New Front Illustrates Evolving U.S. Strategy
washingtonpost.com
By Steven Mufson and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 11, 2001; Page A01
Special Forces troops have opened a new front for the U.S. bombing campaign in western Afghanistan, the latest element of an evolving Pentagon strategy that has become fiercer, broader and far more reliant on Afghan rebels than planners originally envisioned.
A U.S. government source said yesterday that Special Forces are for the first time coordinating airstrikes to bolster rebel leader Ismail Khan in the far western part of the country. Air support from the United States could help the veteran commander, considered by some to be the most militarily effective of all opposition commanders, to launch an offensive in the northwest. If successful, that move would block a major route of withdrawal for Taliban forces ousted over the weekend from the key northern city of Mazar-e Sharif -- and set the stage for a possible attack on Herat, the major city in the west.
Having first focused on winning over southern leaders of the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group in the country, the U.S. approach now is to use Special Forces on the ground and bombers in the air to bolster rebel forces attacking Taliban strongholds. With the fall of Mazar-e Sharif, a senior defense official said, the Pentagon plans to take that tactic to other parts of the country.
"That strategy seems to be working," this source said. "Once we get the ability to coordinate airstrikes, it gets pretty effective."
The new U.S. action in the west of Afghanistan underscores how the U.S. military strategy has evolved considerably since warplanes began bombing five weeks ago, despite repeated statements from the Bush administration that the war on terrorism is proceeding according to plan.
When military operations began, the United States hoped for a rapid succession of events: pinprick airstrikes and a few raids by U.S. Special Forces might lead to substantial defections from the ruling Taliban, the rapid fall of major cities and, with a bit of luck, a final offensive that would "smoke out" Osama bin Laden from Afghan caves. There was even talk by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that some Taliban members might be able "to participate in developing a new Afghanistan."
These hoped-for developments did not materialize, and by late October there was little evidence that the U.S. approach was working. But early this month the United States began to fight a different, more intense kind of war that more fully embraced the opposition Northern Alliance, along with trying to encourage defections among Pashtuns supporting the ruling Taliban.
The relatively restrained attacks by fighter jets off Navy carriers that characterized the first three weeks of the campaign have given way to body blows by heavy B-52 long-range bombers. Having once eased up on bombing on the Muslim sabbath, the Bush administration is signaling it will bomb through the Ramadan holiday -- despite protests from the Islamic world. All talk of including moderate Taliban leaders in a future government has been dropped.
The changing strategy highlights the improvisational nature of the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan: Having rolled the dice on a plan to knock off the Taliban quickly, the Pentagon appears to be settling in for the long haul while looking for chances to kill large numbers of Taliban soldiers and members of bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.
"It is a plan that . . . looks for creating opportunities, it looks for exploiting opportunities," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said Friday. "It's a strategy rather than a blueprint."
Trying to wage a war as clearly different as the Afghan war -- in which the United States is not trying to win and occupy territory, and instead is targeting small groups of people -- is especially hard for the U.S. military, said retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters. "In a time of crisis, bureaucracies fall back on what they know how to do," said the former military strategist. "The military is a vast bureaucracy, and its response was to fall back on what seemed to work in the past."
So, for example, even as U.S. officials were insisting how different this war would be, the conflict began like a smaller, less-intense version of the Persian Gulf War, with a volley of cruise missiles and strikes against radar emplacements and antiaircraft sites. In the following weeks, the United States escalated slowly and, in the eyes of some critics, too cautiously. The Taliban front lines were not heavily bombed until the fourth week of the campaign.
That tentative start was at odds with how the U.S. military is trained to operate, noted retired Army Col. Richard Sinnreich, an expert on military planning. "There's a gap between the way we say we want to conduct campaigns and the way we [were] doing this," he said. "We say we want to be rapid and decisive, beginning with a high level of intensity and keeping it up. It would seem to me that we haven't done that here."
One reason that the United States moved slowly was to minimize civilian casualties, Pentagon officials said, and so help sway public opinion, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world.
