Kandahar

Trucks full of steaming asphalt drove past Mike Bois, each load adding a few more feet to the black ribbon advancing across the barren landscape. Bois watched the procession, talking a mile a minute, faster than anyone has driven around here in decades. "We're pulling out all stops, whatever it takes to get this project finished," said Bois, the superintendent of the Louis Berger Group, a New Jersey construction company that is rebuilding the 299-mile highway linking Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, and its second largest city, Kandahar.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai made strong demands for U.S. military officials yesterday to protect Afghan civilians from mistaken attacks as the Pentagon cautioned it was still too early to draw conclusions about an apparent friendly-fire incident Monday that killed dozens of innocent people, most of them women and children. In issuing their unprecedented protest of the military attack, the leaders of the country's newly minted government, which rose to power with Washington's support, also said yesterday that 40 people - 25 from the same family - had been killed and 100 wounded in the U.S. attack over Uruzgan province that reportedly struck a wedding party.

U.S. troops will begin training Afghan soldiers to bolster security and guard borders in that still-unstable nation, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday. The training will begin in four to six weeks and be led by 125 to 150 members of the U.S. Army's special forces teams. The Pentagon said the training will start with 10-week courses emphasizing "basic soldier skills. " More complex training involving a range of units - from small groups to battalions comprising several hundred soldiers - will follow.

President Bush is expected to ask Congress tomorrow for $20 billion to $25 billion more to finance the war against terrorism abroad and at home and for other initiatives, officials said yesterday. About half the money would go to the Defense Department for the war in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and its efforts to protect U.S. cities, airports and military bases, said the officials. The proposal also is expected to include $5.5 billion to help New York rebuild from the Sept.

Until lately, Kandahar was a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. The place name is also the title of a scorching movie odyssey, Kandahar, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's lyrical lament to disembodiment, exile, and the day-to-day terror of war. In the opening passage of this surreal dirge, prosthetic legs rain from the skies over Afghanistan, replacement parts parachuting down from Red Cross planes to aid thousands who have lost...

Following the surrender last week of the Taliban's former foreign minister, more than 15 top Taliban officials have begun negotiating with representatives of the new Afghan government to give themselves up, Afghan and U.S. officials said yesterday. Their eventual surrender could provide U.S. forces in Afghanistan with access to the upper echelons of the ousted regime that harbored Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network. "Right now we are in contact with more than 15 top Taliban," Khalid Pashtoon, a senior aide to Kandahar Governor Gul Agha Sherzai, told reporters.

Residents of this central Afghanistan village, apparently raided by U.S. Special Forces, continued to insist yesterday that 21 men who died and 27 more who were captured were anti-Taliban fighters loyal to interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai. Four days after the raid, villagers led reporters through the remains of a former schoolhouse they said had been used to store weapons and equipment collected from the Taliban. Witnesses said U.S. military aircraft destroyed the building last week, killing the anti-Taliban fighters who were guarding the weapons.

While I was on a three-week leave from columnizing, the world changed. Enron took over the headlines, and Afghanistan slipped onto the inside pages. This means we've entered the slog phase of the antiterrorism war, which isn't nearly as dramatic as Army Rangers parachuting into air bases or bombs raining on Tora Bora. But this phase - in which we try to tie up many loose ends unresolved by the fighting - is just as important as our defeat of the Taliban. How we handle the slog phase will show the world whether we've got the stamina to combat terrorism over the long haul.

John Walker Lindh, the young American found fighting alongside the Taliban, will likely leave today for the United States, where he faces trial on charges of conspiring to kill fellow countrymen, U.S. officials said. Lindh will be flown from the USS Bataan in the northern Arabian Sea, where he has been held, the officials said on condition of anonymity. The officials would give few details, saying Lindh would stop somewhere in the region - most likely at the U.S. base at the southern Afghan city of Kandahar - before continuing on to his final destination.

The bodies of five Marines killed last week when their plane crashed in Pakistan were recovered yesterday as search efforts continued at the mountainous site for two others who were aboard. To the sad strains of "Amazing Grace," 100 of their comrades gathered in Kandahar to pay tribute to the victims of the single deadliest incident for Americans so far in the war in Afghanistan. The deaths will "strengthen our resolve to do everything we can to eradicate terrorism in the world," Marine chaplain Joseph Scordo told troops assembled at the U.S. base, their M-16 assault rifles and rocket launchers pointed downward.