Story gallery: Analysis

Many of his fellow structural engineers were stunned when the twin towers of the World Trade Center crashed to the ground on Sept. 11.

Soldiers and doctors see dead and wounded after bomb goes astray

Tribal chief dodges U.S. bomb, Taliban to head government

French rampage a mix of alienation, crime and extremism

Iraq isn’t afraid of American threats and is ready to defend itself against any attack, the Iraqi government said Tuesday.

The past year has not been an easy one for John Ashcroft. He lost his Senate seat to a dead man.

If you don’t read every single word of this story, then the terrorists have won.

Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry rushed to pull a suddenly sensitive report from its Web site titled “Industrial Chemicals and Terrorism.”

The Transportation Department will likely miss an early deadline of the new aviation security bill requiring that all checked baggage be screened for explosives, the agency’s head said Tuesday, prompting an immediate rebuke from top Democratic congressional leaders.

The director of surgery at the public hospital was a Muslim cleric with no medical experience.

The two men stand uncomfortably side by side in the makeshift prison yard, unwarmed by the autumn sun.

While discounting the latest reports of Osama bin Laden’s nuclear capability, weapons experts warn that the United States is doing far too little to safeguard bombmaking materials around the world, heightening the risk of a nuclear terrorist attack against America.

As the Taliban’s power erodes in Afghanistan, officials in Pakistan are further distancing themselves from what remains of the embattled, hard-line regime.

Factions seem to hate foreign troops more than they do each other

A child soldiers on as villagers ask why America bombs them

Take your bag to the counter or the curb at any major airport. Hand it over to the attendant.

Two months into the war against terrorism, Americans continue to display a level of unity, optimism and confidence in the nation’s leadership rarely seen in the last 40 years, a Times Poll has found.

Most Americans showed signs of psychological distress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, but since then many have bounced back by instinctively doing things mental health professionals would have recommended to speed their recovery, researchers say.

Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami warned Monday that forcing the Taliban out of Kabul or ending its rule altogether probably would not end the fighting -- or the Taliban’s presence -- in Afghanistan.

It is a peculiar fact of an Afghan war that friends become enemies and suddenly friends again, always knowing that either one would have killed the other if they’d had the chance.

Humanitarian aid for starving and displaced civilians fell victim over the weekend in parts of Afghanistan to all three forces battling in the country--the ruling Taliban, the opposition Northern Alliance and the U.S. military--United Nations officials here reported Monday.

By noon, Ensign Ahmed Aslam has made his way to the Tarawa Terrace Chapel, transformed for an hour every Friday into a mosque.

Even as the rebel Northern Alliance celebrates its first significant victory in Mazar-i-Sharif, it’s important not to lose sight of the real goal for the military campaign in Afghanistan.

Who says the West isn’t doing enough to help Afghanistan’s beleaguered anti-Taliban rebels?

Experts: Elite forces unduly risked on targets of limited value

That Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf feels secure enough to leave his country for a week is testimony to the growing confidence of a man who has emerged as one of America’s most crucial allies in the war against terrorism.

Beijing sees opportunity to improve troubled ties between two nations

When Abdullah Jan stole the Kalashnikov from the body of a Russian soldier 18 years ago, he could see it was in bad shape, dirty, battered, in need of love and care.

The old slogan “Loose Lips Sink Ships” flashed on television sets throughout this amphibious assault ship as it cruised the Arabian Sea this week.

Middle-class students lecture U.S. officials on Afghan campaign

Some are jailed on tenuous ‘evidence,’ their opinion of America soured

Although the U.S. military campaign so far has focused heavily on northern Afghanistan, the United States has little hope of tracking Osama bin Laden, eliminating his al-Qaida terrorist network or replacing the Taliban regime unless it wins in the south -- the cradle of Afghan power, according to U.S. and regional experts.

Beaten Democrats get behind Bush

Deal reportedly struck for use of Tajikistan bases

The FBI came for Tarek Albasti as he cooked pasta in his restaurant.

The “new normalcy,” as Bush administration officials like to describe life in America post-Sept. 11, has been heavy on the new and light on the normalcy.

What do Martha Stewart, Big Steel, automakers, Planet Hollywood, trendy clothing manufacturers, software companies, Donald Trump and Scottish pubs have in common?

Sardar Bibi Khan, a farmer from southern Afghanistan, never thought much about America other than as a place that helped his country overthrow the Russians, but one month into the U.S. bombing campaign his view has changed.

