October 22, 2001	Monday	Shaba'an 4, 1422

WASHINGTON: Two weeks ago, US officials predicted that a few days of bombing and a commando raid or two would touch off internal upheaval in Afghanistan. Southern tribes, warriors loyal to the exiled king, even dissidents within the Taliban would rise to help overthrow the weakened regime, they said.

It has not happened. Instead, the southern opposition has bogged down in seemingly endless talks. The former king has called for a national council to meet, but no date has been set. The opposition’s sole functioning military force, the Northern Alliance, waits in frustration on the battlefront north of Kabul, the capital. And only a handful of Taliban dissidents have turned up so far.

In short, the two sides of the US effort in Afghanistan, military and political, are out of sync. The air war against the Taliban is proceeding at a brutally efficient pace, now augmented by commando raids against critical military targets. But the effort to organize a revolt on the ground is going much more slowly, on Afghan time.

“There’s nothing there,” one US official said. “The Afghans are moving about 10 times faster than they are used to - but it’s nowhere near as fast as we would like.”

As a result, the scenario outlined by Bush administration optimists - airstrikes followed by an uprising on the ground that would help US special operations forces hunt down Osama bin Laden - has been stretched out.

“This is a tough one,” said Robert L. Oakley, a former US ambassador in Pakistan, Somalia and other hot spots. “It’s going to take a lot of time.” On the political side, he said, “They’re way behind.” On the military side, “You want to let Afghans do the work. But are we patient enough for that?” Besides, he noted, the Taliban are decentralized, not a hierarchical government. “How are we going to know when they collapse?” he asked, only partly tongue-in-cheek.

Military officials say essentially they have run through their initial bombing targets and are striking mostly at ‘targets of opportunity’ - Taliban units they happen to spot.

The Northern Alliance appealed to the US for airstrikes in support of an offensive against Kabul, but the administration held off, hoping that a broader opposition coalition could be organized first. The Northern Alliance responded by promising that if it seized Kabul, it would cede control to an authority named by the UN. But the world body has not worked out its plans, either.

The UN special envoy for Afghanistan, Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, warned that forming a peacekeeping force will be no small task. No country publicly has volunteered for the hazardous mission of pacifying Kabul.

US Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged that his forces have not found an ally to link up with in the southern, Pashtun-dominated provinces. “We do not have the kind of interaction with elements of the south that one would have to have for progress,” he told reporters.

The Northern Alliance was supposed to deliver its list of representatives to the king last week. It has not.

The council was supposed to have 120 members: 50 from the Northern Alliance, 50 from the south and 20 named by common accord. The king had hoped to call it into session by the end of the month, aides said.

The Northern Alliance’s envoy to the king, Younus Qanooni, left Rome for northern Afghanistan on Oct 1 to collect 50 names from among the alliance’s many factions. Almost three weeks later, he has not returned.

Although some US officials had described the bombing’s initial phase as a three- to five-day campaign, experts were skeptical that military planners really believed they could polish off every worthwhile target in only a few days. Defence officials also acknowledge privately that the continuation and intensification of the air campaign made sense, given the pressure to do as much damage as possible in Afghanistan before the onset of winter. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.