Marines stranded at Bagram airbase

Not since General Gordon was marooned in Khartoum has a British garrison been more beleaguered than the troops now stuck at Bagram air base outside Kabul.

One hundred Royal Marines are here in this giant airfield, surrounded by thousands of potentially hostile Afghan troops, and coping with the news last night that London has cancelled plans to fly in reinforcements. The hills nearby are infested with several hundred Arab Taliban fighters, cut off by the fall of Kabul and now fighting daily clashes with the Northern Alliance.

At Bagram, the Northern Alliance troops guarding the Marines seem more like jailers than friends, with Alliance commanders demanding an end to the British operation. The Marines, many from the elite Special Boat Squadron, arrived on Friday here, 22 miles north of Kabul, as the spearhead of a much larger force of up to 2,000, which was supposed to begin arriving today.

But the Alliance has slammed on the brakes. Foreign minister Dr Abdullah Abdullah, happy enough last week to see American bombs clear a path for his forces to Kabul, now says there can be no more British troops without further "discussions". His deputy intelligence chief, named Engineer Arif, has gone further, ordering the British to cut their numbers, rendering their deployment pointless.

London insists the force is in Afghanistan to provide humanitarian relief. But the Alliance fears the British are here as peacekeepers, and might interfere with its sudden dominance of Kabul.

Last night the UN contradicted London's claims about relief work, saying these Marines form no part of any UN humanitarian operation.

"You don't move relief items in by air unless you have no alternative," said Mike Sackett, the Australian humanitarian coordinator. "We have a number of routes. We can move thousands of tonnes of food." In fact an efficient UN feeding operation is already uncoiling along highways from well stocked food depots in Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

There is simply no need for an air bridge, especially to Kabul, where the bazaars are groaning with food. If London has another motive for plonking its special forces in the middle of Afghanistan, now is probably the time to come clean.

Bagram, a huge sprawling base stretching over three miles, is an unhappy place in which to be beleaguered, with wide open spaces allowing snipers to take pot shots. The place was fought over many times by the Alliance and Taliban.

Its hangars and control tower have huge holes in the roofs. Every building is wrecked. Broken fighter planes sit in the former dispersal areas and rubble, shrapnel and spent ammunition casings lie everywhere. Until last week it was on the front line with the Taliban and the whole area is strewn with mines.

Bagram was built as the hub of the 10-year Soviet effort to subdue the Afghans. The war, dubbed "Moscow's Vietnam", ended in humiliating failure and withdrawal in 1989.

What the Marines inside think about all this is impossible to tell - their Alliance "hosts" refuse to let me in - but the longer they stay here, the more they become pawns in a much bigger political game.

The Alliance no longer needs American air power, and is busy strengthening its grip on Kabul. A single party, the ethnic-Tajik Jamiat i Islami, now dominates not just the city but the government too, accounting for all three ministers - interior, defence and foreign affairs. That party's allied warlords are also the only ones in control of troops patrolling the streets - to the annoyance of other ethnic groups who fear Tajik domination. Ethnic Hazara troops, arriving to guard their own suburbs in the capital at the weekend, complain that they have been forcibly disarmed by the "ring of steel" the Alliance has thrown around Kabul.

None of this is likely to impress the Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest group, who dominate the south. Pashtun warlords may well be about to dump the Taliban, but most Taliban units are likely to be re-employed, ready for a possible war against their bitter foes, the Tajik- dominated Northern Alliance.

Whether Balkan-style peacekeeping, which involves forcing all sides to disarm, is going to work here is uncertain.