TORA BORA, Afghanistan - Inside the elementary school that was functioning as the US special forces command center, a US military adviser was livid. An Afghan commander had brokered a cease-fire at Tora Bora without consulting anyone.

''Why did you do the cease-fire?'' the American demanded to know, according to two participants. ''We don't want to stop the bombing.''

In December, anti-Taliban fighters gathered in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, as a bomber circled overhead. (Globe Staff Photo/Dominic Chavez)

He ordered the air assault against Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda forces to resume immediately, at 8 a.m. on Dec. 13, radioing a B-52 bomber overhead and asking that it deliver that message for all to see.

The pilot wrote a gigantic ''8 ON'' in the blue sky, using the plane's trail of exhaust.

Over the five days that followed, the air assault, combined with fighting by local Afghan troops, left 300 bodies scattered across the landscape. But the success of that operation - and the overall impression, at the end of the battle, of a routed terror group - mask the failings of the US mission.

A first on-the-ground examination of the Tora Bora battle (the Pentagon allowed no access during the fighting) reflected the dangers inherent in the US strategy of relying on double-crossing and power-grabbing warlords while US ground forces remained on the fringes of the fight. The tactics gave bin Laden and Al Qaeda leaders several opportunities to escape, and it is likely that they did.

''The Americans relied too much on these commanders. They were trapped by them,'' said Malik Haji Mohammed Nasir, the chief secretary for the Nangarhar Province and a village elder from the village of Agam, about 3 miles north of Tora Bora.

At key junctures of the battle, the Americans learned they had little or no control.

During the US and Afghan cease-fire of Dec. 12 - which an Afghan commander negotiated with Al Qaeda in hopes that some would surrender - several hundred Qaeda members slipped through the valleys and over the White Mountains into Pakistan, Afghan commanders say.

And in at least two cases, Afghans, paid to help the US find Al Qaeda members, took the money and disappeared. One, possibly both, led a group of bin Laden's men to Pakistan.

Looking back, even the Afghan commanders, who US intelligence sources say received more than $1 million in total from Central Intelligence Agency officers in freshly minted $100 bills, believe the Americans fell far short.

''We got only 50 percent success - getting Al Qaeda out from this area,'' said Hazarat Ali, the main Afghan commander at Tora Bora, as he leaned back on an overstuffed cushion in his house in Jalalabad. ''We didn't do what we should have in the mountains. The cease-fire was a trick, and due to that a lot of people escaped.''

The details of US failings have emerged in more than two dozen interviews with commanders and fighters here, as well as with US intelligence and military sources in Washington. US special forces in Jalalabad declined several requests for comment.

In addition, US military follow-up in the seven weeks since the bombing stopped has provided information that corrects much of had been believed about Al Qaeda forces at the time.

For example, Qaeda fighters were not dug deep into multilayered cave complexes because no such complexes exist, according to a US American-led exploration of 180 to 200 caves. The largest found so far is 60 feet deep.

The almost daily declarations during the fighting from Afghan commanders that bin Laden was at Tora Bora also doesn't hold up; the most reliable information, from Qaeda prisoners, was that he appeared for 30 minutes on ''the 11th day of Ramadan,'' or Nov. 27, to drink tea and to tell his followers, ''Paradise is on the way. Fight until death.''

Then bin Laden probably slipped away - at a time when the Americans couldn't get the local Afghan warlords to fight on their behalf.

From the very start, the Tora Bora operation - with 2,500 local Afghan fighters, 40 US special forces, and the mightiest air arsenal in the world against an estimated 1,000 Qaeda fighters - seemed star-crossed.

The battle took too long to start, and when it began no one had a plan - least of all the local warlords, who tripped over one another trying to capture bin Laden.

''We have a saying in Pashtu,'' Ali said, smiling at the thought. ''If you want to hunt one bird and have more than 100 hunters, it is very possible that the bird will escape. We had a lot of hunters there, and the birds escaped.''

A local reluctance to pursue fleeing Qaeda

The Tora Bora offensive achieved lesser goals: It chased the terror group from its most fortified base; 57 Qaeda members were arrested in Afghanistan and another 150 in Pakistan, over the border from Tora Bora; four Stinger heat-seeking missiles, used to shoot down aircraft, were found in one cave, along with a computer and satellite telephones, according to Ali.

