A Fight Over the Next Front
The bombing began and the skies were secured. But the air war is just the beginning. As the Pentagon anxiously eyes the rocky terrain ahead, the generals, worried about finishing the job, are grumbling about what it will really take
By Evan Thomas and John Barry
NEWSWEEK
Oct. 22 issue — In the military, which has an acronym for everything, there are a number of ways to express, by means of abbreviated profanity, that things are not going well. In World War II, the Greatest Generation talked about “snafus” and situations that were “fubar.” Around the Pentagon during the opening days of the First War of the 21st century, the abbreviation of the moment is AOS, which, politely translated, means All Options Stink.
TOPPLING THE TALIBAN and nabbing Osama bin Laden were supposed to be just the first steps in the new war on terrorism. The more difficult challenge, it seemed, would be rolling up Al Qaeda cells in 60 nations around the globe and then taking on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and eliminating his weapons of mass destruction. The Taliban could hardly be a match for the world’s greatest superpower, and Americans, conditioned by Hollywood, could readily visualize Delta Force storming bin Laden’s cave.
American Special Forces may indeed stage a commando raid inside Afghanistan as early as this week, NEWSWEEK has learned. It would, however, likely be limited to gathering intelligence, not trying to kill or capture bin Laden. To military minds, hunting guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan, a country that has long swallowed armies whole, is a chancy proposition. America’s Special Forces are superbly equipped and trained, but the mountains of Central Asia are an easy place to get lost. The history of military manhunts is not encouraging: in 1916, Gen. John (Black Jack) Pershing took 6,000 U.S. soldiers into Mexico to track down an outlaw named Pancho Villa. The Americans returned empty-handed 10 months later; they succeeded only in making Villa a Mexican national hero. More recently, American Special Forces tried to snatch Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in a lightning raid in Mogadishu in 1993. The Rangers and Delta Force failed at the cost of 73 wounded and 18 dead (with one American corpse dragged through the streets). The modern record of “special operations” is at best checkered: when veterans think of operating helicopters in the sort of dust storms common to Afghanistan, they recall Desert One, the failed 1980 Iranian hostage-rescue mission. And the possibility of escalation—of regular ground troops invading Afghanistan—evokes mutterings from old warriors about another Vietnam.
DUTIFULLY SALUTING
Only one week into the war, any talk of a “quagmire” seems a little premature. As President George W. Bush said last week, the campaign to “bring Al Qaeda to justice” could end in “a year or two”—or “tomorrow.” In any case, the commander in chief is clearly determined to stay the course. His troops are dutifully saluting. But in the privacy of their offices, some of the senior military officials are quietly pessimistic. The top brass is worried that the military is being asked to do a job that requires not just brute force but skillful diplomacy and cunning spying—not to mention a large dose of luck. Speaking privately to fellow officers not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former head of Central Command, bluntly stated, “I hope the military isn’t given this to solve.”
President Bush has been warned by his advisers not to stake everything on catching bin Laden.
President Bush has been warned by his advisers not to stake everything on catching bin Laden. The president toned down his early “dead or alive” bluster and rarely mentions bin Laden by name. But Bush can’t seem to restrain himself from personalizing the enemy. At his press conference last week, the president referred first to Al Qaeda, then to the “evildoers,” then to “the evil one.” The effect was to treat bin Laden like the wicked wizard Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels—a force so menacing that he can only be whispered about as “He Who Must Not Be Named.”
The bombing campaign that began last week was clearly designed to “decapitate” the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership. American warplanes dropped 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on suspected underground shelters and shot up a convoy that included the kind of Chevrolet Suburban used by Mullah Mohammed Omar, chief of the Taliban. A couple of Omar’s family members were reportedly killed. Yet after five days of bombing, Bush acknowledged that he did not know if bin Laden was dead or alive, and Pentagon sources indicated they have no real idea where the Qaeda chieftain is hiding out.
