Posted on 09/27/2001 5:52:35 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
In seeking to undermine Afghanistan's Taliban regime and compel its authoritarian leaders to turn over fugitive terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, the U.S. military is grappling with an unfamiliar challenge: a nation so backward and lacking in communications, transportation and other basic infrastructure that it presents few valuable targets to destroy.
"This is a low-tech country and most of our [military] systems are focused on technology-based enemies," one Air Force targeting officer said Sept. 19 on condition of anonymity. "We can blow up bridges and the limited power generation capabilities there, but then what? [Afghans] have lived for a long time under the most austere circumstances" and Taliban fighters "are completely used to being out on their own again living under really rugged conditions. . . . I just don't see how Afghanistan would stop functioning because of an aerial bombardment," the officer said.
The Bush administration has indicated it will retaliate against Afghanistan for harboring the terrorist network allegedly behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as several previous terrorist acts. But the president and his team have offered mixed signals about whether they will seek to overthrow the Taliban or merely weaken its grip on power in Afghanistan. The United States, like most of the world, has never recognized the legitimacy of the regime since it claimed control five years ago today.
President Bush condemned the Taliban in a Sept. 20 speech before Congress, and threatened that the Afghan leaders "will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate." Some administration officials have talked quietly of supporting the regime's overthrow. But this week, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer appeared to back away from that threat, saying U.S. plans are not designed to "replace one regime with another regime."
Yesterday (Sept. 26), Secretary of State Colin Powell said the U.S. government "is not prepared to say" how Afghanistan "might be governed in the future, or what might be the fate of the Taliban regime."
Yet the Pentagon faces daunting perils regardless of the final objective in Afghanistan.
Bush and his Cabinet have been careful to note the United States has no argument with the people of Afghanistan, but attacks against its leadership are almost certain to result in additional hardships and unintended deaths among the population, according to military experts. And several observers caution that the United States runs the risk of appearing to be a big bully going after a small, impoverished adversary -- the very image of the lone superpower that bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers have sought to portray and vowed to destroy.
Afghanistan's parched, deforested landscape is home to nearly 27 million inhabitants whose annual per capita gross domestic product is $800. The average life expectancy for an Afghan male is 47 years; the average woman is not expected to live much beyond the age of 45. Only 32 percent of adults can read and write. There is one telephone for every 925 people.
War, trade embargos, disruptions in transportation and severe droughts have resulted in the nation's falling GDP over the past 20 years. Last year, Afghanistan was by far the world's largest producer of opium poppies, and narcotics trafficking has become a primary source of revenue for the nation, according to the CIA, although that may have been cut back in 2001.
Although the several factions warring with the Taliban regime agree Islamic law should form the basis for Afghanistan's legal system, there is no constitution, and, since the early- to mid-1990s, no functioning legislative or judicial branches.
In place of a working government, the Taliban has imposed a strict form of justice on the Afghan people in which harsh penalties are exacted for even small deviations in personal appearance or conduct. Peter Tomsen, a former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, was recently quoted as saying that the only working element of the Taliban government besides the military is the General Department for the Preservation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Seventeen hundred miles of paved highways run through Afghanistan's rugged mountain landscape, augmented by six times as many unpaved roads. The nation -- about the size of Texas -- has 45 airports, 10 of which offer paved runways.
The defense secretary appears to believe that while targeting bin Laden and his cronies will prove to be a challenging and long-term effort, it will be easier to go after those who harbor them. "In the past, we were used to dealing with armies and navies and air forces and ships and guns and tanks and planes," Donald Rumsfeld told reporters at a Sept. 18 briefing. "This adversary is different. It does not have any of those things. It does not have high-value targets that we can go after. But those countries that support them and give sanctuary do have such targets. The terrorists do not function in a vacuum."
Other military and regional experts say undermining or overturning the Taliban will indeed prove quite difficult, given the existing lack of governmental structure and the level of privation already facing the typical Afghan citizen.
"If the government consists of government buildings, they can be leveled," according to retired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak, who led his service during the Persian Gulf War. "But if these guys are used to living off the back of a camel," they are less vulnerable to the kind of targeting from the air the United States has utilized over the past 10 years against Iraq, Yugoslavia and other nations, he said.
"Leveling Kabul is not an attractive military target, as far as I'm concerned," McPeak told Inside the Pentagon in a Sept. 24 interview. "I wouldn't look for either a massive Army campaign or air strikes."
Michael Vickers, a former Army special operations officer who worked for the CIA in the Near East, agrees. The Taliban leadership has dispersed "because they know we're coming," he said. Furthermore, Afghanistan lacks "the strategic infrastructure" the United States traditionally bombs. "The country has been war-ravaged so it's not a target-rich environment," Vickers told ITP Sept. 25.
Rumsfeld acknowledged this point in his Sept. 18 press conference. "Afghanistan is a very poor country. . . . There are not great things of value that are easy to deal with," he said. "And what we'll have to do is . . . use the full spectrum of our capabilities."
To John Warden, a principal planner of the 1991 air war against Iraq, finding targets in Afghanistan to weaken the Taliban poses a difficult challenge, but is surely doable. He agrees with the prevalent opinion -- expressed recently by the defense secretary -- that there are few valuable targets in Afghanistan suitable for attack using long-range cruise missiles.
"People think of the wars we have seen lately, the kind of antiseptic wars where a cruise missile is fired off, shown on television landing in some smoke and so forth," Rumsfeld said in a Sept. 16 television interview. "That is not what this is about."
Warden also warns against getting bogged down in a lengthy ground war against fighters who used fierce determination and their gritty terrain to force the Soviets out of the nation in 1989 after a 10-year war.
