LONDON -- Four out of five: Mazar-e Sharif, Herat, Kabul and Jalalabad. All but one of Afghanistan's major cities have been lost by the Taliban and captured by the Northern Alliance in less than a week, and the last, Kandahar, is likely to fall at any time. Neither Washington nor anyone else expected so sudden a collapse. So the burning question at the Pentagon, in the National Security Council, in all the decision-making centers of the United States and the other members of its antiterrorist coalition, is what to do next. The answer is to stop.
Stop the bombing, above all. It has achieved a lot by breaking up the Taliban's fixed defenses and demoralizing their troops, but it can do little more now that the Taliban forces are pulling back into the hills and reverting to guerrilla warfare. There is far more to be gained in goodwill by stopping the bombing during Ramadan, both in Afghanistan and in the rest of the Muslim world, than there is militarily by continuing to bomb.
Yes, we know that bombing pauses have a dreadful reputation among the U.S. military after the way they were used in Vietnam, but that really was different. There, the U.S. was facing an entire people in arms, and trying to persuade them to abandon the military victory they were gradually winning on the ground by punishing them from the air. Every once in a while Washington would stop to see if they were hurting enough yet. Ridiculous.