‘DEGRADED’ FORCES
At Pentagon press briefings, reporters were shown precision-guided bombs wiping out rows of aircraft, blasting buildings and punching holes in runways. The armed forces of the Taliban were undoubtedly, in Pentagon lingo, “degraded.” But the Taliban’s forces were pretty low grade to begin with—a handful of beat-up Russian MiG and Sukhoi planes and aging artillery pieces and tanks. B-2 stealth bombers flew halfway around the world from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to deliver precision bombs stenciled with messages like NYPD and FDNY on their targets. B-52s from the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean delivered their payloads—old-fashioned iron “dumb bombs”—on Al Qaeda’s terrorist-training camps. The camps, however, had long since been abandoned by the terrorists, while some errant bombs reportedly wiped out a nearby village. By the end of the week, before a Friday bombing pause for the Islamic holy day, American warplanes were landing on their carriers without having dropped their munitions. The pilots were running out of good targets.
Late last week Pentagon officials were boasting that America “controlled the skies” over Afghanistan and that demoralized Taliban defectors were starting to stream in. There were reports that the Taliban was having to beat its soldiers to force them to the front. Still, the experience of several wars, from World War II and Vietnam through the more recent largely casualty-free fighting in the Balkans, shows that air power is rarely decisive. (Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic gave up Kosovo because Moscow warned him he faced a NATO ground invasion.) The best use of the bombing in Afghanistan may be to gain intelligence—to, as Bush put it, “smoke out” bin Laden.
In the days immediately after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld privately grumbled that the military was unable to come up with a creative battle plan. “The media are preparing to cover a second gulf war and the military are preparing to fight one,” one of Rumsfeld’s top aides said wearily. War councils seemed to drone on endlessly without fresh thinking. At one point, Rumsfeld mordantly joked that the operation, then known as Infinite Justice, should be renamed “Infinite Meetings.” But bombing the Taliban’s meager “infrastructure” should cut the phone lines bin Laden uses to communicate with his lieutenants. Bin Laden, the theory goes, would be forced to go on the air—to use radios and cell phones whose signals can be intercepted and locations pinpointed by spy planes and satellites.
SECRET MESSAGES?
At least that’s the hope. It may be, however, that bin Laden uses no-tech couriers and possibly even carrier pigeons to send messages. With his diabolical knack for exploiting modern technology in his battle against modernism, bin Laden may be encoding secret messages in the propaganda videotapes he has made available to the Arab-language TV network Al-Jazeera. In one chilling tape, a Qaeda spokesman declared that “the Americans must know that the storm of airplanes will not stop.” Was he delivering a warning—or an order to sleeper cells of terrorists in the United States or abroad? (Last week, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice won the cooperation of U.S. network executives to use caution before airing future tapes.)
Short of homing in on his radio signals, finding bin Laden in a desolate countryside the size of Texas is a very tall order. U.S. intelligence is running low on unmanned drone spy planes that it needs for close-up surveillance and tracking inside Afghanistan. An undisclosed number of these drones have crashed in Iraq and the Balkans, and at least one already in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials complain that the Air Force has been pouring billions into the F-22, a next-generation fighter of no use against terrorists, while building only seven Predator drones a year. One military expert told NEWSWEEK that U.S. forces need scores of such spy planes to maintain blanket coverage over Afghanistan.
Precisely because the military is so desperate for intelligence, the commanders of Operation Enduring Freedom are strongly considering sending a reconnaissance team into Afghanistan. Helicopters would drop in a raiding party to snatch some prisoners, in the hopes that if the right ones fell into the net, they could lead U.S. forces to the Taliban leadership or even bin Laden. This may seem like a long-shot proposition, but the Pentagon is eager to be seen doing something. A daring raid could be a morale booster before the public’s patience grows thin. Also under consideration, but less likely: sending in forces to seize a patch of ground inside Afghanistan that could be used as a forward base for staging commando raids and airstrikes. The downside: protecting the base from guerrilla attack could be very difficult and deadly.
