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Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd: Advances encouraging to U.S. cause

Don Shepperd is a retired Air Force major general and a CNN military analyst.

Update: The encouraging news is that the Northern Alliance is on the move and reportedly has captured Mazar-e Sharif and also reported to have captured the towns of Samangan, Baghlan and Pol-e Khomri. Those towns are all southeast of Mazar-e Sharif, on the road to Kabul. The next key element on that road is the Salang Pass. It's about a 12,000-foot pass north of Kabul. Those towns along that road lead to the bottom of the Panshjir Valley, to Charikar and the Bagram airport.

Once you control that entire road, and once you control Bagram airport, you now have the ability to move on Kabul when you're ready, and you essentially cut off the supply lines for any Taliban forces up in the northeast part of the country. If you also take the towns of Taloqan and Konduz, you own the entire northeast of the country northeast of Kabul. (Note: Northern Alliance forces claimed later Sunday to have taken Taloqan, which lies about 120 miles east of Mazar-e Sharif.)

Impact: This is significant. Once you take these and once the Taliban retreat, they have to decide whether they are going to regroup and attack; whether they are going to surrender, whether they are going to defect or whether there is going to be a strategic retreat to other areas. If they should to decide to mass and reattack, to try to retake some of this ground, they become a very lucrative target for U.S. and coalition air power.

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If these reports are accurate, and if the Northern Alliance takes over the northeastern part of the country -- which would now be about a third to 40 percent of the country -- that stretches their troops very thin and makes them vulnerable to counterattack. They must be very careful, because taking territory is both a blessing and a curse.

Is this a rout? It's far to early to use that word. The Northern Alliance is in a fluid situation, and must redeploy their forces and reposition for new attacks in other areas.

Tactics: It's very difficult, when the Northern Alliance is moving this fast, to coordinate air power with their movements. You have to be very careful, when troops are in combat and moving like this, that you're hitting the right targets.

So it's going to take some time for this to sort out and for air power to be applied to targets remaining in the area taken. The high ground surrounding cities is still reportedly occupied by the Taliban, and you have to go back and clean up those pockets so they can't shell you from the high ground.

We have to have a liaison with the Northern Alliance to find out where they are now and where the enemy is now. This is something that takes not minutes, but hours, days and sometimes a couple of weeks to find out before you can apply air power to the new disposition of forces.

Strategy: Should they secure the northern 30 or 40 percent of the country, then it leaves the Herat and Kandahar areas as the major strongholds of Taliban, and you can expect more bombing and activity in those areas.

You take the major supply lines away from the Taliban. They can still get supplies by smuggling in from Pakistan and from Turkmenistan, even smuggling from Iran. But it really cuts the major supply lines that are under their control -- if all these reports are accurate.

The bottom line is all this is extremely encouraging, but there remain many miles to go before we sleep.