The US military has dispatched teams of advisers to help the opposition Northern Alliance in its war on the Taliban, and US forces will use a new airstrip built by the front at Golbahar, 65 km north of Kabul, Mr Younes Qanooni, the front's interior minister, said yesterday. Taking the capital, Kabul, is no longer a priority, he added.
Mr Qanooni, a member of the triumvirate that has ruled the alliance, which also calls itself the United Front, since the assassination of its leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, said at least three teams of between six and 10 US officers have flown into the front's enclaves in the group's Soviet helicopters.
"Military delegations have been coming and going for the last two to three weeks," he said. "Not only in Panjshir, but to Khoja Bahuddin and Dari Suf as well. This co-ordination between the United Front and the US is in military information."
The front has built the landing strip at Golbahar, at the mouth of the Panjshir Valley, this month. Mr Qanooni said it will be operational in 10 days.
US aircraft attacked frontline positions of the Taliban on the Shomali Plain, between the Panjshir Valley and Kabul, for the second time yesterday. Witnesses heard eight explosions. Mr Qanooni lamented the fact that the US has mainly bombed buildings vacated by the Taliban, but claimed the front had provided intelligence for US attacks on Shomali and the commando raid near Kandahar at the weekend. Panjshir is the home province of the front's leaders, where its offices and weapons stockpiles are located. The narrow river valley was a graveyard for Soviet invaders and the Taliban never managed to take it.
Khoja Bahuddin, in northern Afghanistan near the Tajik border, has also received US advisers. It is the headquarters of Gen Mohamed Fahim, the alliance defence minister. Fighters there have tried to retake the northern city of Taloqan from the Taliban for the past year.
Dari Suf, near Mazar-e-Sharif, is the third main frontline in the Northern Alliance's ground war. The forces of Gen Rashid Dustom, an alliance ally, have advanced to within 10 km from Mazar in a week. "Two days ago a US military delegation went to Gen Dustom," Mr Qanooni said. "The Americans travelled from Uzbekistan to Dustom's forces, and from Tajikistan to Khoja Bahuddin and Panjshir."
Uzbekistan has granted the US use of the Termez airbase near its border with Afghanistan. If the alliance retakes Mazar-e-Sharif it will gain a land border with Uzbekistan - and a better supply route than the poor mountain track from Tajikistan.
"If there is any fighting on the Kabul front, it will be only after the United Front makes substantial inroads in Mazar, Takhar and all the northern provinces," Mr Qanooni said. Any ground attack on Kabul "will be only by the United Front, and not in co-ordination with the US." Asked how long it would take before Mazar-e-Sharif falls, he answered, "We are in a semicircle around Mazar. It's a question of weeks." If the alliance maintains its present strategy, months could pass before the Taliban loses the capital.
"Ideally, we would like a political resolution for a transfer of governance in Kabul," Mr Qanooni said. "The mechanism of transfer has to be worked out before we go to Kabul ... We want to enter Kabul by agreement with the king."
King Zahir Shah (87), has lived in exile in Rome since 1973. A United Front delegation reached an agreement with him whereby the Pashtun king proposed 60 members and the mainly Tajik United Front 60 others to create a "Supreme Council of National Unity". A small group of the king's representatives are to meet front officials in Istanbul this week to organise the first session of the council inside Afghanistan.
"In a normal situation these 120 people would name a loya jirga to rule Afghanistan," Mr Qanooni said. The convening of a loya jirga - a traditional, broadly based national assembly - is an idea floated repeatedly during 23 years of war in Afghanistan. "But in an emergency situation," Mr Qanooni concluded, "the council may act as a loya jirga themselves."