TRULY FEARSOME UNITS
If bin Laden is spotted, small units of highly trained Special Forces can be inserted nearby. Among America’s 44,000-odd Special Operations soldiers—among them, Green Berets, Army Rangers, Air Force helicopter and gunship crews—there are some truly fearsome units, like the supersecret Delta Force and the Navy SEALs’ Special War-fare Development Group. The British SAS commandos have a proven record at stealthy combat, and the best unit for fighting in the Afghan mountains in winter may be a specially trained British Marine unit called Commando Three. Though the Pentagon is being appropriately tight-lipped about the movements of these shadow warriors, sources say teams are already stationed at remote bases along the Afghan border in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as well as aboard the carrier Kitty Hawk, which has finally arrived in the Arabian Sea. Flying at night in special helicopters, commandos can “fast rope”—slide down ropes—to the ground. President Bush repeatedly uses the phrase “bringing to justice” when he discusses his aim for bin Laden. As a practical matter, that means killing the terrorist leader. It is highly unlikely that a commando raid would capture the Qaeda chief and his cohorts alive. (Nor would it want to: imagine the possibilities for hostage taking and other mayhem attendant to a bin Laden trial.) For the record, Rumsfeld has disavowed any specific efforts to kill bin Laden and the Taliban leadership, but his denials are taken as pro forma.
More likely, Special Forces would sit atop a nearby peak and call in an airstrike, either with “fast movers”—carrier-based jets—or possibly the lethal Spectre gunships, which can circle overhead, pouring a torrent of cannon fire into a target. (To improve the aim of bomber pilots, commandos can point laser beams at targets on the ground.) The commandos will likely have to operate in brutal conditions—winter is coming in the mountains, and temperatures will soon be subzero. On the other hand, bin Laden’s movements would be both curtailed by the snow and more easily tracked. And if his bodyguards really are holed up in some well-equipped cave, U.S. sensors will more easily detect their heat emissions in a frigid landscape.
The best way to find bin Laden may be a well-placed bribe. “It was said by the Brits that only two things move the Taliban tribal leaders—religion and money,” a former high-ranking Pakistani military officer told NEWSWEEK. “I would reverse the order.” The CIA is reportedly trying to pay off local warlords to turn against the Taliban and guide the Americans to bin Laden’s lair. Newspaper stories last week reported that the CIA was “surging” in the region. “That means that the agency brought three or four guys out of retirement and they’re trying to find their old contacts,” said a former CIA official who has worked in the region. A diplomatic source with intimate knowledge of Afghan affairs told NEWSWEEK that some tribal leaders are demanding titles and power as well as cash. “They’re saying, ‘I can get bin Laden if I can be governor of this or that province’ after it’s all over,” says the diplomat. “Washington’s problem is: how do you deal with people who are mostly a bunch of pirates?”
HELP FROM PAKISTAN
Lacking its own “assets,” the CIA has already asked for help from the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. But knowledgeable American officials say they have been disappointed with the information provided by the ISI, which had a hand in training Taliban and presumably Al Qaeda fighters, but claims little detailed knowledge of bin Laden and his leadership group. A senior Pakistani official told NEWSWEEK that his leaders are reluctant to become deeply involved in a proxy war until they have a clearer picture of what might follow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Pakistan wants a friendly government run by ethnic Pashtuns on its border, not by other, less friendly tribes in the north of Afghanistan. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has told Washington that he is dead set against a government run by the Northern Alliance—the one rebel group that is actively fighting the Taliban.
Washington is listening to Islamabad. Last week the forces of the Northern Alliance seemed to stall on their march to Kabul, the Afghan capital. American warplanes made no move to provide air support to the Northern Alliance by striking Taliban frontline forces. That is partly because the Navy has been stressing the difficulties (and dangers) of providing low- flying ground support at such long distances from the carriers, say Pentagon sources, but mainly because the United States does not want to alienate General Musharraf by tipping America’s hand toward the Northern Alliance.
