Tribal warlords who have spent the past five years in hibernation were swiftly re-emerging yesterday to try to get control of large swaths of southern Afghanistan. These moves are plunging the country back into the chaotic and feuding pre-Taliban era of the early 1990s.
As Taliban forces retreated, tribal Pashtun leaders were reported to have asserted power in the remote southern province of Oruzgan - where the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, grew up - and were poised to move into the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the south-east.
Forces loyal to one local warlord, Arif Khan, have already seized Kandahar airport to the north. Tribal elders also took over at Gardez, 60 miles south of Kabul.
In the east, several tribal leaders - including the veteran Pashtun mujahedeen leader, Yunus Khalis - began staking claims to the strategic city of Jalalabad, which links Kabul to Pakistan via the mountainous Khyber pass.
The rapid fragmentation of Afghanistan into a mosaic of rival fiefdoms last night dismayed supporters of attempts to introduce a coalition government in Kabul. They said the resurgent warlords represented a serious obstacle to creating a broad-based administration.
Afghanistan, they feared, was now sliding back into the bad time it suffered after the fall of the pro-Soviet Najibullah regime in 1992, when rival mujahedeen groups battled for power.
The Taliban showed yesterday that they are not entirely finished, even though their regime's dominion has shrunk to less than 20 per cent of the country.
In the northern provincial capital of Kunduz, up to 20,000 Taliban fighters refused to surrender, despite being surrounded by opposition troops. The Northern Alliance said Taliban and Arab fighters were also holed up in a school on the outskirts of another key centre in the north, Mazar-e-Sharif.