At the Labor Department, where incoming mail has been disrupted for 10 days, dozens of enforcement cases are jeopardized because the timing on legal deadlines is set when a litigant mails a document.

V.S.

If the U.S. assault against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were strictly a war of words, we might be in worse trouble than we’d like.

Hamidullah can expertly fire a rifle, fearlessly attack an enemy trench and deftly bayonet an enemy Taliban fighter.

After more than three weeks of inconclusive bombing in Afghanistan, the Bush administration is facing the same question that reverberated through the last two major U.S. military engagements: Can air power do the job by itself?

The boy from Russia and the boy from Afghanistan recently faced off in the school hallway, a past war bringing them to the brink of a fight.

The crisp new fatigues were a bit big for Zikr Ullah’s gangly body, so he had to pull the web belt in all the way to the last notch.

Earlier generations took unusual steps to disinfect letters

A walled religious school served as central headquarters.

In Uzbekistan, word of hangings, battle trickles out

Behind a dusty gray wall in the military district here works an organization with secret knowledge that could spell success or doom for U.S. military operations against Osama bin Laden and his ally, the Taliban.

President Pervez Musharraf is scheduled to begin a series of hastily arranged meetings with Pakistan’s mainstream political parties Tuesday in an effort to contain pressure on his military government generated by the ongoing U.S.

As anthrax exposures continue and the specter of smallpox has loomed on the horizon, many officials have begun discussing widespread vaccination against the two diseases in an effort to reduce public concern about terrorist threats.

With America now on alert for imminent terrorist attacks, former federal agents acting as consultants to private industry say widespread security lapses have left no shortage of targets.

Rumsfeld denies `quagmire,’ hints at attacks during Ramadan

Afghan war hero’s execution presents added challenges

In the new war on terrorism, the American intelligence community is beginning to ask: How far can we go?

In the late 1980s, the U.S. government undertook an investigation in Bethlehem that was so sensitive to this nation’s foreign affairs it required the approval of a secret court.

From South Mountain Middle School in Allentown to the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan, from taking orders at a local McDonald’s to giving orders as commander of a 3,000-strong army -- what a long, strange journey it’s been for Jeff Naderi, now known as Sayed Jaffar Naderi.

When the Soviet Union took on Afghanistan, its troops found themselves crawling, terrified, through a vast network of mountain caves studded with knives and booby traps, pursuing moujahedeen fighters who seemed to melt into mountainsides like the night itself.

Secretary of State Colin L.

In 1945, the armed forces needed 100 B-19s and an average of 650 bombs to reliably destroy a single ground target.

FBI probe at cross purposes with public health efforts

The people who tell the stories don’t know what to say, at least not yet.

Calls for a national system of identification cards sparked by the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have gained little traction, failing to win endorsements from the Bush administration or congressional leaders.

Way up on the barren, treeless mountaintop sits a Taliban camp, which lobs shells every so often at the Northern Alliance army base below, giving this otherwise abandoned village about 30 miles east of Mazar-e Sharif a desolate look.

Afghanistan’s representative to Pakistan leading his nation’s propaganda war

Jarrah, believed to be one of hijackers, appeared to embrace Western life

About a dozen Afghan tribesmen, resplendent in their traditional turbans and robes, settled themselves into garden chairs on the front lawn of Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani’s walled villa on Monday afternoon to haggle over their role in the future of their country.

When President Bush declared war on terrorism immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, he warned Americans not to expect anything like the wars of the past.

Six weeks ago, George W.

As 19 hijackers around the United States prepared this summer for a deadly day in September, authorities say, a related but decidedly different Islamic network was plotting an attack on an American symbol in the heart of Europe: the U.S.

Inspectors with high-tech gear and a United Nations mandate charge around this southern seaport, on this day examining ships loaded with beans and rice to make sure they are not concealing electronics, or chemicals or even weapons, banned under the strict sanctions imposed on Iraq a decade ago.

Miles above the Earth, inside the slender fuselage of a Boeing 707, the crew of a stunningly complex flying command center concentrates on more than a dozen brightly colored video screens.

The day the first case of anthrax was revealed, Tommy G.

Salahuddin Khalled, 27-year-old Pakistani and captured Taliban warrior, sits in a cell among 20 criminals and prisoners of war, plastic bags of clothes, metal pots and shoes hanging off the walls and dangling from the low log rafters.

