CIA's Stealth War Centers on Eroding Taliban Loyalty and Aiding Opposition
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 10, 2001; Page A01
The United States announced its war in Afghanistan with dramatic airstrikes Sunday but the campaign could ultimately be won by the covert efforts of American and Pakistani agents to win over commanders in the south and east of the country who are the base of Taliban support, according to current and former U.S. officials.
In these parts of Afghanistan where the ruling Taliban is most deeply rooted in the local ethnic Pashtun community, CIA agents have launched an effort to win the loyalty of dissident Taliban commanders through the use of money or fear, administration officials said.
This program represents one element in an American strategy, tailored to the political and ethnic geography of Afghanistan, to attack Taliban positions, encourage defections among Taliban supporters and bolster opposition military forces through airstrikes, financial support and psychological warfare.
The United States has sought to turn the tide in northern Afghanistan on behalf of the Northern Alliance, which was already battling the Taliban before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, both by targeting government tanks and aircraft and arming opposition commanders. Within the last week, the alliance forces of Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum have begun to receive assault weapons, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and other military supplies from Uzbekistan that were paid for by the United States, according to Philip Smith, Dostum's representative in Washington.
While international attention has focused on northern Afghanistan, the only part of the country where western journalists have access, an equally significant and perhaps ultimately decisive effort to shape opposition is occurring in the south, where the CIA effort to encourage defections from the Taliban is centered.
President Bush alluded yesterday to the importance of covert actions in the counterterrorism campaign. "There will be a conventional component to the conflict, but much of what takes place will never make it onto the TV screens," he said.
It is in the south and southeast where the campaign remains most in the shadows. "The intell stuff -- the efforts to get the Pashtuns to defect -- that's the war you don't see," said a former CIA official familiar with Afghanistan. "Once you get that, you can operate militarily."
Strikes on Taliban targets by U.S. aircraft and cruise missiles are meant to punctuate the clandestine wooing of commanders, tribal leaders and village elders in the broad swath of Afghanistan from Jalalabad in the east to Kandahar in the south where the ethnic Pashtun community is centered, officials said. The Taliban is composed primarily of Pashtuns and profits from their traditional rivalry with other Afghan ethnic groups.
"There's the message to the Taliban: Time to quake in your boots. Then there's the message to the Taliban moderates, which is: Now's the time to change sides. It's agency guys doing it, inside the south and east," the former CIA official said.
Another former CIA officer with extensive experience in Afghanistan said the only practical strategy for ousting the Taliban is to "peel off" Pashtun tribal leaders who had not expected they would face war with the United States when they allied themselves with Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader. Winning Pashtun defectors, he said, will not be difficult for the CIA. "These are rented relationships -- if you have common grounds, common interests, you can do something for a few bucks," he said.
The success of this strategy could turn on the intelligence efforts and intimate cooperation of Pakistan, which initially created and fostered the Taliban in the 1990s. That prospect received a crucial boost on Sunday when the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, ousted several influential intelligence and military leaders who remained close to the Taliban, most notably purging Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed of the Interservices Intelligence Agency, which long served as the Taliban's patron.
"Much depends, in this whole process, on the Pakistanis," said Jack Devine, a former CIA operations official who headed the agency's Afghan task force. "It's a question of going in with the right incentives. When [Pashtun leaders] see the Taliban is a losing proposition, they will be looking for new allies. I'm pretty optimistic about driving the Taliban into the ground."
But Abdul Haq, a prominent Pashtun commander opposed to the Taliban, said the U.S.-led bombing campaign is undermining efforts to turn relatively moderate Taliban commanders against the hard-line leadership of Omar.
Speaking yesterday from Peshawar, Pakistan, the former mujaheddin fighter said he was planning to return to Afghanistan to muster his supporters against the Taliban. Haq said he had been involved in intensive talks with Taliban commanders interested in switching sides. But, he said, "after the bombing started, it put us in a difficult situation and it weakened the moderate Taliban inside the Taliban."
In northern Afghanistan, overt U.S. military action and coordination with the Northern Alliance is designed to play a dominant role, administration officials said. U.S. Special Forces have an important part in the battles in the north and west, in particular calling in airstrikes against Taliban troops and equipment, according to the former CIA official familiar with Afghanistan.
Northern Alliance fighters have begun capitalizing on American airstrikes -- in particular targeting a Taliban concentration of Soviet-era tanks near the major regional center of Mazar-e Sharif -- to advance against Taliban positions.
Smith said the U.S. airstrikes on Taliban MiGs and attack helicopters have also given a considerable boost to alliance forces, which under Dostum have been engaged in street-to-street fighting on the outskirts of Mazar. "The morale in the forces is very high, especially after what was hit in yesterday's bombing," he said.
He also said that U.S. officials have paid for the provision of old Soviet weapons stashed in Uzbekistan, including small arms, AK-47 assault weapons and ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, antitank weapons, mortars, mines and supplies, including food and medicine. Dostum's forces began to receive the weapons within the last week but said they fall short of expectations.
"It would be more beneficial if they would be arriving in larger quantities and in a more timely fashion and a mix of weapons and ammunition that is a little different," Smith said. In particular, he said Dostum needs more rocket-propelled grenades and tanks.
U.S. intelligence officials have received reports of Taliban forces pulling back from the border of Uzbekistan to reinforce Mazar, according to one U.S. official. "In the north, there's some movement -- Taliban forces pulling back to reinforce Mazar-e Sharif, coming back to the urban area from the border," the official said.
Briefing reporters yesterday at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not rule out tactical air support for Northern Alliance forces: "That is a possibility, but I'm not telling you we're going to do that."
Asked whether the U.S. military, flying from distant bases, could provide tactical air support for Northern Alliances, Myers said that it could. "We have the capability to operate at great distances," he said, adding that U.S. aircraft "would not be prohibited technically" from providing close-in air support of Northern Alliance troops.
The U.S. official said that the fall of Mazar would clear the way for another opposition commander, Ismail Khan, to capture the western city of Herat. Such a turn of fortune could convince some Taliban commanders to break ranks with the Taliban and back the rebellion to preserve a Pashtun element in the government, administration officials and analysts said. Unlike the Taliban, the Northern Alliance mainly draws its support from the minority Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara communities.
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Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks and news researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.
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