah, a former Afghan intelligence chief, and in 1989 he made Dostum commander of the army’s 53rd division, based in Mazar-i-Sharif.

Ata was a moujahedeen fighter attacking Dostum’s forces from the northern Afghan mountains until Dostum, who is accused of numerous human rights abuses, switched to the moujahedeen’s new government in 1992.

That government is still recognized by the United Nations even though the Taliban drove it from Kabul five years ago.

Dostum is a former plumber who enriched himself by building a ruthless fiefdom in Mazar-i-Sharif. The city is home to the Tomb of Ali, said to be the burial site of the fourth Caliph of Islam, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed.

Whereas Dostum was born in the village of Giuse Jan, outside Mazar, Ata’s roots are in the city itself, where he is highly respected, according to Kanuni.

“He is not a killer of civilians, and so the people like him,” Kanuni said. “He is kind to his people and his moujahedeen.”

Mazar-i-Sharif is a city soiled by the blood of many massacres and political and ethnic murders over the years, and Kanuni warned that the longer the Taliban holds on to it, the more civilians will be executed.

Taliban radio announced Monday that its regime had hanged five people as alleged spies in Mazar-i-Sharif and that many more civilians are being rounded up and killed, Kanuni said.

“They claimed that these [five] people had contacts with the [exiled] government,” Kanuni said. “It’s just a cover so that they could kill them. Secretly, they are killing a lot of other people. The Taliban doesn’t want anyone to rise up from the center of Mazar and fight them.”

Kanuni criticized the U.S. for limiting its airstrikes on Taliban targets along the front lines and accused Pakistan of recommending the wrong targets to Pentagon planners.

“We don’t have any political problems with America about the future, but there is some political problem between America and Pakistan,” Kanuni said, accusing the Taliban’s once-staunch allies in Islamabad of trying to prolong the fighting in Afghanistan in order to dominate any postwar government.

“Afghanistan is sacrificed for relations between America and Pakistan,” he said.

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Watson reported from Dallan Sang and Paddock from Tashkent, Uzbekistan.