Desert Vietnam

NYTimes Magazine -- Where the Enemy Is Everywhere and Nowhere

According to terrorism experts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based policy group devoted largely to world security, the estimates run something like this: about 20,000 jihadic soldiers had graduated from Al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan as of October 2001, when the American-led war began there. Up to 10,000 of those were inside Afghanistan at the time. Since then, the coalition campaign has killed or captured around 2,000. Ninety percent of bin Laden's forces, and more than half of his top commanders, remain free. And no one is quite sure where they are. Some of the Arabs among them have probably made their way back to the Middle East. Many of the rest seem to straddle the frontiers of Afghanistan, Pakistan and neighboring Iran. Al Qaeda is, the institute judges, ''more insidious and just as dangerous'' as before the 9/11 attacks.

Here and across Afghanistan, the work of ''humint,'' as the Army calls human intelligence, has been badly frustrated. Christopher Langton, a retired British colonel and military attache in Central Asia, now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, speaks of the attempts to befriend and the attempts to pay. The paying hasn't bought much in the way of trustworthy information, and a psychological operations officer on Vigilant Guardian tells me that the Army has mostly abandoned it. The befriending hasn't worked well either, because, Langton says, the Americans have failed ''to capture the virtual territory, the territory of the mind of the population.'' The troops on missions like Parker's, operations that set out from American bases every two weeks or so, should pick up the kinds of details that form the foundation of military intelligence. But the troops are handicapped, Langton explains, because the people sense a shortsighted American involvement, a powerful wish to be gone.

The Afghans feel that the Taliban, with Al Qaeda behind it, could take hold again in the country as soon as the Americans go home. For the villagers, survival when that happens could depend on keeping their mouths shut now.

''I'm not optimistic,'' Captain Parker says, thinking forward five years. ''The smart terrorist in Afghanistan will simply wait us out, wait for us to lose interest, lose will.'' Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader who has kept himself so mysterious and secreted that, the military's top officers acknowledge, he could drift through their bases without any chance of being recognized, sends out edicts against the invading infidels, demanding their deaths. Three weeks before Vigilant Guardian, a Special Forces convoy dipped through a gulley and found itself under ambush, taking machine-gun fire. Two soldiers were killed and one was critically wounded before the attackers disappeared.