But the Arabs have the tremendous advantage of the terrain, a narrow but steep mountain range covered with caves and forests into which they can retreat at will.But gliding through the sky, scarcely audible at 15,000 feet, is the decisive factor in this battle: American B-52 bombers.The mujahedin commanders on the front line carry only walkie-talkies and they have no way of communicating with the planes above. Yesterday, they simply watched as a single plane circled again and again. Every 15 minutes or so, a great muffled boom reverberated through the mountains, accompanied by an orange flash, then clouds of smoke rising from behind the hill. And then their 13 elderly T-56 tanks loaded and fired at the same spot.But this is a battle that will be won on the ground, and there the mujahedin had a mixed day. One thousand of them have gathered here since Tuesday, along with their battered Russian tanks, and last night more were on the way. The Arabs have left their cave hideaways for the forest, and to the mujahedin soldiers moving towards them, they are a faceless enemy.

“We can hear them talking to one another on their radios,” said a soldier named Habibullah “But they call one another by numbers instead of names We heard them saying ‘Don’t shoot at them now. Wait until they come up and then surround them, and take them out.’ ” And that, as Commander Shah and his over-enthusiastic men discovered, is exactly what happened.But the Arabs’ supply lines have been cut. The villagers who were bribed and bullied into delivering water and food are leaving the area, and the stores in their caves will give out eventually.”I can’t compare them with the Russians because there is no one left to help them now,” said Halim Shah, the commander of the front line “They are completely helpless. But they are terrorists.”When you ask how long the battle will last, the mujahedin refuse to answer.

And when you press them, they say, rather hesitantly, “Soon”.. When the four Afghan delegations first met in formal session at the Petersberg hotel, near Bonn, 10 days ago, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, sent a pointed message. He said they had to prove wrong the sceptics who believed they would only “repeat the mistakes of the past”. The British special envoy to the talks, Robert Cooper, a diplomat not given to hyperbole, said the outcome was “miraculous”.They were four very disparate groups – the battle-hardened Northern Alliance, which now wields power in Kabul, the suavely cosmopolitan Royalist supporters based in Rome, and two smaller groups: one representing the mainly ethnic Pashtun Pakistan emigration, and the other the Cyprus-based exiles, who tend to look towards Iran. As Mr Brahimi conceded, they were hardly representative of Afghanistan.But, as he also said, it was the best that could be done in such extraordinary circumstances. America’s “war on terrorism” had toppled Afghanistan’s fundamentalist Taliban rulers and threatened a new upsurge in the country’s 23-year civil war, as well as widespread famine this winter. The purpose of the talks was to lay the basis for a “broad-based government”, ethnic harmony, and the rule of law.