But the battle started as a mess, and the fighters didn't recover until near the end.

US signal intelligence found that in mid- to late-November, many Qaeda members drove four-wheel-drive vehicles 25 miles south, according to US intelligence officials speaking on condition of anonymity. But when the United States urged its mujahideen allies to go after the enemy, the local commanders were reluctant, preferring instead to stay in newly liberated Jalalabad to stake out their own turf.

To encourage the pursuit, US officials gave several warlords $30,000 to rent four-wheel-drive vehicles and to buy supplies, according to one Afghan who handled the money for a commander. To the two most powerful warlords, Ali and Haji Mohammed Zeman, the United States gave several hundred thousand dollars, officials said.

Flush with the US dollars, Ali and Zeman, they said, sought to spend some on spies who might be able to deliver bin Laden. Ali found one such prospect, Ilas Khel, in the village of Chaparhar. Khel knew many of the senior Qaeda leaders, Ali said.

Ali said he gave Khel a satellite phone and 500,000 rupees - $8,333 - to arrange a surrender of Qaeda members. Khel took the money and phone, and hasn't been seen since.

''We arrested one of Ilas Khel's friends, and they told us he took 20 important Arabs into Pakistan,'' said Halim Shah Qadery, one of Ali's commanders.

Amin, Zeman's top commander, said he had found a local Afghan, Mirajuddin, who offered more tantalizing information.

''Before the bombing, Mirajuddin came to me and told me Osama was in Tora Bora with his two sons,'' Amin said, sipping green tea in Jalalabad. ''I offered him 300,000 rupees ($5,000). Mirajuddin had been close to Osama for the last seven or eight years. He told me he would come back to me after one day. He didn't come.''

Amin told the Americans about the encounter. ''I said to them, `Since he didn't come back, hit his house.' I pointed out his house to the Americans, and they bombed it, and 70 people were killed,'' Amin said.

During the Tora Bora operation, Afghan anger grew over the increasing number of civilians killed by US bombs. From Dec. 1 to 5, US bombs hit three villages, killing at least 150 civilians, according to local village elders, hospital officials, and Afghan commanders.

Most of the 70 people killed in and near Mirajuddin's house in the village of Pacheer Agam - confirmed by several other Afghan commanders - were villagers fleeing the fighting in Tangi, according to Nasir, the Agam village elder.

In a second strike, US signal intelligence tracked and bombed five cars belonging to Qaeda members - not knowing the cars were driven by Zeman's soldiers, who had taken them from the Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. The bombing killed 20 people, according to Nasir and several Afghan commanders. Little is known about the target for the third strike, in Landa Khel, which killed about 60 civilians.

Nasir confronted the Americans about the bombing in Pacheer Agam. ''I told them, `You missed the target,''' Nasir said.

''They said they didn't miss the target.''

Three days after the offensive began, a 40-man US special operation force helicoptered in. They moved into the hilltop seven-room Agam Primary School. Outside, about 100 mujahideen fighters' sole job was to guard the perimeter.

The US team - known to Afghan commmanders only as Dave, Mike, Roger, and Mike - was divided into three teams, along with an unknown number of CIA officers.

The school, about 3 miles north of the front lines, became the base of operations. They taped pieces of cardboard over broken windows to keep out cold at night. On one wall, the words ''Silver,'' ''Black,'' and ''Red'' were written on duct tape. Commander Malik, another of Ali's men, said the colors represented names for the three special forces teams.

The US troops kept their distance from the front lines and from the Afghan fighters - with the exception of Ali and his commanders.

Ali, 38, a veteran Afghan fighter who has a fourth-grade education and speaks Pashtu, Dari, and his tribal language of Pushai, had first met with US covert operatives about 20 days after the Sept. 11 attacks, in a Northern Alliance base camp in the Panjshir Valley, he said. The Americans, apparently impressed, made Ali their point man for fighting Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan.

But the admiration was not entirely mutual. ''They just gave us the targets,'' Ali said. ''We had our own plan of attack on the ground with our force, and we did that.''

