Officials from the armed Afghan opposition have gone on an offensive to change the name by which they are known, and their image. At a press conference here in Tajikstan yesterday, the Afghan "foreign minister", Dr Abdullah Abdullah, chided every journalist who alluded to the Northern Alliance, as his group has been called by western media until now.
"We say the United Front - that name (Northern Alliance) comes from Pakistan," he said. "The United Front represents all the ethnic groups of Afghanistan - Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Hazara - and Pashtouns," Dr Abdullah added.
The war between the United Front and the Taliban is often seen as an ethnic conflict between the predominantly Tajik United Front and the Pashtoun Taliban. But the Front now wants to break that notion. Earlier in the day, at the Afghan embassy here, Col Saleh Registani asked me not to use the term "Northern Alliance".
Pointing to a map on his wall, dotted with seven United Front-held enclaves, he stressed that they span the country, although the pockets of "liberated" territory make up at most 10 per cent of Afghanistan.
"Pashtouns are our people," the former fighter - now the Front's liaison officer with Russia - said. "We don't see any Pashtoun as an enemy. There are three Pashtouns in our delegation to (talks with the exiled King Mohamed Zaher Shah in) Rome. Our problem is with terrorists - not Pashtouns."
Until this crisis, the United Front was best known for its charismatic leader, Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated two days before the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. Phoney Arab journalists on a suicide mission blew him up with a booby-trapped camera. The supposition is that the Arabs were dispatched by Osama bin Laden to decapitate the only viable armed opposition to the Taliban before the US could use them for retaliation.
The United Front already had a chance to rule Afghanistan, from 1992 when it conquered Kabul until the Taliban seized the capital four years later. Its performance was not impressive. Fighting within the group was so destructive that residents of the capital initially welcomed the Taliban. One of the former Front members, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, lives in Tehran today and is still a sworn enemy.
"Hekmatyar thinks he will be president of Afghanistan," Col Registani says scathingly.
Another, the Uzbek leader Gen Rashid Dostom, "made a mistake" in warring with the Massoud faction in the early 1990s, Col Registani says now.
Gen Dostom is part of the United Front, and helps to hold one of its seven enclaves within Afghanistan. But the voices of Front officials still turn cold when they speak of him.
The full name of the Front is the United National Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan. In its search for allies - and especially local proxies - against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, Washington has reservations about just how "united" the Front is. If the US brings the Front back to power and more civil war ensues, it will be blamed.
The word "Islamic" may give less cause for immediate worry, but it too could later haunt US decision-makers. The United Front government that ruled from 1992 until 1996 still calls itself the Islamic state of Afghanistan. The Front has banned the sale of cigarettes in the Panshir Valley. Col Registani - who chainsmokes - insists that they are "moderate" Muslims who would never use coercion to enforce "recommendations" on, for example, dress codes for women.
Before the attacks on the US, the Front had an unlikely combination of international backers: Iran, Russia, India and the French secret services - to name only the main ones.
Since September 11th, the CIA and US military intelligence have taken unprecedented interest in the guerrillas. (I even caught myself wondering whether it was US "spin doctors" who encouraged them to go on a change-of-name offensive.) "We are in daily contact with the US," Dr Abdullah said, declining to give more details. International support for the Front was growing, he said, and a US military reaction was "inevitable".
The biggest United Front enclave is the north western corner of Afghanistan, sharing borders with friendly Tajikstan and China - and distinctly unfriendly (to the United Front) Pakistan. It is here that Gen Mohamed Fahim, who took over after the death of Commander Massoud, keeps his headquarters at Hoza Baddin.
The main enclave contains Afghanistan's two most active combat zones - just east of Taloqan - which the Front hopes to retake soon, and at Bagram airport, 40 km north of Kabul. Both are on flat land, which makes it easier to fight there. Col Registani points at the Hindu Kush mountains, sweeping down from Tajikistan in a diagonal from northeast to southwest .
"Our strategy since 1980 has been the same," Col Registani says. "To keep the Hindu Kush Mountains. If we cut off the Taliban's air route over the mountains, they will be forced to drive around. We've also got the Salang Tunnel, which is the main road between north and south."
But does the Front have the means to shoot down Taliban aircraft? "The Americans will do that for us," Col Registani replies confidently.
When he was fighting the Soviets with the mujahideen in the 1980s, Col Registani saw Osama bin Laden often. "Bin Laden didn't have much money then," he says. United Front leaders imply that bin Laden's sudden wealth - which coincided with the Taliban coming to power in 1996 - was a cover for aid from Saudi Arabia. Dr Abdullah believes bin Laden is now near Jalalabad area, where his bodyguards have been sighted in recent days.
Combatants in civil wars usually blame foreigners, and Afghanistan is no exception. The United Front hates Pakistan almost as much as it does the Taliban, because they believe Pakistan wants to control Afghanistan to give itself "strategic depth" in its rivalry with India.
"The 1,000 terrorists with bin Laden - they are not Afghans," Col Registani says. "They are Saudis, Egyptians, Algerians . . . And how did they get to Afghanistan? All of them flew through Islamabad. You mean to tell me the Pakistanis didn't know what they were doing?"