While Afghan society does not function as well as Iraq, for example, Warden says the Taliban do depend on the same basic tools to stay in power: leadership, communications, infrastructure, the population and the military. "Maybe it's more primitive, but it's there," he told ITP this week, referring to the Afghan infrastructure. "I don't think it's quite as difficult as it sounds to help the Afghans change their government or have the government change its policy" toward harboring terrorists, Warden said.
Others are more doubtful that the approach the Air Force has taken over the past decade in seeing an adversary as a "system of systems" that can be dismantled will apply to Afghanistan. "Everyone in the targeting world is scrambling to determine what can be done, and my bet is that it is not much," the Air Force targeting officer told ITP.
Air power, which has played a central role in U.S. warfighting over the past decade, will almost certainly play a supporting role to special operations commandos or light Army forces in the Afghan campaign. "I think air power will be most useful getting troops into battle and extracting them [and] supporting them logistically," says former Air Force historian Richard Kohn, now a scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition, it could be used to destroy terrorist camps and hideouts, and possibly keep Taliban forces at bay while the effort to seize bin Laden is undertaken, he said.
Many military experts are calling for a new level of creativity in undermining the Taliban and targeting bin Laden. Reports are that U.S. special operations forces may already be operating inside Afghanistan, and military officials say they would play a key role in identifying targets for carefully tailored air strikes by U.S. fighter and bomber aircraft that are rapidly deploying to the region.
Vickers says U.S. jets could destroy Afghan military aircraft, which the Taliban has been using against militia in the so-called "Northern Alliance" that controls a small area in the nation's northeastern region. Although Taliban forces outnumber the Northern Alliance 3-to-1, their fighters are about equally proficient, in Vickers' view. The United States could neutralize the Taliban's advantages by arming and training the Northern Alliance, and destroying Taliban aircraft and heavy equipment from the air, he says.
With all the run-up to attacks on Afghanistan, bin Laden and the Taliban have had plenty of time to desert their training camps and take cover, experts say. "If bin Laden has training locations, they are certainly abandoned by now, so blowing them up would be symbolic at best and at the end a waste of resources," said the Air Force targeting officer. "We are faced with a real problem here."
Bush seems cognizant of the risks of an ineffective strike. He reportedly told four senators recently, "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive."
Using secret U.S. ground operatives and indigenous fighters to provide intelligence on the location of Taliban forces and the fugitive terrorists -- augmented by the Predator unmanned aerial reconnaissance platform and other aircraft -- "gives you a better chance of leveraging air power and not targeting empty camps," said Vickers, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, DC.
But allying with local enemies of the Taliban is fraught with political perils. This week the foreign minister of Pakistan, a key nation in the U.S.-led coalition, warned the Bush administration against supporting Afghan opposition groups that seek to replace the Taliban, which has enjoyed the support of Pakistan's security services.
And the Northern Alliance, like the Taliban, gleans funds through narcotics trafficking, making them seamy bedfellows for the United States. "Sometimes you have to decide the lesser of several evils," says Vickers.
The U.S. military must cultivate not only the Northern Alliance but those in the Taliban's own majority Pashtun ethnic group in the south, according to Thomas Gouttierre, who served on the U.N. peacekeeping mission to Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Perhaps as many as half the Pashtun Afghans in the south are "tired of living in a concentration camp" under the Taliban, he said.
But Gouttierre -- a University of Nebraska scholar who joined other Afghan experts at a closed-door roundtable discussion on the problem at the State Department on Sept. 24 -- emphasized that military tools are limited in their ability to undermine the Taliban. He advises instead that the Bush administration utilize "geosocial" and political instruments to encourage the regime's demise. To the extent that U.S. military force is exercised, "we need to be quick and clean and highly effective."
McPeak agrees that the United States may undermine its own objectives if it strikes too hastily. "This is a 100-year war we're going into" in ridding the world of terrorists, as the president has said he intends to do, McPeak observed. "The worst thing we could do is fall on our face in round one."
Should U.S. military forces falter in their initial attacks, the lone superpower will be perceived by the world as "the guy that can't shoot straight. We need to hit what we aim for, even if it takes a year to prepare," McPeak said.
Frank Anderson, who directed CIA operations in the Near East and South Asia in the early 1990s, warns that nearly any use of force against Afghanistan could backfire on U.S. undertakings to nab bin Laden.
"Unless we have the intelligence to get bin Laden, almost anything we do militarily will undermine our efforts" to eliminate the indicted terrorist's network, said Anderson, now a private consultant. For the United States to waste its vast military might striking at low-value Afghan targets like that nation's limited electricity or communications grids "would risk us looking silly" and impair the effort to maintain global allies in the war on terrorism, he told ITP in a Sept. 24 interview.
The United States also runs the risk of turning the Afghan public -- or, more broadly, Muslims around the world -- against a war aimed at ending terrorism. Bush has taken pains to make the distinction plain, but Vickers says the danger of misunderstanding grows as military operations step up. "The idea is not to turn this into an anti-Afghan conflict -- or worse, anti-Muslim."
"We don't want to indiscriminately bomb because this is a campaign for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people," Vickers said. "We don't want to look feckless." He warned against allowing "the terrorists [to] laugh at us because we hit empty camps and are ineffective."
"Bombing can easily be counterproductive," agrees Kohn. "Beating up people from afar [would make] us look brutal and uncaring, quite likely killing some innocent people, and not getting those responsible."
Thus, Vickers and other military experts urge that the United States launch a major effort to offer food aid, medical care, clothing and housing to Afghans that badly need assistance, even as it goes after the Taliban and bin Laden militarily. Food and other aid "is almost as important a weapon" in the Afghan campaign as military force, Vickers said.
-- Elaine M. Grossman
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