LONDON: Even days ago the war against Afghanistan, the sceptics said, was going nowhere. The use of air power alone was failing. The Taliban would almost certainly survive. Today, those sceptics are having to acknowledge the first major victory of the war, the fall of Mazar-e Sharif to the American-backed Northern Alliance. Reports from inside Afghanistan suggest that in a large area the Taliban is on the run and that its hold on the country may now be collapsing.

In purely military terms, the campaign is proceeding according to plan. The staged use of American war planes has removed Taliban air defences, degraded its communications and destroyed aircraft and armoured vehicles on the ground.

The latest phase has seen the bombing of Taliban and Al Qaeda troops on the frontlines. The success of this logical shift in bombing strategy is testified to by accounts both from the attacking soldiers of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban itself, which has admitted that its forces retreated in the face of heavy bombing. Most important, it has opened up a corridor through which both aid and military support can easily be channelled from neighbouring countries.

But for all the achievements of the campaign on the narrow military front, serious questions remain about the broader strategy. The most important objective remains the disabling of Osama bin Laden. But equally worrying is the apparently unqualified US backing for the Northern Alliance, which has minority support within Afghanistan’s ethnic mix and an appalling record on human rights.

The next stage of the war appears an imminent attempt to capture Kabul. Already Northern Alliance troops and tanks are massing at the frontline nearby - a prospect now alarming their Western sponsors.

American and British officials say they would like to see Kabul as a ‘free city’ administered, perhaps, by the UN. But in warfare - especially of the largely proxy kind - the best intentions are often confounded by the situation on the ground. And the victorious entry of the Northern Alliance into Kabul has the potential fatally to undermine the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda if it sparks a calamitous widening Afghan civil war in which civilians would inevitably be victims.

America and its allies are wary about moving large numbers of ground troops into Afghanistan. But with events moving so quickly, they must act now to insist to the Northern Alliance that it cannot expect to sweep to power on the battlefield and defeat its Pakhtoon rivals in the south. If an imminent rout of the Taliban seems likely it may be necessary for international troops to be deployed in key cities such as Kabul until a post-war political settlement can be finessed.

The alternative - both unthinkable and unacceptable - is to allow one brutal human rights-abusing regime, the Taliban, to be replaced by another. That would not only be wrong. It would utterly destroy the credibility of the war on terrorism. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.