THE United States won the war in Afghanistan not so much through its overwhelming military might as through the simple, age-old technique of bribery, according to a book published in the US today.

Bob Woodward, the Washington Post journalist, claims that CIA agents, led by a team called “Jawbreaker”, bought off a number of Taleban commanders and other hostile factions with a mere $70 million (£45 million).

In Bush at War, Mr Woodward tells how, as US aircraft rained bombs on Afghanistan, 110 CIA officers and 316 special forces personnel were causing just as much damage on the ground with their cash handouts.

“That’s one bargain,” President Bush told Mr Woodward as he wondered aloud what the Soviet Union had spent during the nine years in which it tried in vain to suppress the Afghans in the 1980s.

The CIA’s pay-offs were a drop in the ocean compared with the estimated $10 billion overall cost of the war in Afghanistan, but experts agree that they did much to shorten the campaign by buying off Taleban forces and giving money up front to their only organised opponent, the Northern Alliance.

According to Mr Woodward’s account, a ten-man paramilitary team code-named “Jawbreaker” set the tone after landing in Afghanistan on September 26, 15 days after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre. They carried $3 million in a single attaché case.

The team leader, “Gary”, dumped half a million dollars in ten stacks of $100 bills in front of the head of the Alliance’s intelligence and security service and told him to do with it as he wished. The next day, he delivered $1 million to the commander of the Alliance forces, who is now Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister, Mr Woodward wrote.

“Hank”, the head of the CIA’s counter-terrorism special operations, knew the value of cash to Afghanistan’s impoverished fighters, whose commanders had themselves been bought off by the Taleban some years before.

“Warlords or sub-commanders with dozens or hundreds of fighters could be bought off for as little as $50,000 in cash,” he told Mr Woodward. “If we do this right, we can buy off a lot more of the Taleban than we have to kill.”

One commander, offered $50,000 to defect, asked for time to reflect. US special forces then dropped a precision bomb right outside his headquarters and called him back, this time offering only $40,000. He accepted.

“It’s the way things work there. Ever since the Soviet War, there have been no governing structures. It’s really a question of who has got the cash and who has got the weapons,” P. W. King, the co-ordinator of a project on US policy towards the Islamic world at the Brookings Institution, said.

Julie Sirrs, a former Defence Intelligence Agency analyst and expert on Afghanistan, agreed. “If they would have done this a few years ago, maybe we wouldn’t have had this problem,” she said. “The Northern Alliance was so cash-strapped, it needed money to feed its horses.”

The one thing that American money could not buy, however, was information leading to the capture of either Osama bin Laden or Mullah Mohammed Omar, supreme leader of the Taleban.

The White House said yesterday that intelligence experts had concluded that the voice on an audiotape received by the al-Jazeera television station last week was that of bin Laden, proving that the al-Qaeda leader was alive.

Mr Woodward recounts the parting instructions given to “Gary” by the head of the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre before he left for Afghanistan. “You have one mission,” he was told. “Go find the al-Qaeda and eliminate them . . . Get bin Laden, find him. I want his head in a box . . . I want to take it down and show the President.”

In his first cable back, “Gary” rather optimistically requested some heavy-duty cardboard boxes, dry ice and some pikes.

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