US expects longer war
Jonathan Weisman and Andrea Stone (USA Today)
(Washington, October 29)
A wave of military setbacks in the past week has put the Bush administration on the defensive and forced Pentagon planners to move more aggressively toward the establishment of a forward base in Afghanistan.
On the Sunday talk shows, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and White House chief of staff Andy Card were peppered with questions about the pace of the war and refused to say whether the administration would commit large numbers of ground troops to Afghanistan, as members of Congress have suggested. "Let's not go there yet," Card said on NBC News' Meet the Press.
But a senior defence source with knowledge of military operations says US forces may soon establish a forward base in Afghanistan that would support 200 to 300 commandos. Up to 600 soldiers would man the base and provide security, food, medical care and evacuation support.
The source hinted that the first such base might be established in Northern Afghanistan to help the rebel Northern Alliance's stalled campaign to take the key town of Mazar-e Sharif. The base could be used to launch helicopter strikes against Taliban forces and to call in Navy fighter jets and AC-130 gunships. That represents a significant shift in strategy because Pentagon officials had suggested for weeks that they hoped to establish a base outside of that city, but only after it fell to Northern Alliance fighters.
The more aggressive planning points to a fundamental change in the outlook for the war on terrorism. Two weeks ago, senior administration officials worried that their Taliban foes could fold before an alternative Afghan leadership was found. Now they are confronting a more fundamental question: Can the war on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network be won without a protracted, bloody struggle?
Card said Americans need to be ready for a protracted war against terrorism. "This is going to be one where we require patience and persistence," he said on Fox News Sunday. On Meet the Press, he said, "It could take years."
The White House and the Pentagon say they have the will, the resources and the popular support to wage a protracted campaign. President Bush has said from the outset that the war on terrorism could take years but the United States would ultimately prevail.
Bush's long-term goal has been rooting out terrorism around the globe and routing the governments that support them. But until now the Pentagon had depicted the war's first phase — against al-Qa'eda and the Taliban — as advancing rapidly. Within the past week, however, a new reality has set in:
Where once Pentagon officials were declaring that Taliban troops had been "eviscerated," they now are acknowledging the Taliban's "dogged" resilience.
Where once US military officials saw rapid advances by the Northern Alliance, they now say the battle against the Taliban has ground to a standstill. If anything, Taliban forces may be making gains on the ground. They have staved off an attempt by the Northern Alliance to capture Mazar-e Sharif. And the alliance, complaining it lacks the weapons to mount an offensive, has asked the United States for mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns.
Where once Bush spoke of wanting bin Laden "dead or alive," Rumsfeld now warns of the difficulties of tracking down one man in a vast country like Afghanistan.
Where once experts predicted mass Taliban defections or desertions, Pentagon officials now reluctantly admit that the enemy has lost little of its troop strength and is, in fact, husbanding its men and material for a long, bitter fight. Tanks and troops are being hidden in mosques, schools and residential neighborhoods, while reports from Pakistan indicate that as many as 10,000 armed Pakistanis have volunteered to join the Taliban.
The only top leader known to have been killed in Afghanistan since the US bombing began on Oct. 7 was a US ally, the famous anti-Soviet mujahedin guerrilla Abdul Haq. The Taliban executed him Friday after catching him trying to rally Afghans to rise up against their hard-line rulers. His execution was a serious blow — psychologically and logistically — to US efforts to form a broad-based coalition government to take the Taliban's place.
US officials said Sunday that the CIA had sent a missile-armed, unmanned drone to protect Haq in his flight from the Taliban.
"The assistance unfortunately was from the air, and he was on the ground. And regrettably, he was killed," Rumsfeld said Sunday on ABC's This Week.
Haq's death marks the second time a charismatic Afghan leader has been killed by the Taliban in recent months. On Sept. 9, suicide bombers posing as journalists assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the popular Northern Alliance leader who was a prospect to lead a post-Taliban government. In contrast to Massoud, Haq was a Pashtun, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, and consequently may have been an even more viable leader for the anti-Taliban forces.
'A tragedy and a catastrophe'
Richard Holbrooke, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, called Haq's death "both a tragedy and a catastrophe."
"It sends a signal throughout the region that involving themselves with us, involving themselves against the Taliban, carries potentially fatal risks," he said Sunday on CNN's Late Edition.
On top of those setbacks, the United States may be losing the propaganda campaign, as every day, Taliban leaders accuse U.S. pilots of killing innocent civilians. Witnesses in Kabul said Sunday that U.S. bombs strayed into a residential neighborhood of the Afghan capital, killing 13 civilians. On Friday, the Pentagon had to admit it had struck a clearly marked Red Cross warehouse full of relief supplies — for the second time since the air war began.
