UNLIKELY U.S. ALLIES IN AFGHANISTAN

Anti-Taliban Coalition Is Motley Band With Shady Past

Dushanbe, Tajikistan -- Until President Bush signaled that the U.S.
campaign against terrorism would start in Afghanistan, the West paid little
attention to the cluster of fighters who have opposed the country's Taliban
regime for the past five years -- the Northern Alliance.

Although the Bush administration says ousting the Taliban regime would not
be the goal of attacks against terrorist havens in Afghanistan, alliance
leaders say U.S.-led attacks would afford them an opportunity to do
precisely that.

America's newfound friends are potentially very useful: Alliance fighters
know Afghanistan's difficult terrain, speak local dialects and control the
Soviet-built Bagram air base north of Kabul. But they have a troubling
history as well.

Russian border guards, who still man the 682-mile frontier between
Tajikistan and Afghanistan, reported last year that the alliance pays for
rocket launchers, helicopters and ammunition with precious stones and,
occasionally, opium and heroin.

The U.S. State Department and the United Nation's top anti-narcotics
official have said that drug traffickers operate freely in areas controlled
by the alliance.

A motley coalition of 15,000 to 30,000 fighters, the alliance considers the
ruined northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif to be its capital even though the
Taliban recaptured it in 1998. Since then, they have set up their
headquarters in Faizabad, although most decisions are made by alliance
leaders in Dushanbe, the capital of neighboring Tajikistan.

The group consists of communists, anti-communists and moderate Muslims who
have only one goal in common: to oust the Taliban. Outside of that aim, the
coalition's members are so diverse that experts fear a new civil war if
they manage to topple the Taliban.

While the Taliban are mostly Pashtuns, who represent about 60 percent of
Afghanistan's population, the Northern Alliance consists largely of ethnic
Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, who represent only about 15 percent of the
populace.

Afghanistan plunged into civil war soon after the Soviets withdrew in 1989
and left their despised puppet regime, headed by Mohammad Najibullah, to
fend off forces associated with several ethnic groups and Islamic factions.
Najibullah was lynched by the Taliban in 1996.

In the past, the alliance has had trouble holding itself together in the
face of devastating attacks by the estimated 30,000- to 50,000-man Taliban
army. During the battle for Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998, for example, alliance
forces commanded by the Uzbek Gen. Rashid Dostum simply abandoned the
battlefield, and its leaders fled to Uzbekistan.

Barbaric Tactics

Dostum is known for his cruelty and reportedly has killed political foes by
tying them to two tanks headed in opposite directions. During the chaotic
conflict that ensued after the Soviet withdrawal, Dostum's forces rampaged
through Kabul, destroying much of the city with rocket fire, looting
businesses and terrorizing women and children.

The alliance's political leader is Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was driven from
power by the Taliban but is recognized as Afghanistan's president by the
United States and other Western powers.

His deputy prime minister, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, is held responsible for the
deaths of thousands of Shiite Muslims who reside mainly in northwestern
Afghanistan, a minority he considers to be outside the pale of Islam.

Human rights groups have accused Sayyaf's troops of committing large- scale
summary executions and rapes of Shiites during the 1992-96 civil war.
Sayyaf also backed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf
War and has advocated war to remove U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia, the site
of Islam's holiest shrines.

The Northern Alliance has dominion over one of the poorest regions on Earth,

partly because the area has been ravaged by warfare and deprivation for the
past 22 years. It controls 2 million people in about 10 percent of the country.

Most endure with typhoid and dysentery all around them, and their drinking
water is contaminated with hepatitis bacteria. Many eat bitter soup they
make with the sparse grass they find in the mountainous desert.

Antiquated Arms

When the alliance wages war, it fights with rusty, outdated arms that the
Soviet army left behind when it retreated after its ill-fated decade-long
campaign, which killed a million Afghan civilians and left 15,000 Soviet
soldiers dead and some 50,000 wounded.

During the war with the Soviet Union, future alliance leaders fought with
U. S.-supplied weapons alongside Taliban forces and bin Laden.

But the Taliban and other hard-liners vowed to continue their resistance
until an Islamic government had been installed in Kabul. In Mazar-e-Sharif,
local militias soon joined the moderate mujahedeen, or holy warriors, to
fight the southern Pushtun fundamentalists.

By 1996, the Taliban ruled 90 percent of the country, imposing strict
Islamic rules on its 21 million people.

Ironically, post-Soviet Russia began arming its longtime enemies -- the
very people who have become the Northern Alliance -- once the Kremlin
decided to try to halt the Taliban's northward march to prevent the spread
of Islamic fundamentalism into the former Soviet states of Central Asia.
The alliance also has received support from Iran, which detests the
Taliban's Sunni Muslim movement because it poses a potent threat to its own
mainly Shiite Muslim theocracy.

In recent weeks, the rebels have stepped up their offensive against the
Taliban. But their military leaders deny that the fighting has intensified
because of the expectation that the United States will back them up.

Avenging Gen. Massood

They say they are simply avenging the Sept. 9 assassination of the
coalition's charismatic leader, Gen. Ahmed Shah Massood, an ethnic Tajik
who was considered the alliance's most brilliant military tactician. The
group blames Osama bin Laden, the primary suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks
that killed nearly 7,000 people in the United States, for Massood's death.

On Tuesday, President Bush said he will "ask for the cooperation of
citizens within Afghanistan" to fight the Taliban and bin Laden. The
Pentagon is well aware that only Afghan fighters are capable of staging and
thwarting guerrilla attacks in the treacherous mountains of the Afghan
Kush, taking cover and locating the enemy in highlands and gorges that
would be totally unfamiliar to outsiders.

Saleh Muhammad Registani, the alliance's military attache to Moscow,
suggested that the rebels could coordinate ground offensives while U.S.
troops strike the Taliban from the air.

"We have been fighting against the Taliban for many years," said an
alliance official in Dushanbe, who asked not to be named. "We are fighting
because we want to see democracy in Afghanistan."

The history of many of the alliance's leaders, however, casts doubt on that
claim.

The Northern Alliance at a glance: The fight for Afghanistan

- -- What is it? The Northern Alliance consists of the military wing of
Afghanistan's pre-Taliban government.

- -- What is its influence? The alliance's role, at the moment, is relatively
small; it controls less than 10 percent of the country.

- -- How big are its forces? The alliance claims to have 30,000 troops, but
experts say the real number may be half that. Its arsenal includes tanks,
fighter jets and helicopter gunships from the Soviet era.

- -- Who runs it? The alliance is headed by a 60ish scholar and poet named
Burhanuddin Rabbani, who is still recognized as Afghanistan's president by
the United States and other Western powers and holds Afghanistan's U.N.
seat. The alliance suffered a huge blow earlier this month when its
military leader, Gen.

Ahmed Shah Massood - a leader in the Afghan fight against Soviet occupation
- - was assassinated.

- -- Who supports the alliance? The Taliban's enemies - Iran and Russia,
among others.