Gul Karim, Ali's chief of security in Jalalabad, said the Americans ''didn't know the way in Tora Bora, didn't know the places, didn't know the atmosphere.''

And Commander Musa, who has spent the last seven weeks with US special forces exploring caves and finding Qaeda bodies, said he ''couldn't believe they were soldiers. They really looked like schoolboys, always afraid, their faces yellow. I was, though, impressed with their technology.''

The battle unfolded in fits and starts, and then the cease-fire of Dec. 12 stopped it.

Haji Zeman arranged the deal shortly around noon on Dec. 12. Using a walkie-talkie on the front line, he talked with an Afghan member of Qaeda who said that more than 100 members of the group were ready to turn themselves in at 8 a.m. the following day. Their only condition was to surrender to the United Nations.

An accord that drew immediate discord

The deal sparked instant disagreement. Even now, almost exactly two months later, tempers still run high over the deal - anger perhaps fueled, in hindsight, by an appreciation of its price.

Zeman essentially lost his post of regional defense chief because of the arrangement, and has spent a few weeks in Kabul lobbying for other positions. The dwindling number of Americans still in Jalalabad, according to several Afghan leaders, still fume about it.

''One American came to meet me, and he was very angry,'' said Engineer Ghafar, the mayor of Jalalabad. ''He said he was angry because they spent so much money here and too many Arabs escaped. He asked my opinion about this, and I got angry. I said that they put all this money in the pockets of commanders, who did not organize anything. In a war, you need strategy. They were moving here, going there, coming back at night - it wasn't a real war.''

After ''8 ON,'' the attack picked up. Day and night, the United States bombed a long east-west ridge line and farther south near the Pakistani border, employing a wide range of weaponry that included the 15,000-pound ''daisy-cutter'' bombs. On the ground, Afghan troops waged the final battles near Uchnow, Ghrangali, Balamai, and Zoor Kandahar, according to the commanders.

But while battlefield victories are well-documented, details about the 57 Qaeda prisoners taken remain murky. The warlords gave conflicting accounts about who had captured the prisoners, and their identities remain unknown. A list of 19 prisoners taken to the Jalalabad Public Hospital for treatment gives almost only first names, which may or may not be true.

On Dec. 20, four days after the capture of one group of Al Qaeda fighters, an Afghan commander, Muslim Khan, said the mood of the US special forces working with him markedly improved when they learned the name of one of the prisoners.

''I don't know who they arrested, but they were very happy,'' Khan said, adding that the Americans took out some alcohol on a hillside overlooking Milawa in the heart of Tora Bora and poured themselves a drink.

Relationship improves; landscape scarred by war

Since the war, US special forces have spent almost all of their days in the quiet of Tora Bora, working with Afghan troops to check out the Qaeda caves and photograph and videotape bodies left behind. In addition to the 300 observed bodies, several Afghan commanders said they saw scores, if not a few hundred, fresh graves in the area.

The relationship between Americans and Afghans has improved, according to the Afghans. The Americans gave as gifts hundreds of khaki duffel bags, which were stuffed with parkas; boots; a black sleeping bag good to temperatures of minus 10 degrees and other winter gear.

Some commanders have received personal gifts as well - such as the night vision goggles that Musa says he received from Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, with whom he had spoken by phone.

Musa has been the guide for US forces who have remained in Tora Bora; soon after the war ended, together they set up camp near the Pakistani border after a helicopter tour of the major battle sites. ''After that, they got really close to me,'' Musa said. ''We had dinner together. We slaughtered a sheep and gave them some.''

The landscape that Musa and his lingering US guest oversee from their camp looks like an ancient ruin, populated by squatters with guns.

Blackened trees, snapped at 8 feet, stand stripped on hillsides that have been pummeled by bombs. The floors of Qaeda caves are carpeted with layers of mortar rounds that shift underfoot. A village said to be Qaeda's central post is entirely roofless. And deadly yellow cluster bombs cover charred fields.

There are mysteries, including several caves sealed by landslides triggered by US bombs; no one has looked inside.

One fact is glaringly evident from the middle of Tora Bora - the way out.

''A lot of people went that way,'' said Moorad, a villager in Milawa, pointing to a valley below and the trickle of stream. ''It's a 16-hour hike to the border. We could do it easily.''

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