Kandahar

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN - The drive to find Osama bin Laden shifted yesterday from the exercise of raw military power to the art of human persuasion, as newly arrived FBI agents prepared to interrogate al-Qaida fighters who were captured at Tora Bora. American warplanes still patrolled Tora Bora and the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but - for the first time in days - no bombs fell. Bin Laden's whereabouts remained unknown and a formerly rich lode of targets evaporated. Still, U.S. officials said, many al-Qaida and Taliban leaders and fighters were at large in Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan, and they emphasized that many perils still confront U.S. forces.

HOW CAN a hunted man escape hundreds of miles through barren desert with no place above ground to hide? Easily, it seems. The combat phase in Afghanistan is ending with the war on terrorism uncompleted. While international peacekeepers hold Kabul so the provisional government will be safe from its Northern Alliance protectors, forces loyal to that government must ensure that the Taliban does not regroup in the Hindu Kush mountains. The search must go on for identified leaders of the Taliban and al-Qaida, many of whom appear to have vanished from the face of the earth.

The day after three American servicemen and several Afghan opposition troops were accidentally killed in a U.S. bombing raid last week, Fox News Channel war correspondent Geraldo Rivera told viewers that he had said the Lord's Prayer over that "hallowed ground," where "the friendly fire took so many of our, our men and the mujahedeen yesterday." But Rivera now acknowledges that he never visited the site where the U.S. servicemen died last Wednesday, just north of Kandahar in the southern region of Afghanistan.

IT WAS an Afghan solution, at odds with simpler U.S. assumptions about how wars are meant to be fought and ended. The Taliban sprang to life in 1994 from the religious schools across the border in Pakistan while warlords were destroying Afghanistan. The new untarnished force was welcomed as an honest religious authority that would end crime and bring peace and order. What it brought was a tyranny owing more to Pashtun clan codes than to the Quran, imprisonment of women beyond any Islamic state's practice, and dependence on foreign fighters who were warring on all civilizations not Islamic.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Two months after the American bombardment of Afghanistan began, Taliban forces abandoned their last stronghold in Kandahar yesterday. The surrender, reported by anti-Taliban leaders entering the city, appeared to complete the collapse of the radical Islamic group that ruled Afghanistan. But confusion was widespread in the streets of Kandahar, with rival warlords competing for control, some Taliban fighters defiant, and the fate of the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, unclear.

WASHINGTON - A one-ton precision-guided bomb dropped by a U.S. Air Force B-52 went astray in Afghanistan yesterday, killing three U.S. special operations soldiers and wounding 20 others, Pentagon officials said. Five anti-Taliban rebels also were killed and about 20 hurt, including Hamed Karzai, who was picked yesterday as the country's interim leader by Afghan delegates meeting in Germany. Karzai suffered slight wounds and returned to his troops, officials said. Pentagon officials said it was not clear what caused the "friendly fire" incident.

WASHINGTON - The last entrenched force of Taliban fighters, in the southern Afghanistan stronghold of Kandahar, is proving particularly difficult to defeat, preventing the advance of U.S. Marines, defense officials said yesterday. The Taliban forces, some armed with shoulder-fired missiles, are a threat to U.S. aircraft, which are being used to assist Afghan tribes attempting to capture the city, they said. The tribal forces lack sufficient numbers to defeat the dug-in Taliban fighters, thought to number between 3,000 and 17,000.

WITH THE MARINES IN AFGHANISTAN - On a sand ridge overlooking an ochre-colored stretch of dunes, Lt. Tim Lynch waits for darkness and waits for any sign of the Taliban. Lynch is the commander of the second platoon of Charlie Company. His men are arrayed in what the Marines call fighting holes, about a mile from the main base. They are preparing to hunker down for a long night in the cold, lining up water bottles, unfurling rubber pads for warmth, preparing to deal with any shadowy enemy fighters who might dare emerge from the forbidding high desert.

WASHINGTON - Aided by American air power and ground troops, opposition forces in southern Afghanistan have encircled and are on the verge of laying siege to the city of Kandahar, the last major bastion of Taliban military power, senior U.S. military officials said yesterday. As American warplanes continued to bomb Taliban positions in and around Kandahar, opposition militias cut off the main roads leading into the city from the north, west and east. Eighty miles to the southwest, 1,000 U.S. Marines have established a base that is within quick striking distance by helicopter.