The front line stretches across an oatmeal-brown mudscape, down one hill to the south and up another to the north. In the no man's land below lie the waffled foundations of what used to be the village of Chogha.
Above hangs a freezing fog that screens the city of Kunduz, about 20 miles away, where as many as 30,000 Taliban fighters are making their last stand in northern Afghanistan.
Through that veil of mist, figures slowly appeared - turbaned men carrying babies, women in billowing burqas, the occasional overburdened donkey.
Some of the women were walking from Kunduz in high-heeled street shoes. Some of the children hobbled past barefoot.
"This has been a front line many times," said platoon commander Taj Mohammed, squatting and clutching a radio as he and his Northern Alliance fighters watched the scene from a strategic hillock. "I hope this is the last time."
Gen Mohammed Daoud, commander of the Kunduz front, said he harbours little hope the hard-core Taliban fighters, most of them non-Afghans, will lay down their weapons without a fight. So he is preparing for one.
"If the foreign Taliban do not surrender, they should be killed," he said. But for the moment, with negotiations under way, the pace of fighting has ebbed.
As the Northern Alliance spread across northern Afghanistan this month, Taliban fighters retreated to Kunduz, a province dominated by the ethnic Pashtun, from which the Taliban draws much of its support. In recent days, the Northern Alliance has made some territorial gains, according to the militia spokesman, Zubair, in the regional centre of Taloqan, but still control less than half the province.
As gun battles and clandestine negotiations coincided, 65 warplanes continued to pound cave and tunnel complexes near the cities of Kunduz and Kandahar, according to Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, deputy director of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Pentagon would be willing to halt bombing in the region during negotiations if asked to by allies, he said, but added that rebels appeared content to allow US bombers to continue the pressure.
The United States has tended to avoid targeting front-line positions near Kunduz to minimize the risk of a stray bomb hitting the Northern Alliance. So most of the Taliban are clustered along the front, the alliance spokesman said.
Some of those Taliban fired heavy machine guns briefly on Tuesday morning at the hill above Chogha, sending several news crews scurrying for shelter. But within the hour, things were so peaceful that the only gunfire was from Northern Alliance troops taking potshots at geese flying overhead.
"The Taliban cannot fight anymore," said Taj, the platoon commander. "They have nothing left to fight with."
The alliance seems to be playing its card slowly in Kunduz. After giving the Taliban two days to surrender, and then extending the deadline by a day, Gen Daoud said he was now willing to keep talking until the end of the week. But another Northern Alliance leader Gen Nazir Mahmad demanded that the Taliban surrender later today
What the Northern Alliance hopes to do in coming days is more deeply divide the "foreign" Taliban from the "local" ones, Gen Daoud said. The foreigners are Arabs, Pakistanis and others recruited to fight in Afghanistan by bin Laden. The locals are Afghanis who served the Taliban but are not the same kind of do-or-die fighters.
"I'm not optimistic that most of the foreign Taliban are ready to surrender," Gen Daoud said.