But that cautious approach may have undercut efforts to win over Pashtun defectors in the south, said Peter Feaver, a Duke University expert in public opinion and national security policy. "The campaign until about 3 November likely convinced would-be defectors that the U.S. was not prepared to use all its force, creating the exact opposite psychological effect -- not of U.S. resolve and strength, but of U.S. tentativeness and weakness," he said.
Political and diplomatic considerations have also muddied the first month's strategy. The U.S. desire to make a new Afghan government homegrown, combined with the need to satisfy Pakistan's desire for ethnic Pashtuns to play a key role in a new regime, led the administration to adopt a "southern strategy" of trying to peel off Taliban members or allies.
It was an approach championed especially by the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Worried about a possible power vacuum in the event of a rapid Taliban collapse, the United States tried to calibrate its military campaign to its political goals and appeared to hold back on bombing Taliban front lines outside Kabul.
But the less progress the United States made in the south, the greater the urgency became of pushing harder in the north. Now, said a senior Pentagon official, "reality has settled the question" of how much to help the Northern Alliance, the strongest military force opposing the Taliban -- but one in which Pashtuns play a relatively modest role.
"The Northern Alliance is it," he said. "It didn't make sense to hobble them."
Pentagon officials still believe that Pashtuns ultimately will go with the winners. So, they argue, vigorous support for the Northern Alliance could spur more Taliban defections, rather than rally Pashtuns around the Taliban, as other policymakers have feared. "I think tribal and regional leaders are waiting to see what the trend is, what the balance of forces is," a Pentagon official said.
U.S. officials said one positive surprise over the last month has been the relative stability of Pakistan under its leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Initial anxiety about a possible overthrow of Musharraf by Taliban sympathizers in the Pakistani intelligence services and military, followed by a crisis with Pakistan's nuclear weapons, has not been realized. There have been some demonstrations by Islamic fundamentalists, but they have not been as big as many U.S. diplomats feared.
"The war has given Musharraf a second chance to rebuild and restructure his country," said William Milam, who was U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 1999 until July of this year.
The Bush administration's new faith in the stability of Musharraf's government appears to have made it easier to vow to maintain the bombing campaign through Ramadan if necessary, despite rising complaints among Muslims. "I think President Musharraf is probably in a stronger position today than he has been in the past with regard to controlling demonstrations in the street," said U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin. She said that even if fighting continues in Afghanistan through Ramadan, she is "confident" that "nothing will happen" in Pakistan.
Another major area of change has been in how the U.S. government thinks about information -- that is, propaganda and public diplomacy aimed at both foreign and domestic audiences.
U.S. officials were slow to recognize that "this is first and foremost an information war," said retired Col. Robert Killebrew, a longtime Army strategist. He argued that rather than try to restrict the flow of information, the Pentagon should have tried from the outset to be as open as possible, putting reporters on Special Forces raids and aboard strike aircraft. "U.S. policy should work toward a transparent world, one in which information . . . moves easily from one people to another," he said.
A couple of weeks into the war, some in the Bush administration began to worry that they had lost the initiative in the propaganda war. Every day, Pentagon officials found themselves responding to Taliban announcements about the course of the war. Top military planners were stunned at the news media's focus on civilian casualties in what they believed to be an air campaign already terribly constrained by that concern.
At the end of October, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sent emissaries to the White House to urge a faster, less-defensive approach to information. Since then, U.S. officials have begun to appear on Arab television more often. Among the U.S. officials who have been interviewed on al-Jazeera are Powell; Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. A veteran U.S. diplomat who is a fluent Arabic speaker was pulled out of retirement to provide immediate responses to bin Laden's videotaped messages.
This weekend Bush administration officials could look with satisfaction at how the military and diplomatic campaigns have progressed so far. But the real test of the U.S. military and diplomatic strategy, as well as its coalition, could still lie ahead.
"We're very good at learning once we're in a fight," said Peters, the former Army intelligence specialist and strategist. "We're going to get this right, but there will be some setbacks, and the real test of the administration will be the first setback."
Staff writer Vernon Loeb contributed to this report.
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