Inside Tora Bora

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The U.S. ignored the cease-fire and bombed relentlessly. Sure enough, the next day, the surrendering al-Qaeda troops had vanished. Zaman's aides insist that they were probably "confused" when the U.S. broke the cease-fire and scampered back into their holes. But other Afghan leaders thought Zaman had been duped. "It was a trick," said Haji Zahir, one of the warlords commanding Afghan troops in Tora Bora. "They were buying time."

The arrival of Western troops at the front lines had the added advantage of giving the Afghan fighters new resolve. During previous weeks, the Afghans withdrew from their positions during the day in time to break their Ramadan fasts at dusk. With the endand the Americansin sight, they held their positions.

From the start of the war, the U.S. has relied heavily on Afghan ground forces rather than deploy a sizable contingent of American troops. But the cease-fire screw-up was a reminder that the Afghans might be useful proxies for some jobs but were perhaps not quite professional enough to finish this one. On Sunday, Zaman managed to get back into the U.S.'s good gracesand back into the race for the $25 million bounty on bin Laden's headas he ferried western commandoes to the front. By then, U.S. warplanes were pounding al-Qaeda positions with hundreds of bombs and missiles, and more than 100 U.S. and British special-ops soldiers moved in, signaling to the Afghans and al-Qaeda that the time for mistakes was over.

"Al-Qaeda is finished," crowed Afghan commander Hazrat Ali from his battlefield perch below the caves on Friday afternoon. "They are surrounded." American military leaders were more cautious. "'Surrounded' probably is not a terribly good word," said General Tommy R. Franks, the regional commander of American forces. "But the view of the opposition leaders on the ground is that this al-Qaeda force is contained in that area."

If a hole is to be found in the tightening alliance net, it will most likely be somewhere along the 2,430-km Pakistani border. Earlier in the week rumors swirled that bin Laden had been successfully smuggled across, although radio intercepts and the ferocity of fighting in Tora Bora suggested that al-Qaeda was defending more than just snow-covered rock. The Pakistani government, having seen the devastation bin Laden's presence caused in Afghanistan and having been swayed by the promise of $1 billion in new U.S. aid, insists it is guarding against the possibility of border crossings. Arabs, Macedonians and Turks have recently been arrested trying to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and even some Pakistani extremists were not allowed back into the country until they surrendered their weapons. "We have made it impossible for bin Laden to enter our country," said Pakistan Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider. Even so, on Saturday there were reports that 50 Arab al-Qaeda fighters had traversed the border in a mule train. Neither technology nor vigilance can secure a border that spans impossibly remote mountain trails.

Sixty km east of Tora Bora lies Pakistan's Tirah Valley, a semiautonomous tribal belt only nominally under government control. In the late 19th century the British established the area around and including the Tirah Valley as a buffer zone between Afghanistan and British India. The Pakistani government has never had an official presence there, and many of the tribesmen who rule Tirah are deeply conservative supporters of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. But of late, Pakistani military helicopters have been buzzing over the frontier while soldiers patrol on foot. State-run Pakistan Television has broadcast pictures of locals eagerly assisting soldiers as they arrived, but those who know the valley believe they will not take kindly to an armed presence. Given local sympathies, if bin Laden could make it there, he might be well protected.

Of course, $25 million is a lot of money, especially in the Tirah Valley. It's more than enough to sway convictions. And as alliance forces creep up the mountains and Western special-ops troops take their technology and firepower to each and every cave, bin Laden's choices are getting as narrow as his chances of escaping. "This is a man on the run, a man with a big price on his head," says Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. "He has to wake up every day and decide, 'Do I keep all the security around me, which I need to make sure that some Afghan bounty hunters don't turn me in but which help to give a lot of reports about my whereabouts, or do I go into hiding?' He doesn't have a lot of good options." He also doesn't have a lot of time.