The anthrax spores delivered to a Senate office appear to be concentrated, pure and processed to a minute size that would make them a formidable weapon, government officials said Wednesday, suggesting that the biological attack required sophisticated expertise.

The anthrax scare that seized the nation’s attention this week underscored two unfamiliar aspects of the war against terrorism.

Pornographic material mailed to a Microsoft office in Reno, Nev., tested positive for anthrax on an initial screening.

In a distant echo of Vietnam, some leading conservatives are quietly questioning whether the Bush administration is allowing its political goals in Afghanistan to excessively shape military strategy.

In law enforcement’s zeal to find those responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, some legal experts fear, the basic rights of some innocent people are being trampled.

It started as a dispute over a lunch tab and ended with a mass defection of Taliban troops.

Images reveal few details about effectiveness of air strikes

When Khalid Almidhar and Nawaq Alhamzi arrived at Dulles International Airport on Sept. 11 to board American Airlines Flight 77, airline officials were unaware their names were listed on an Immigration and Naturalization Service watch list of people associated with possible terrorist activity.

They do not run from the world’s most-feared diseases -- they run to them.

Trucks rumble where beasts tread with care

It has been a stain on the nation’s conscience for five decades, a shameful mistake for which apologies have been made and reparations paid.

Progress. And patience. Vigilance. And a return to normality. Bomb Afghanistan. And feed it.

Just as the international politics of the American-led war on terrorism is a maze, so is the attempt to cover the campaign.

If history is any guide, the daily briefings from Defense Secretary Donald H.

Each evening just after sundown, convoys of heavily armed Taliban fighters push out of their bases in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and drive to the safest place they know: the front line.

When Osama bin Laden issued his chilling warnings Sunday in footage videotaped from the mouth of a cave, Americans didn’t just see enemy No. 1.

Capability to disrupt major systems exists, experts say

When the Reagan administration made a controversial decision to send shoulder-fired missiles to Afghan rebels in 1986, critics warned the move could come back to haunt the United States.

Russia puts pressure on Chechens, deals in arms with Iran

As home to dozens of highly specialized air-and-sea operations and the command post for tens of thousands of U.S. forces across the globe, Florida will play a crucial role in any military retaliation for the Sept. 11 attacks blamed on Osama bin Laden, military officials and analysts say.

How do you preach forbearance in the face of wanton slaughter?

In Washington, the symbol of the free world, nothing will be quite as free and open as it was before September 11.

The Egyptian government has convicted Yasser al Serri in absentia for a failed attempt to assassinate the prime minister.

The doctor once ran a flourishing medical clinic in this wealthy neighborhood of grand villas and trendy art galleries.

Immigration flaws in spotlight as authorities track terror

As the United States and its coalition partners move to cut off the financial lifeblood of terrorism, they will run headlong into a simple, centuries-old practice of moving money that will frustrate their efforts.

As President Bush encourages Americans to get back to business as usual after the terrorist attacks two weeks ago on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, he is simultaneously warning that a long struggle lies ahead and that more terrorist attacks are possible.

Land mines laid during and after Soviet occupation pose risk

The success of American military action in Afghanistan could hinge on aid from a small, rebel Afghan army that just two weeks ago seemed on the verge of collapse.

Plunging into a new kind of war against terrorism, U.S. leaders are preparing to police the world with economic pressure tactics and far-flung engagements that go well beyond the military mobilization around Afghanistan.

Accountants, computer experts and fraud investigators have risen to the forefront of the new war against terrorism.

In dark times, different kind of films emerge

Anxiety high; security measures grow; business travel drops

U.S. girding for possibility of other forms of attack

Next steps may determine Americans’ psychological direction

Battles will be less action and more quiet struggle

It’s an axiom of historians that an American president needs a national crisis of major proportions to prove his mettle.

On the brink of war, the preeminent political task usually facing a president is to rally the country’s support for military action.

When President Bush announced the creation of a new Office of Homeland Security and named Pennsylvania Gov.

Abdulaziz Alomari -- identified as a suicide hijacker on the first plane that smashed into the World Trade Center last week -- is “alive and well in Saudi Arabia,” a Saudi Embassy official told the Orlando Sentinel on Wednesday.

Large-scale layoffs in the wake of last week’s terrorist attack could damage an already fragile economy, putting another dent in consumer confidence and curtailing retail spending, experts say.

Spy agencies fear clues to attacks may be overlooked

China likely will play a major role in the scope and success of U.S. military action in Afghanistan.

Good intelligence key to success in Afghanistan