On the night of Feb. 23, a Taliban bomber sneaked through the vineyards near Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, carrying an explosive device hidden in an old cement sack. He planted his bomb by the road, primed to go off just as a U.S. convoy came rumbling past. The bomber must have thought he was on home turf. His chosen site was just a kilometer or so away from the madrasah where a one-eyed cleric named Mullah Mohammed Omar launched a movement of young religious zealots in 1994. Within two years the Taliban controlled nearly all of Afghanistan, and Omar had forged an alliance with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda forces. But the bomber chose the wrong place. For months, U.S. soldiers have been busy in Omar's village, digging wells, building schools, handing out medicine—even helping to restore the tomb of a Muslim holy man. The troops' efforts to win the hearts and minds of the local people paid off. A shepherd noticed the explosive and told the local police chief. Soon afterward, U.S. Army experts defused the bomb.That's a small indication of a big change. Six months ago, Afghans around Kandahar were either too loyal to the Taliban, or too scared of them, to have tipped off U.S. soldiers. Sure, bin Laden is still at large, probably hiding somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and the trail for him has gone cold. But U.S. military officers, Afghan officials and even several ex-Taliban commanders say that the Taliban itself is on the run. "The Taliban is a force in decline," says Major General Eric Olson, who conducted the U.S. military's counter-insurgency battle in Afghanistan until last month.
The Taliban's fall has been a long time coming. After U.S. forces took Afghanistan in December 2001, many Taliban simply melted away into their villages. But plenty chose to fight on. Using Pakistan as a sanctuary, and recruiting fresh volunteers from seminaries around the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar, die-hard Taliban commanders led by Omar conducted a jihad against American forces. By late 2002, say Afghan officials in Kabul, nearly half the country was out of bounds to foreign relief missions. And without the lifeline of aid, Afghans saw no point in supporting the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.
