Thought this to be an interesting perspective from FEER cover dated Nov 8, 2001:
AFGHANISTAN
Article: FEER=Far Eastern Economic Review Issue Cover-Dated Nov 8, 2001
TIME TO GET BACK TO BASICS
U.S. MILITARY STRATEGY HITS A WALL
feer.com
By David Lague in HONG KONG
Issue cover-dated November 08, 2001
After four weeks of air strikes the Pentagon's war in Afghanistan is following a familiar pattern. Like the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization campaign against Yugoslavia, U.S. planners build up a detailed picture of the battlefield from an array of satellites, reconnaissance aircraft, intercepted signals and intelligence from the ground.
Targets are selected and strike aircraft or missiles are deployed to destroy them from a distance. Afterwards, the video images are analyzed and the pictures of those strikes deemed successful are shared with the media and the public.
And, just like that earlier conflict, the evidence suggests serious shortcomings in this high-tech version of warfare fought from afar. With civilian casualties mounting, the Taliban still firmly in place and Afghan opposition forces floundering, pressure is mounting on the Pentagon to switch tactics and deploy substantial ground forces. "I watch with some amazement generals in the U.S. Air Force who still advocate vast bombing campaigns as a solution to various conflicts," says recently retired Australian army brigadier, Adrian D'Hage.
Leaders of the opposition United Front, informally known as the Northern Alliance, are also dismissive of U.S. strikes. "This is not enough," says Haji Bari, a military commander just north of Kabul. "We attack the Taliban harder than this."
One problem with these tactics seems to be that bombing alone has little impact on a rudimentary military force like the Taliban that is highly motivated and well concealed amid a civilian population. Despite mounting global dismay at the growing toll of civilian victims, the U.S. has also begun attacking Taliban positions with cluster bombs, which spray out hundreds of bomblets.
Retired Pakistan army special forces officer, Ashfaq Ahmed, was astonished when he saw that the U.S. was dropping these weapons on a country littered with millions of mines from the 1980s Soviet occupation. "You really don't know where they all end up," he says. "There can be a lot of civilian casualties."
To some, the conflict is drawing attention to failings in the Pentagon's vision for modern warfare. The U.S.--like some of its allies--is heavily influenced by what has come to be known as the Revolution in Military Affairs--the integration of information technology with modern weapons and surveillance systems. These include weapons such as the Predator surveillance drone, armed with tank-busting Hellfire missiles and sent over Afghanistan to look for targets.
This reliance on advanced technology and stand-off weapons combined with a strong aversion to risking casualties feeds a growing suspicion that U.S. forces are ill-suited to conflict where ground forces may need to engage with an enemy.
Some critics even argue that modern U.S. tactics transfer the risks of combat from the combatants to civilians. This is not to say that technology has no place in Afghanistan. Ashfaq Ahmed has seen its value on this testing battlefield.
He trained Afghan mujahideen fighters to use U.S.-made shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles in the war against the Soviet invaders. The missiles were first successfully used against troop-carrying helicopters at Jalalabad airport on a September evening in 1985. Ahmed recalls that three of the four Stingers fired were direct hits. The other malfunctioned. "They fired three and they got three," he says. "It was all filmed and sent back for President Reagan to watch."
The Stingers became a key factor in the Soviet defeat but Ahmed's years fighting with the mujahideen also gave him an understanding of the limitations of technology, particularly when it serves as an indiscriminate alternative to engaging an enemy at close quarters.
He and others note that bombing an enemy that is hiding among a civilian population with little in the way of major military hardware, communications and traditional supply methods can be ineffective, if not outright counter-productive.
Even within the U.S. military, there are serious misgivings about RMA.
"Today's menu of miracles envisions computerized battlefields where commanders are never confused, where fear does not affect rationality, where the fog and friction of combat are curious anachronisms and mental clarity is always the rule and where weapons can be fired from safe, antiseptic distances to strike the enemy inventory of targets with unerring accuracy," wrote Pentagon aviation expert Chuck Spinney in the Defence Week newsletter.
"It's a top down mechanical vision where strategy boils down to target servicing. Like the French theorists who designed the Maginot Line, the new-age swamis view war as a predictable engineering problem rather than an unpredictable evolutionary stew of chance and necessity," he added in the April edition.
It seems the Pentagon may have been given a reminder of the unpredictability of war in the only publicly acknowledged ground operation in Afghanistan on October 20 when U.S. Rangers were reportedly forced to withdraw hurriedly from a raid on Kandahar airbase when Taliban resistance was unexpectedly fierce.
"They are proving to be tough warriors," acknowledged Rear-Adm. John Stufflebeem at an October 25 Pentagon briefing. "But we are prepared to take however long is required to bring the Taliban down." If that is so, many experts are convinced big numbers of ground troops and supporting weapons will be needed.
"Certainly in Afghanistan, ground troops will be absolutely essential and a lot of them," says the decorated Vietnam War veteran D'Hage. "We are going in to fight [suspected terrorist mastermind] Osama bin Laden and the Taliban on the ground of their choosing, a ground they know better than any satellite can possibly hope to chart. This is the start of a potentially very long war." |
