At sunrise on Saturday (November 17), four days after the Northern Alliance (NA) took over Kabul, Afghans will commence observing the holy month of Ramadan. As many wonder if the holy month will bring them peace, the battle in Afghanistan has just begun.

According to NA sources, elements of the US Special Forces have landed in southern Afghanistan. In northern Afghanistan the unthinkable has happened - US and British Special Forces reportedly worked with the Iranian Special Unit to plot, plan and direct the NA's military run over the Taliban. American and British military units are now inside Kabul. According to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, American officers are there to "provide advice and counsel" to the NA.

The Taliban fighters have either defected to the NA, surrendered, melted into the local Afghan populace or have simply retreated to the countryside and mountains. The anti-Taliban NA now control most Afghan cities including Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Bamiyan, Taloqan, Jalalabad and of course, the capital Kabul. The fall of Konduz in the north and Kandahar in the south is just a matter of time. Complete NA control of the key cities of Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Konduz and Taloqan, all located astride vital supply routes into neighboring countries, will help United Nations (UN) and humanitarian aid agencies to mount relief operations.

At the moment the humanitarian aid flow has been choked by the uncertain military situation in Afghanistan. The United Nations Children's' Fund (UNICEF) has announced that it is postponing the dispatch of aid convoys into Afghanistan until the situation becomes more stable. The World Food Programme (WFP) postponed its truck convoys carrying food into Afghanistan because drivers are scared of becoming the targets of reprisal killings.

It would be foolhardy to be convinced of NA's ability to establish peace and security in the areas that have come under its control. The battle is not over yet. Pakistani strategists believe the Taliban has intentionally surrendered territory. They would launch guerrilla operations against the NA and always keep the opposition forces and leaders unsettled. The worse case scenario is of the war spreading beyond Afghanistan's borders as the hard-core elements of the Taliban and Al Qaida seek to secure their supply lines. According to an Indian diplomat who has served as an ambassador in one of Afghanistan's neighbouring countries, "There are 2,500 border crossing points between Afghanistan and Pakistan through which Pak-Afghan traders have made fortunes. Also don't forget the porous borders along the Pashtun dominated provinces in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan."

The Pakistani military top brass at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi may resume covert support to the Taliban. Pakistani analysts believe the US's inability or reluctance to stop the NA from taking over Kabul has severely degraded Pakistan's bargaining position with the US and its allies over the composition of a new Afghan government. The fact of the matter is that Pakistan has always perceived a hostile government in Kabul as a direct threat to its security and integrity. With the hostile and rabidly anti-Pakistan NA now in control in Kabul, the Pakistani ruling establishment is jittery.

Wali Masood, Afghan ambassador in London and the brother of the assassinated NA leader Ahmad Shah Masood, has vehemently argued about the NA's opposition to any Pakistani role in the process of government-formation in Afghanistan. Yesterday, in an interview, he said, "The Pakistani government and its secret service, the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence), has been responsible for what has happened in Afghanistan by backing international Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. They have also sent thousands of Pakistani militia into our country, and replaced them at regular intervals. "They are the enemy. How can they have a say in how Afghanistan is governed in the future? It is like the Soviet Union wanting to have a say in running Afghanistan after they had been forced out."

Pakistani strategists have been quoted in the Pakistani press saying that Pakistan will be forced to play a role in extending support to a group, and in the present circumstances the Taliban would be the only choice. Pakistan's Afghan gambit has failed and it is being forced to adopt a new strategic policy, which might resemble the one that it abandoned to support the US war against terrorism. In the new scheme of things to come, Islamabad will find it difficult to contain support for the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal belt bordering Afghanistan. This area is home to 10 million Pashtuns and if the Taliban indeed launches a guerilla war it will be from these Pakistani tribal belts. In this scenario the Taliban can and will continue to wage a guerilla war against the government in Kabul with backup and logistics provided by its supporters and bases in Pakistani Pashtun areas.

Religious parties in Pakistan are blaming President Pervez Musharaff for pro-Indian forces occupying Kabul at a time when Pakistan's armed forces are already engaged with India on its eastern borders. The danger here is that if the possibility of the Taliban launching a guerrilla war from Pakistani soil is not quickly snuffed out, the war could envelop Pakistan. The fact that Pakistan has moved tanks, armoured units and troops to strengthen its defences along its border with Afghanistan indicates precarious situation that Pakistan finds itself in.

Reports from Pakistan indicate that scores of Arabs and Taliban militiamen have been crossing the Chaman border into Baluchistan and Peshawar since Monday afternoon, apparently on orders of Mullah Muhammad Omar to abandon major cities and to prepare themselves for guerrilla operations. The possibility of the Taliban using Pashtun-dominated tribal areas of Pakistan as staging posts for a prolonged guerrilla battle in Afghanistan is a threat that Pakistan seems to be taking seriously.

