NEW YORK, March 3: The most important battles in the US war in Afghanistan has begun with the Americans, and Afghan forces are launching a major offensive near Gardez against the Al-Qaeda resistance.

It is also a reminder that the war in hardly over and the US forces could stay longer than some had predicted in Washington.

“ When the Pentagon kept saying the war in Afghanistan was not over, a lot of people thought that it just a case of being cautious,” a US Defense Department official told The New York Times . “But it was really a case of the Pentagon being accurate. There are pockets of bad guys all over the place, especially in Paktia and Paktika.”

The newspaper observed that for weeks the debate in Washington centered on whether the next stage of the Bush administration’s drive against terrorism should be toppling of Saddam Hussein of Iraq or mounting counter insurgency against remnants of the Al Qaeda network in Asia and the Middle East.

But there is still much unfinished business in Afghanistan. So much, that the role of American ground forces have grown, not diminished.

It also said the flight of the Taliban from Kabul last year was so sudden and the collapse of their defences in their Kandahar stronghold so dramatic that it created the impression that the war was all but won. The battles over Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz and Tora Bora appeared to have given way to sporadic and, occasionally, ill-planned raids against small groups of Al Qaeda fighters. The war that began with such a bang appeared to end with a whimper.

But that was something of an illusion. While it is true that life has been returning to normal in the main Afghan cities, it is also true that much of the vast country is a no man’s land. That is certainly the case in the Paktia, Paktika and Khost provinces in eastern Afghanistan, the paper said.

The offensive in south of Gardez is the largest American-led ground action of the Afghan war, the paper said.

The 1,500 Afghan soldiers that the United States has mobilized for the battle are doing much of the fighting, but are hardly alone. The offensive in Gardez involves American Special Operations forces and American airstrikes, which include the use of two new “thermobaric” bombs, whose chemical mixture produces a huge incinerating blast that can force the oxygen out of caves and suffocate the people inside.

Significantly, the attack also involves several hundred soldiers from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, whose Apache helicopters have been sent to the fight, according to Pentagon officials.

The Pentagon, it seems, may have learned the lesson of what can happen when the United States relies too heavily on a proxy force, and it now appears determined to avoid the mistakes of Tora Bora, the paper said.

The offensive, Pentagon officials told the NYT, could last for days.