So far, Musharraf has been a strong ally in the new war against terrorism. But his government may be precarious, susceptible to a revolt by Islamic extremists. In a Gallup poll commissioned by NEWSWEEK in Pakistan, Musharraf still enjoyed the support of a narrow majority of his countrymen. At the same time, the poll showed that a stunning 83 percent of the population sided with the Taliban in the current conflict, while only 3 percent called themselves pro-American. The pro-Taliban sentiment jumped by 40 points after the bombing began. With rioting and anti-American demonstrations in several cities, Pakistan rode out an uneasy holy day last Friday. Musharraf has moved to crack down on dissent, purging his own leadership of fundamentalists, closing madrasas (the religious schools that trained Afghanistan’s Taliban) and deporting Afghans who took to the streets. Still, the Musharraf regime is understandably eager for the U.S. bombing campaign to come to a quick conclusion.
OVERRULING THE DOUBTERS
Within the Bush administration, some national-security officials had argued against starting the bombing campaign too quickly, before even a mechanism was in place to choose a successor government to replace the Taliban. Bush overruled the doubters and ordered airstrikes to begin essentially as soon as U.S. forces were in place to do the job. (Bush was supported in this decision by his closest aides and advisers. Secretary of State Colin Powell, normally the most cautious of military men, approved of the limited scale of the attacks.) The worry now, at least among some administration strategists, is that Afghans who despise the Taliban may still rally patriotically against the American attacks.
Bush hoped to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan—and throughout the Muslim world—by a showy display of humanitarian relief. As the bombing began, giant U.S. cargo planes began dropping thousands of food packages into Afghanistan. The actual impact of the food drop was iffy. Two airdrops a night could do little to alleviate the famine now threatening millions. There were reports of the Taliban’s defiantly burning the packages in Kandahar and of rival tribes fighting over them in Khost, near the border. Alex Renton of Oxfam, an NGO that has been delivering food to Afghanistan for three years, worries that many of the food packages dropped along the refugee routes leading to the Pakistani border wound up in minefields. Aside from Angola, Afghanistan is the most heavily mined country in the world. The food was not halal, the Islamic equivalent of kosher, and it was vegetarian, though most Afghans are not. Along with such American staples as peanut butter, strawberry jam and shortbread cookies, each package contained a moist towelette, a source of some chuckling among relief workers in a country with little sanitation. The instructions on the package were in English and at times Spanish. Asked about this by Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut at a hearing last week, a USAID official patiently explained, “Most of the people who will receive this cannot read, Senator.”
The Bush administration is moving on other fronts as well to placate its wary Arab allies. U.S. support of Israel has long been a sticking point in the Islamic world. The administration recently leaked that it had been planning to call for the creation of a Palestinian state even before the Sept. 11 attacks. Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, administration officials are working on a speech calling on both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to make painful concessions to find some kind of peace agreement. The details are still the source of fierce debate in Bush’s inner councils, but the final product is likely to displease the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Some Bush officials were secretly glad when the sometimes intemperate Sharon seemed to be accusing the United States of appeasement in a speech two weeks ago. Though Sharon later apologized, his outburst was useful because it distanced the Sharon government from Washington in the eyes of some Arab leaders.
AFTER THE TALIBAN FALLS
Bush and his advisers have long advertised a distaste for what they call “nation-building.” But the United States will inevitably be drawn into trying to create a stable Afghanistan after the Taliban falls. The president himself signaled as much at his press conference when he implicitly criticized his own father’s administration for abandoning Afghanistan after the CIA-backed mujahedin drove out Russia in 1992. Bush went on to say, in somewhat stilted fashion, “It would be a useful function for the United Nations to take over so-called nation-building.” Involving the United Nations means the United States will have to pay for and support U.N. peacekeepers, though probably after shaking the tin cup round the oil-rich Arab leaders in the gulf. A top administration official told NEWSWEEK that Washington is preparing to fill a “political vacuum” if the Taliban collapses. There is talk of bringing back Afghanistan’s exiled 86-year-old king, Mohamad Zahir Shah, who has been living in Rome. Some Afghan leaders dream of convening a Loya Jirga—a “grand assembly” of tribal elders—Sunnis and Shiites, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmens and Hazara tribes from the north and the Pashtuns from the south and east.