With the US supporting the NA push towards the Pashtun heartland of Kandahar, Pakistan has reasons to worry about the worsening situation along the Pak-Afghan border. Besides, it has to mould its policy in accordance with the strategy that the Taliban adopts. Observers say the withdrawal of the Taliban from Kabul and other northern cities is not a sign of collapse, but a tactical retreat.

There is one final Afghan intricacy that needs to be taken into account. Afghanistan is geographically, ethnically and religiously divided, and loyalties are strongest at the local clan level. The Taliban, like the Northern Alliance and like previous Afghan governments, are not a unified entity.

The Taliban's core members are Durrani Pashtuns from Kandahar and southern Afghanistan. They have had difficulty expanding support beyond this region - even in integrating their close ethnic kin, the Ghilzai Pashtuns from eastern Afghanistan and around Kabul. As Taliban fighters advanced through Afghanistan, other clans and factions chose to join rather than fight them, but loyalties always remained at the local level.

Switching loyalties is routine in Afghanistan. Taliban actually bought the loyalties of war lords to make territorial conquests. This is how they initially captured Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997 and how, again, they were as swiftly driven away from the city later that year. The factions that comprise the Northern Alliance have fought one another as often as they have fought the Taliban. Kabul residents can never forget the infamous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar-Ahmad Shah Masood clashes before the Taliban occupied Kabul. As the core of the Taliban withdrew from northern Afghanistan, the groups that had sided with it during its occupation quickly joined the advancing Northern Alliance. These are, therefore, not whole scale defections from the Taliban.

STRATFOR (Strategic Forecasting), a leading provider of global intelligence headquartered in Austin, Texas, in a report states, "The speed of the Northern Alliance's advance was not surprising. Rapid advances are the norm in Afghanistan. The Taliban swept through the country as quickly when the group first emerged in 1994 and 1995. Russia's initial invasion of Afghanistan took only a few weeks."

"Population density explains much of this phenomenon. Afghanistan has about 41 people per square kilometer - less than a third of the density of neighboring Pakistan - and this does not take refugees into account. Rugged terrain means much of Afghanistan is nearly uninhabited or is settled in small villages. It is easy to sweep through this territory; there is little to get in the way."

"But there is a catch. Ethnic divisions, limited resources and logistical difficulties have constrained the size of the armies that fought over Afghanistan. At their peak, the Soviets had only about 90,000 troops in the country, and the Taliban and Northern Alliance armies were far smaller. Small armies and vast distances make frontal warfare difficult and dangerous. Armies cannot afford to spare the troops necessary to garrison the land they have overrun if they are to maintain a viable army at the front."

"This leads to thin front lines, with troops concentrated at key nodes and with little reserve behind them. Once a front breaks or withdraws, an opposing force can make tremendous advances. Anyone who has played the board game "Risk" will recognize this."

This explains the scorched earth policy of the Taliban in all its previous battles. Any Taliban victory was followed by complete annihilation of the captured area. The Taliban would set village after village on fire in the captured areas. They would also routinely massacre their opponents and captured civilian populations. Since Taliban forces could not afford to spare the troops to secure the land that they had captured they brutally subjugated those areas by following a deliberate scorched earth policy in order to pre-empt and quell any chances of an uprising behind their lines.

Hence, any Taliban advance was accompanied by large-scale migration of people and the result was thousands of internally displaced Afghans. Although the NA does not have the record to match the brutality of the Taliban occupation, the anti-Taliban forces also have blood on their hands. That is why this time the NA march into Kabul is significant for the absence of any signs of either a NA scorched earth military movement or any reprisal killings. (See Walking into Kabul: Northern Alliance comes of age)

But the Pakistani press is full of reports of two massacres of Taliban soldiers. One is about the massacre of 1,700 troops, many of them Pakistanis fighting for the Taliban, to the south of Kabul. Reports from Mazar-e-Sharif say several hundred Taliban supporters, including Arabs, Chechens, and Pakistanis, were shot in cold blood after the city fell to NA. The UN has confirmed the receipt of such reports, but it has not been able to independently verify the magnitude of the massacres.

The Taliban has not yet been completely vanquished. It will rear its nasty head when it launches a rear-guard action. Intelligence estimates had earlier pegged the Taliban's arsenal of 250 to 300 Scud missiles and they still remain hidden in the mountains. They are intact, so far, with their arms and equipment. The question is not really whether it is the end of Taliban, but whether US can ensure the end of Pakistan's Afghan policy, which led to the creation of Taliban.