From: "Michael Gurstein" 
To: 
Subject: Fw: War to set up a military presence?
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 08:19:09 -0400

 INDEPENDENT (London) 18 September 2001
 By Robert Fisk

 If Bush wants an invasion, it could become more costly than Vietnam

 President Bush is talking about a "crusade"  it would be difficult 
 to find a word more likely to enrage Muslims  but if he plans to 
 wage it in Afghanistan, the United States faces a military campaign 
 more fraught and potentially even more costly than Vietnam.

 Ground troops may be necessary to seize Osama bin Laden but they 
 will be entering a country containing one tenth of the world's land 
 mines, left by Soviet occupation forces across 80 per cent of the 
 land.

 Besides, anyone who wants to invade Afghanistan needs friends. The 
 Russians had the communist government of Babrak Karmal. But, with 
 the murder of the only serious opponent of the Taliban, Shah Masood, 
 by Arab suicide bombers nine days ago, the United States hasn't a 
 single friend in that cemetery of foreign armies.

 So, are the Americans planning a mere attack by cruise missiles? 
 They fired 70 missiles at Osama bin Laden's camps after the bombing 
 of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam  they knew where 
 they were, of course, because the camps were built by the CIA during 
 the Afghan-Russian war  but they did not touch Mr bin Laden. Do they 
 plan to use special parachute units to descend on the areas around 
 Kandahar where Mr bin Laden has been known to live in the past?

 And what about those mines? If the Americans are even contemplating 
 a ground force, it can enter only from Pakistan  the most dangerous 
 main supply route it would be possible to find  and up the Kabul 
 Gorge from Jalalabad. But the Russians seeded the perimeters of 
 Jalalabad, Kandahar, Khost and Herat with anti-armour mines. There 
 are, in Afghanistan today, more than 10 million mines. They lie in 
 fields, on mountainsides, beside roads, around the big cities, along 
 irrigation ditches. On average, between 20 and 25 Afghan men, women 
 and children are blown up by mines every day  even if we take the 
 lower figure, this indicates 73,000 civilian casualties from these 
 mines in the past 10 years alone.

 A military incursion would, therefore, need an army of mine 
 clearance specialists as well as soldiers, men who would have to 
 inch their way over the roughest terrain in the world  while under 
 attack  to make the roads and countryside safe for the Americans and 
 their allies. Of Afghanistan's 29 provinces, 27 are littered with 
 mines.

 During their savage 10-year occupation, the Russians also planted 
 thousands of mines in "security zones" around Afghanistan's 
 airports, power stations and government installations. Western 
 non-governmental organisations working in the country two years ago 
 estimated that it would cost $1 per mine to clear Afghanistan's 10 
 million mines and 45 days to clear merely a square mile of land. 
 There are now two million disabled men, women and children in 
 Afghanistan. No infantry can march across this territory.

 And then there is that main supply route. Pakistan has already made 
 clear that it will not involve its own military in a campaign, 
 although there are suspicions that enough money might persuade 
 General Musharraf now respectfully referred to as President by the 
 Americans even though he took the presidency illegally to change his 
 mind. However, the "Jihadi" culture has already impregnated the 
 Pakistan army and there is a real possibility of unrest turning to 
 civil war if the Americans arrived to invade Muslim Afghanistan.

 The very border areas through which a Western army would have to 
 pass are held by men loyal to the Taliban. On the Pakistani side of 
 the frontier, there are now 2,000 Taliban madrassas (schools) where 
 religious teaching is given not only to potential mujahedin but to 
 Chechen and Tadjik fighters as well.

 The policemen who guard these madrassas constitute a mere facade of 
 governmental control.

 Even if the Americans penetrated Afghanistan, their shells would 
 only plough over the ruins. The Russians tried to destroy the 
 Taliban's predecessors with 10 years of bombing, destroying whole 
 villages, with their people, farm animals, fields, trees and mud 
 huts. And still they could not get rid of the mujahedin, still they 
 could not to use Mr Bush's inappropriately folksy phrase "smoke them 
 out of their holes".

 With Pakistan as its only, broken ally among Afghan-istan's 
 neighbours, with no friends inside the country and 10 million hidden 
 land mines lying across its mountains and fields and cities, Mr 
 Bush's "crusade" looks more than dangerous. We are now being told 
 that the United States is no longer afraid to take casualties. 
 America, the President says, will have to accept losses. He'd better 
 be right.

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