Afghan’s bombed-out roads and vicious infighting may make such an assemblage difficult to achieve. “It might take two years for that to jell,” said a State Department official. But already, several of the Afghan groups have taken on Washington lobbyists. The king listens to Ronald Reagan’s former national-security adviser, Robert (Bud) McFarlane.
At the Pentagon, the generals are beckoning the State Department’s diplomats to join the fight. The military’s greatest worry is that it will be called on to invade Afghanistan. The top brass fears this scenario: Al Qaeda launches another terrorist attack against America. Bin Laden has still not been hunted down. The Taliban has not collapsed. The popular pressure to show results could force Bush to send in ground troops to finish the job. Waves of airborne troops could be dropped near Kabul and other Afghan cities; they would no doubt overmatch the Taliban forces. But the prospect of street fighting in an Afghan city or chasing around after guerrillas in the Afghan mountains is appalling to U.S. military planners. Some Pentagon officials tell NEWSWEEK that they are concerned that bin Laden is not hiding in a remote cave but in the teeming alleys of a city like Kandahar. The memory of Mogadishu—American soldiers surrounded by thousands of Somali irregulars with AK-47s and crude rocket-propelled grenade launchers (which nonetheless downed two helicopters)— remains searingly fresh in the Special Forces community.
Invading Afghanistan remains a worst-case option. But it would not be the last battle in the war, or even the hardest. Last week administration officials indicated that they were already looking at the Philippines and Malaysia as possible terrorist staging grounds. Then there is Saddam Hussein, America’s most lethal foe. “An Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein is basically a Kmart for terrorist weapons,” says George Shultz, Reagan’s former secretary of State. Saddam is known to be trying to make a nuclear weapon, and he has large stockpiles of deadly germs and chemical weapons. The Bush administration continues to insist that there is no solid evidence linking Iraq to the Sept. 11 bombings. But Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, met twice with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague during the last year. A small but vocal group of Bush officials, centered on Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, pressed from the beginning to target Iraq in the new war on terrorism. When even well-established hawks like Vice President Dick Cheney sided against the Wolfowitz faction, Bush decided to leave Baghdad alone—for now. Moderate Arab regimes, especially the Saudis, have warned Washington that bombing Baghdad would shatter Bush’s fragile and none-too-demonstrative Arab coalition against Al Qaeda. But the anti-Saddam hawks have not given up. Within the last month, former CIA director Jim Woolsey, who has long seen an Iraqi connection to the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, flew to Britain in a Pentagon aircraft on a secret mission. He was looking for evidence of Iraqi ties to terror. It was his second trip this year, and British sources say Woolsey claimed he was there on behalf of the Bush administration. The British government was irked by what it saw as his “freelancing.” (Woolsey declined to comment.) Now conservative former officials are talking about putting together an outside assessment group to monitor the Iraqi terrorist threat. The model would be the cold-war “Team B” that offered a dark view of the Soviet threat in the late 1970s.
The nightmare of Saddam’s handing out weapons of mass destruction to be used by terror cells operating in the United States is pretty dark indeed. Unlike the Islamic extremists, Saddam is not believed to be suicidal. If he were caught trying to nuke a city or infect a population, he knows that the United States would destroy Baghdad, with him in it, unless the Israelis did it first. But then no one really knows what Saddam is up to, and in a fearful age, ignorance is not bliss.
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With Rod Nordland, Melinda Liu, Juliette Terzieff and Zahid Hussein in Pakistan, Owen Matthews in Afghanistan, Martha Brant, Debra Rosenberg and Roy Gutman in Washington, Stryker McGuire in London and Tony Clifton in New Delhi
msnbc.com
Read the other parts also. Especially Parts 3, 4 and 5. |
