Alliance waits as plain fills with craters

The luckiest man in Afghanistan came popping out of the middle of a smoke cloud left by a huge bomb, driving his jeep like a bat out of hell from the latest American air strike.

From my vantage point at the shattered Bagram Airbase on the Northern Alliance front line, I watched him scoot across the flat empty plain, leaving the kind of dust trail you see in Road Runner cartoons.

Behind him, a huge brown mushroom cloud rose into the air, one of several standing across the plain in the still morning air.

Today is the second day of round-the-clock air strikes on Taliban positions guarding approaches to Kabul. American planes, singly or in pairs, are in the sky more or less continuously - mostly fighter bombers lining up for precision strikes, but interrupted by lone B-52s which sometimes drop great sticks of bombs and sometimes simply circle.

Northern Alliance commanders sit here carefully noting each blast.

I ask my host, General Sayed Hakim, what the target was for the bomb that had somehow missed our jeep driver. "Lots of things," he said.

Throughout this week the general has been ticking off the shifting targets. On the top of one hill was a tank that had been annoying them for months. It was dug in - though evidently not far enough. There were gun positions there too, and spotters and some sort of base. "All gone now," he said.

From this vantage point, the plain is slowly filling up with craters like giant's footsteps.

Pentagon planners are having an easy ride after the nightmare of Kosovo two years ago, when hundreds of bombs managed to destroy only Serbian 13 tanks.

Unlike Kosovo, this enemy has no trees to hide under. And also unlike Kosovo, there are forward observers, guarded by the Northern Alliance, to guide the planes in. "It's simple," said one bearded Alliance soldier at the airport. "If they miss one day, they just come back and bomb it again the next."

While the Americans bomb the daylights out of the Taliban, with special forces teams in their jeans and bomber jackets flying in and out by helicopter, the Northern Alliance shows no signs of going on the offensive.

"When I get the order, of course I will go," said General Hakim. But not yet.