Just when the Afghan war may seem to be ending, some experts believe it is entering the most dangerous phase for U.S. troops.
In the weeks to come, military analysts and Afghanistan specialists predicted yesterday, U.S. soldiers will have to pursue members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and their Taliban allies through booby-trapped caves and remote areas strewed with land mines.
"I think there's a lot more danger" to U.S. forces now that they are operating as frontline troops, said Alexander Thier, former head of the U.N. humanitarian office in Kabul. "You're going to have more incidents like the Marine casualties in Kandahar," he added, referring to the wounding of three Marines on Sunday when one tripped a land mine.
"The fact of the matter is . . . there are still any number of al Qaeda" in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday while flying to a NATO meeting in Brussels. "There are still a lot of Taliban in the country, and they are still armed. And it is going to take time and energy, and people will be killed in the process of trying to find them and capture them, or have them surrender."
Some experts believe that Afghan fighters have done about as much as they are willing or able to do in pursuing members of the al Qaeda terrorist network, and that U.S. and British soldiers will have to carry out many of the risky searches in the final phase of the war.
Some American Special Operations troops were searching caves yesterday with Afghan fighters, a U.S. official said.
This week, for the first time in the war, U.S. military operations are more ground- than air-based. The war will go on for some time, a senior U.S. official said yesterday. But in the coming weeks, he said, "it won't be so much B-52s anymore."
A Pentagon official added, "As this whole thing starts to wind down on the ground, the need for that [air] capability will lessen." Although it is too soon to say whether many warplanes will be recalled from the war, he said, "to have a whole bunch of bombers loitering in the air 24 hours a day -- I just don't see the need."
U.S. officials said yesterday they do not know bin Laden's general location. Bin Laden's organization is accused of plotting the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
"A few days ago, we believed he was in Tora Bora, and now we're not so sure," Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem said at a Pentagon briefing, referring to the cave complex near the Pakistani border. "Maybe he's been killed or has left."
The United States is gleaning less battlefield intelligence from intercepted radio conversations among al Qaeda fighters, reflecting the likelihood that many have been killed or have fled, he added.
"We get all kinds of reports -- that he's in a cave, that he's not in a cave," President Bush said yesterday, summarizing the search for bin Laden. "There's all kinds of speculation, but when the dust clears, we'll find out where he is, and he'll be brought to justice."
Some military experts said the United States cannot leave the vital job of pursuing bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders to Afghanistan's opposition Eastern Alliance, Pakistani border guards or anyone else.
"Surrogates may not have the same goals we have," said retired Army Brig. Gen. Huba Wass de Czege. "Will the Afghan Eastern Alliance troops be as willing to risk lives to capture bin Laden as our own troops would?"
"We are going to have to go into those mountains and kill him," military historian Williamson Murray said. "And I think that we need to use U.S. and allied troops to do that nasty business."
Not everyone agreed that mopping up al Qaeda will be difficult and dangerous. Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former member of the Afghan resistance who has written several books on Afghanistan's wars, said the "phase of direct fighting is probably over."
He said al Qaeda has so few supporters in Afghanistan that U.S. forces will be kept busy just reacting to a torrent of tips from Afghans about the whereabouts of al Qaeda fighters.
Members of bin Laden's network, many of them Arabs who stand out as distinctly foreign in insular Afghanistan, "have very few friends and a very high profile," and so are likely to be identified and apprehended quickly, Jalali added.
He and others said they were more worried by the threat posed to Pakistan's stability by al Qaeda fighters who may have slipped out of Afghanistan to hide in refugee camps and Islamic seminaries. Surrounded by sympathizers in Pakistan, they might form new anti-American organizations, Jalali suggested. "That's the real danger."
Al Qaeda probably can operate better in Pakistan -- especially in the unruly border region -- than in Afghanistan, said Thier, the former U.N. official. "Kidnappings and snipings and attacks on U.S. personnel, and on U.S. relief workers, are more likely to occur in Pakistan, especially in the tribal areas, than in Afghanistan," he said.
The senior U.S. government official said the Bush administration shares those concerns and is considering ways to assist Pakistan, including more extensive intelligence-sharing and other steps to "help the Pakistanis build security."
In short, the next few months in Afghanistan may be far more difficult for the United States than the last two have been, said Harlan Ullman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In addition to pursuing al Qaeda and Taliban members, he said, the U.S. government and its allies must address a host of other issues, such as averting widespread starvation this winter, bolstering a shaky new government in Afghanistan and dealing with potential instability in Pakistan.
"This isn't the beginning of the end," Ullman said. "It's the end of the beginning." 
Staff writer Marc Kaufman contributed to this report. 



Washington Post reporter Steve Vogel covers local and regional military issues. His Military Matters column runs every other week.