American eagle still has claws
By MARTIN SIEFF, Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 (UPI) -- Kabul has fallen to the forces of the Northern Alliance. This is a remarkable military achievement for the United States of America. It serves as warning to Osama bin Laden and the wider world alike that the American eagle still has sharp claws.
The fall of Kabul Tuesday morning to forces of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan certainly does not end the war there. Afghanistan has been in a state of continual conflict since the Soviet Red Army invaded it in 1979. Nor does it complete the job of bringing alleged terrorist mastermind bin Laden to justice to pay for the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and the deaths of up to 4,600 Americans in its ruins.
But it is a start.
Judged in purely military terms, the U.S. success so far in Afghanistan is very impressive. The United States has projected its power to a landlocked country in the heart of Central Asia where before Sept. 11 it appeared inconceivable that it could have done so. And it evicted the Taliban leaders who had refused to hand over bin Laden from their own capital within two months of deploying its forces.
All this was done without committing significant U.S. ground troops to the conflict or invading the remote, mountainous little nation with large land forces as the Soviets did in 1979. Nor did the United States have the advantages of common land borders with Afghanistan, as the Soviets did in 1979. Nor did it have any more than the most cursory and superficial intelligence on the country.
Yet the Taliban regime has been evicted from Kabul.
That is not the end of the war. It is not even the beginning of the end of the war. Judged at its most optimistic it may be, as UPI analyst Ariel Cohen wrote over the weekend, quoting Winston Churchill, "The End of the Beginning."
The war is far from over and the Taliban is far from eliminated as a significant military presence. As UPI Editor-at-Large Arnaud de Borchgrave, one of the most experienced and knowledgeable Western journalists on Afghanistan and Central-South Asia of the past half century, noted in his analysis for us Tuesday, there remains the real possibility that between 100,000 to 400,0000 Pashtun warriors from within neighboring Pakistan could flock to the support of the Taliban with the backing of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.
Also, the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan could find very quickly, as the Soviets did 20 years ago, that the country is a quagmire much easier to get into than to get of.
Nevertheless, the success of U.S. strategy so far is very real. Neither the Taliban nor their sympathizers throughout the Muslim world -- and especially in powerful, neighboring Pakistan -- expected them to be forced to flee Kabul so fast.
As recently as last week, very senior military analysts in the Pakistani Army were confidently declaring that U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan had failed miserably and that the much-vaunted U.S. armed forces were completely ineffective against the mainly Pashtun Taliban forces.
According to such people, U.S. air superiority over Afghanistan was useless since the country's infrastructure was practically non-existent anyway. They also maintained that the Northern Alliance soldiers were ineffective fighters and straw dogs, comparable to the poorest South Vietnamese Army forces in the Vietnam War, and no match for the nationally and religiously motivated Taliban forces opposing them.
There was no way, according to these experts, that the U.S. armed forces and their Northern Alliance allies could make any significant progress at all unless America put in large numbers of ground troops with a willingness to take casualties on a scale comparable to the Soviet Army in Afghanistan two decades ago.
All these assessments have now been shown to be entirely false. The broad coalition strategy crafted by Secretary of State Colin Powell has proven extremely successful in winning secure bases for U.S. military action in neighboring former Soviet republics and with the full support and cooperation of the Russian government, which has also long been opposed to both bin Laden and the Taliban.
U.S. air power was no paper tiger. It successfully smashed the Taliban's military formations where they could be hurt the most -- right up face to face against the Northern Alliance's forces. And the Northern Alliance proved to be no paper tiger either. Its troops were fierce, aggressive and all too willing to take full advantage of the new opportunities that U.S. air and logistical support gave them.
It is early days yet, and the war has a long way to go. A lot of things can still happen. Pakistan could be destabilized, De Borchgrave warns. Hundreds of thousands of Pashtuns could flock to the Taliban's aid across the wide-open border from Pakistan, he also notes. These things are very real possibilities.
But two months after the World Trade Towers were destroyed, the regime that nurtured and protected those the U.S. government holds responsible for the attacks has been evicted from its capital, major cities and strongholds. The United States proved to be no paper tiger, as bin Laden and his sympathizers have repeatedly and tauntingly claimed. The U.S. eagle showed it still has sharp claws.
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