Jalalabad

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- Sixteen Afghan policemen were killed and six more wounded in an ambush yesterday morning on the main road that runs from the capital to the southern city of Kandahar. The ambush took place amid reports of heavy fighting in several places in southern Afghanistan, in particular in Helmand province, where a NATO helicopter crashed Wednesday night, possibly brought down by Taliban fire. The policemen were driving from Zabul province toward the capital, Kabul, when they came under fire at 9 a.m. at Shah Joy, a district known for robberies and ambushes, which lies on an infiltration route used by insurgents heading to the mountains.

OSAMA bin Laden exulted in the World Trade Center's destruction, casually before friends. He claimed advance knowledge of the timing, and displayed callous indifference to the murder of thousands. The amateur videotape with barely audible sound track, translated now by many linguists around the world, is the evidence that doubters wanted to support U.S. accusations against the man and his organization and those who harbor them. Persons with knowledge of the secret war that al-Qaida and the United States had been waging for three years needed no proof.

JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN - The U.S. military has revised a risky plan for American troops to search the caves of Tora Bora for traces of Osama bin Laden and other fighters of al-Qaida. Now it is offering incentives to get Afghan forces to take the lead, U.S. officials said yesterday. Last Friday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he was ordering hundreds more troops to join Afghan militia in the hunt for bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders, in the hope of uncovering intelligence on terror attacks in the works.

When opposition military commander Ismail Khan returned to take control of his home base of Herat in Western Afghanistan last week, he had a message for the foreign forces who helped make it possible: Go home. "We see no need for foreign forces like from the United States and Britain, but the presence of the Americans was effective here because it weakened the Taliban," said Khan, a guerrilla leader during the U.S.-backed proxy war against the Soviet Union. "We believe we must cleanse Kandahar of the Taliban, and we will pursue this with all our might."

KABUL, Afghanistan -- As the Bush administration moves to end 15-month troop deployments, the top commander of U.S. and allied forces here said tours of that length are critical to making progress in the war against Afghanistan's Taliban and other insurgents. He also said he believes it will be necessary to maintain current troop levels here through 2011. Army Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the four-star commander of the 57,000 U.S. and coalition troops fighting in Afghanistan, said in an interview Sunday that the greatest gains in the war have come from soldiers serving the long tours.

WASHINGTON -- Was Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora in the first half of December? And did the U.S. decision to rely on Afghan militias and Pakistani troops, rather than American forces, to seal off escape routes from those mountains permit bin Laden to escape during the intensive bombing campaign of that month? If so, that decision surely ranks as the greatest mistake in an otherwise brilliant U.S.-led military campaign. Well aware of the stakes involved, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has studiously denied any second thoughts about U.S. tactics during the Tora Bora campaign.

SAROBI, Afghanistan -- The road from Kabul to Torkham on the Pakistani border is among Afghanistan's busiest, and it serves as this isolated nation's historic lifeline to the rest of the world. Like almost every mile of highway here, it lies in ruins. "Right now, it doesn't look like a road, it looks like a trail through the mountains," says Saydhagha Shamal, the gray-bearded chief of Sarobi Power Plant, as a Pakistani truck painted with multicolored eyes and whorls ground up the rutted track a few yards away.

LATE LAST November, the forces of Gen. Rashid Dostum called a cease-fire in their sporadic fighting against the Taliban in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, long enough so that the two supposed enemies could work side by side looting the Kunduz Public Hospital of all its supplies. Then General Dostum's men fled before the advance of their alleged allies of the Northern Alliance, while all but the stupidest Taliban fighters melted away into the population. The Northern Alliance soldiers, shocked to find the hospital so thoroughly smashed, did the only thing they could think of - they dragged the doctors away.

IT WAS SHAPING up as the biggest smash-up on the face of the Earth since a careering India rammed into a helpless Asia 50 million years ago. An iceberg the size of Long Island was bearing down on a tongue of ice that sticks out 60 miles from the coast of Antarctica. Video feeds by satellite brightened up the cable TV news stations for a day or two with pink- and gold-tinged images of the austral sunlight slanting across the frozen seascape. It was a quintessential television story: beautiful, exotic, yet incomprehensible.

VIOLENT PROTESTS by offended Muslims struck two Asian neighbors last week - Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Pent-up anger - rooted more in stubborn poverty and a sense of powerlessness than in real religious grievances - drove crowds into the streets, and into harm's way when police in both countries opened fire. Though the particular local circumstances were quite different, the prospect of continuing protest and wider bloodshed in Central Asia is very real and should be very troubling to Americans.