stratfor.com
Afghans Confound New Enemy With Age-Old Tactics
13 May 2002
British Royal Marines have completed a two-week hunt -- named Operation Snipe -- for al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan without encountering any opposition. Allied coalition spokesmen did their best to showcase the few high points, noting that the operation denied strategic terrain to the opposing forces and that allied troops destroyed numerous arms caches.
American, British and other allied soldiers clearly are having great difficulty countering the guerrilla tactics of Afghan combatants, who disperse and take cover when confronted by superior numbers or firepower. This is the essential difficulty any army faces when doing battle in Afghanistan.
The British army faced the same situation nearly a century ago and wrote about it in an army intelligence handbook in 1925. "The celerity and ease with which [the Afghans] disperse, and the consequent difficulty of pursuit: they scatter and, if unable to get right away, hide their weapons and meet their pursuers in guise of peaceful villagers," reads one passage.
Since Operation Anaconda began in March, U.S. and allied troops have had little to show in their campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Earlier this month, the U.S. military prepared to launch a major operation in southeastern Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported. Early deployments of British and Canadian forces were intended to force enemy concentrations to fight or to move, while the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was prepared to engage al Qaeda fighters once they emerged. To everyone's surprise, the British and Canadian forces ran into almost no opposition.
During the Soviet-Afghan war, the Afghans learned dispersal tactics the hard way. In the latter years of the war, the Soviets deployed helicopter-borne soldiers and gunships as rapid-response units that in many instances were able to come to the aid of ambushed convoys or columns within minutes rather than hours.
The units were effective until Afghan fighters developed "lightening raids." Instead of lingering over ambushes and trying to ensure the death of every last Russian, the Afghans concentrated their firepower on an initial salvo or two and then withdrew before the helicopters arrived. Frankly, it is surprising that this tactic has not yet been employed against U.S. forces.
The Afghans' dispersal tactics went beyond the immediate battlefield; most fighters later refrained from congregating in groups of more than a hundred and instead learned how to operate as smaller teams. Thus it appears that the battle of Operation Anaconda -- where a large number of Taliban and al Qaeda forces were drawn into a conventional battle -- will turn out to be the exception in Afghanistan, not the rule.
This presents Washington with three unappealing options. First, it could attempt to pick off small groups and individuals one at a time, for however long it takes. Second, it could create an American force large enough to sweep the border with Pakistan, where many of the militants are located. And third, it could depend on an unreliable Pakistani ally to do the same. |