News like that has transformed the Pentagon's rhetoric from confident to cautious. Rumsfeld said repeatedly on Sunday that the war in Afghanistan had not turned into "a quagmire."
"There obviously has been a change in their tone," says Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "A few weeks ago, there seemed to be concern about the Taliban falling too early. Apparently now, they're thinking spring at the earliest."
Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., says it should not be a surprise that "the Taliban are going to fight like hell, long and hard." But "in the end," he adds, "they're going to lose."
Dangers in bombing campaign
Meantime, criticism of the Pentagon's strategy is being voiced by the leaders of Pakistan and Egypt — who see dangers in the bombing campaign — as well as by conservatives and liberals at home. For now, the Pentagon is relying on relatively limited airstrikes and small teams of commandos to assist Northern Alliance rebels.
In Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike think that approach is too timid.
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., says a long bombing campaign without a ground assault would reinvigorate charges that the United States is "a high-tech bully that thinks from the air we can do whatever we want to do."
Even after that bombing campaign intensified over the weekend, from six targets on Thursday to three times that number on Saturday, Robert McFarlane, a former White House national security adviser, said it is still half-hearted if it is not accompanied by threats of a massive ground operation.
"We haven't yet really gotten serious about this conflict," McFarlane said Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation. "Everybody in Afghanistan ought to know we're coming in and hell's coming with us."
Some authorities on Afghanistan take the opposite tack. They say the Bush administration is putting too much stock in the military campaign and too little in the search for a political alternative to the Taliban. Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University, says the Taliban will never fall without an alternative leadership to rally public support. That means a leader from the Pashtuns. The Taliban is led by Pashtuns, while the Northern Alliance is dominated by Tajiks and Uzbeks.
Unless alternative leaders are found soon, winter will set in, uprooted Afghans will begin starving, and the United States will be blamed, Rubin predicts. "We might be on the cusp of a turning point. To make it go the right way, we have to get the right balance between the political and military."
Without doubt, the task at hand is extremely difficult. In 1993, the U.S. military deployed highly trained Army Rangers and the elite Delta Force Somalia to capture warlord Mohammad Farrah Aidid, who was hiding in the city of Mogadishu, just a few miles from the U.S. base. Aidid was never found.
Now, US forces are based hundreds of miles away from Afghanistan, trying to capture or kill bin Laden and his lieutenants. "Mogadishu was a 7-by-14-mile area, and everything else was a sand box," recalls retired general Richard Vercauteren, who commanded Marine forces in Somalia. "Afghanistan is the size of Texas."
Still, says retired admiral Jonathan Howe, who led the United Nations' ill-fated relief effort in Somalia, U.S. forces have something now that they didn't have in Somalia: the commitment of the American people and their government. In Somalia, "the U.S. was ambivalent," he says. "In the case of Afghanistan, we know why we are there. ... We were bloodied on our own soil. We have an entirely different resolve."
So what will it take to obliterate al-Qa'eda and the Taliban?
Vercauteren says the bombing campaign will have to slacken soon: "There are just so many bombs you can drop on a place like Afghanistan."
Then comes the ground war. Biden says victory requires more than a few hundred special forces parachuting in for quick strikes. Army infantry troops must conduct search-and-destroy operations for up to a month at a time.
But David Grange, a retired Army general and former Green Beret, said military operations are being hampered by a serious lack of intelligence. The commando raid on Oct. 19 apparently has not been repeated, largely because U.S. special forces haven't been able to find the targets, he said. The winter will actually give U.S. special forces an edge: The ground war between the Taliban and Northern Alliance might slow, but the search for bin Laden and al-Qa'eda could intensify, as U.S. commandos use heat sensors to track warm bodies hiding in cold caves.
'The road to victory'
Afghanistan experts stress the need to win the political battle. Warlords tied to the Taliban will not switch allegiances until they see an alternative government. "The road to victory is a political settlement," NYU's Rubin says.
But that does not appear to be where the administration's priorities lie. The Pentagon has dispatched its top generals to prosecute the military campaign, but Secretary of State Colin Powell has left it to an underling, Richard Haass, to forge a political solution, Rubin complains. Meanwhile, experts fear that if too much power is granted to the Northern Alliance, the results could be disastrous. "The third rail of Afghan politics is for the United States to inadvertently trigger an outpouring of Pashtun nationalism," warns Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Besides, it is not necessarily clear what the Northern Alliance can do for the United States' ultimate war aim: the dismantling of al-Qa'eda. The center of Taliban power is the southern city of Kandahar, near where bin Laden and his troops are believed to be hiding. Even if the Northern Alliance seizes key northern cities, including the capital, Kabul, al-Qa'eda's refuge will remain out of reach.
All of this points to a long and difficult road ahead.
"No one thought this was going to be easy," says Richard Perle, an influential Pentagon adviser. "What you've seen so far is just the beginning." |
