Sami Yousafzai

Sitting in a plush leather chair and smoking a Cuban cigar in his office in Jalalabad, Nanghyal, 38, looks the part of a drug-mafia don--and until recently, he was.

For the past 40 years, 50-year-old Shaukat Khan has made a modest income singing and dancing at weddings, family celebrations and private gala parties. Now he is being run out of show business along with hundreds of other entertainers in Pakistan's North-West Frontier province.

When his invitation finally arrived this July, Mohammad Rasul says he didn't hesitate. Within days the Kabul businessman, 36, was one of 28 new Afghan recruits at a jihadist training camp run by two seasoned Qaeda fighters, a Yemeni and a Chechen, somewhere in a forested part of Afghanistan. "Our target is to kill Americans and America's servants," the Yemeni told the group. "There is no difference between the U.S. and [Afghan leader Hamid] Karzai." A decade of civilian life had not erased the...

The Afghan foot patrol was so hot on the trail of fleeing Qaeda troops that the pursuers could literally smell blood. Across the high passes of the Tora Bora range they raced, with blankets drawn over their shoulders and their turbans wrapped around their faces against the freezing December wind.

U.S. officials have mostly kept mum on the names of specific prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They will say only that there are 384 men from at least 33 countries being held, including more than 100 Saudis, roughly 70 Yemenis, at least 25 Pakistanis, and a sprinkling of European nationals--nearly all of Arab ancestry.

The battle now raging in Paktia province seems to have begun unexpectedly. Laying in Kabul's 400-bed military hospital, Abdul Saboor, 28, is nursing shrapnel wounds in his left leg as a result.

Even as the Saudi fighter spoke, American B-52s were bombing the last Qaeda stronghold of Tora Bora. Afghan fighters had flushed the Qaeda guerrillas out of two main caves and into the Agam and Wazir valleys, where they were seemingly trapped.