Missteps Toppled Taliban, Analysts Say
War: Outdated game plan and a misreading of U.S. commitment led to the sudden fall of the regime and its Al
Qaeda guests, according to Pakistanis.
Los Angeles Times
December 27, 2001
E-mail story
By DAVID LAMB, Times Staff Writer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The sudden collapse of the Taliban and its
Al Qaeda terrorist guests in Afghanistan stunned Pakistani military
analysts, who now say the groups' leaders made enormous tactical
blunders.
In the end, they say, the Taliban's vaunted courage and military mastery
proved a myth. The Taliban and Al Qaeda had no strategy, misread the
United States' commitment to eradicate terrorism and, these analysts
say, thought that they could win by fighting yesterday's war--in which the
moujahedeen defeated the Soviet Union, after a decade of combat, in
1989.
Only a few months ago, the Taliban, which controlled 90% of
Afghanistan, appeared in position to defeat the dogged
Northern Alliance opposition force and extend its rule
across the entire country after five years of civil war.
When alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masoud--"the Lion of Panjshir"--was
assassinated Sept. 9, a retired
Pakistani general recalled, "I said to myself, 'That's the end of the
alliance.' Many alliance leaders felt that way too."
Then came Sept. 11. Afghanistan was turned upside down. And within
three months, the religious zealots who had promised to stand and fight
to the death were destroyed as an effective political and military
institution, having been killed or pushed into hiding without digging in for
a single decisive battle.
"We've made tremendous progress, but we're not there yet," Kenton
Keith, a spokesman for the U.S.-led anti-Taliban coalition, said
Wednesday. "In October, the Taliban had 90% of the country. There
was no democratic political process. Everyone assumed Afghanistan
was facing a major famine in which hundreds of thousands could die
over the winter.
"Today, the Taliban controls nothing except some isolated pockets of
resistance. There is a political process in place, and it looks as though
we will not see a major famine, with 104,000 metric tons of wheat
arriving, enough to feed the people. In every respect, what we were
facing in October we are no longer facing today."
In late September, before the U.S. bombing campaign began, Taliban
and Al Qaeda fighters "seemed to disappear overnight" from the north,
Pakistani military sources said. It is now believed that they were moving
their families to places they considered safe. The fighters started
returning in the last days of September.
At first, their leaders taunted the United States in pronouncements and
radio messages. "Send us your Americans, not our Muslim brothers," one
Taliban fighter radioed ananti-Taliban militia member in eastern Afghanistan's
Tora Bora region.
In Pakistan, thousands of tribal warriors answered the call to jihad and walked
across the border with an odd assortment of old weapons, believing that they
were going to Afghanistan to fight the Americans. Many of them were killed.
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the reclusive Taliban leader, appeared to be aware
of the United States' reputation of being willing to fight wars but not suffer casualties
since its ill-fated experience in Vietnam.
Pakistani analysts believe that Omar's game plan was to hunker down and lie low
until large numbers of U.S. ground troops were sent into combat. When Taliban
and Al Qaeda forces, hidden in their fortified mountain caves, inflicted large casualties
on them, the Americans would withdraw, the reasoning went. It was a strategy that
had worked with the Soviet Union.
"Al Qaeda fought hard at first," said Sayed Mohammed Pahlawan, an anti-Taliban
commander in Tora Bora. "But when they found out they were fighting Muslim brothers,
not the Americans, they softened and were easily defeated. I think they were disappointed
not to fight the Americans."
In the capital, Kabul, the northern cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz and the southern stronghold
of Kandahar and other places, the Taliban tried to hold ground. The Soviet army had found in the
1980s that such a tactic doesn't work in Afghanistan. It particularly didn't work in 2001, when the
United States controlled the skies and, unlike the Soviet Union, didn't have to worry about losing
planes to missiles.
Besides, the strength of the Taliban and the anti-Soviet moujahedeen had been as guerrillas,
operating in rugged terrain they knew well, not as soldiers who held ground and fought conventional
battles.
"To say the Taliban had a strategy gives them too much credit for military sophistication," said
Kamal Matinubim, a retired Pakistani general. "These are really militia people, ramshackle people
who've been given some weapons. They've had a little training, like jumping over some obstacle
logs or digging ditches, but strategy and tactics are way beyond them. What they seemed most
concerned with was not taking casualties themselves."
They never saw the Americans they thought they would fight, and the death many met came from
30,000 feet. In the Persian Gulf War a decade ago, 15% of the bombs dropped were
precision-guided. In Afghanistan, about two-thirds were. Additionally, the munitions used in
Afghanistan were cheaper and more plentiful and powerful than those available to U.S. forces in the
Gulf.
The Taliban, Matinubim and others said, was doomed the moment Pakistan pulled the plug on the
fundamentalist regime.
That left the Taliban and Al Qaeda with no havens, no external supply routes, no friendly neighbors
among the countries that surround Afghanistan. On top of that, neither the Taliban nor Al Qaeda
had a constituency willing to rise up in its support.
Like earlier Afghan wars, analysts said, the outcome of this one depended more on negotiated
surrenders, commanders' switching sides and strategic withdrawals than on advancing and fighting
with the enemy, something neither side was willing to do. The moujahedeen who fought the Taliban
and acted as a proxy army for the United States showed little enthusiasm for advancing until targets
had been pounded for days by U.S. warplanes.
"The moujahedeen were pretty smart," one Western military analyst said. "Once the U.S. came in,
they realized what they had to do to win was stay on the United States' side and just show up. But it
was their presence on the ground that forced the Taliban to mass and try to hold ground--which in
an air war proved fatal."
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