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After a night in the cold, Delta Company is still stuck on the mountain. Word comes by radio that no choppers are flying over southern Afghanistan because a Chinook has gone down elsewhere. The soldiers are stranded for at least another day. A bearlike Afghan guide named Siddiq is asked if he thinks the Taliban are gone. "They'll come back for their dead," he says. Several hours later, a soldier spies an insurgent observing the U.S. position from a ridge about 1,500 yds. away. A gunner opens up with a Mark-19, which fires grenades that tattoo the far ridge with puffs of smoke but fail to kill the insurgent. Meanwhile, the special forces alert the company by radio that three Taliban fighters are moving through the canyon so the soldiers should be ready to shoot. But the insurgents are beyond the reach of the .30-cal. machine gun. That night Lieut. Mark Stein sends out a patrol with night-vision goggles to explore the ridge where the lone Taliban fighter was seen. There's no trace of him.
By the next day, rations and water are running low. Soldiers rummage through the garbage to have a second look at items in the Meals Ready to Eat bags they tossed out.
In the afternoon, an Apache returns to blast away with missiles at the canyon again, but the surviving Taliban have disappeared. Eventually a Chinook arrives, first picking up the coalition special-forces unit and then the soldiers from Delta Company. Back at Kandahar air base, the operations commander, Colonel Bertrand Jes, is satisfied with the mission. It isn't clear yet whether Hannan, the prime target, was killed in the bombardment. But as Jes says, "The Taliban had safe havens up in the mountains. They were cocky at first. Not anymore. We've destroyed their support structure." Yet many U.S. officers are worried that as soon as the U.S. forces return to their bases, the Taliban fighters will reclaim the mountains and villages. Few Afghans want the Taliban to return to power, but ancient tribal ties are not so easily broken among the Pashtun who are the Taliban's supporters.
The U.S. plans to push deeper into the mountains of Zabul and Uruzgan provinces in the coming weeks. The aim is to scatter the Taliban from their hideouts and prevent them from returning to sanctuaries in nearby Pakistan--where U.S. forces can't venture and where their ultimate prey, Osama bin Laden, may be hiding. U.S. and Afghan officials believe that the war against the Taliban will go on for months, perhaps years. The longer the Taliban survives, the tougher it will become for the U.S. to penetrate the trails that might lead to al-Qaeda's boss. That reality is more openly acknowledged by officers on the ground than by their superiors back home. Turner says when he speaks to people in the U.S., "all they say is, 'Why haven't you caught Osama bin Laden?'" He gestures at range after range of mountains soaring out of the desert floor. "I tell them, 'The Army recruiting office is just down the street. Why don't you try to find him?' It's no easy task." After four years, it isn't getting any easier. --With reporting by Muhib Habibi/Kandahar
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