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War in Afghanistan shifts to riskier, political role
©Washington Post U.S. officials have concluded after 10 months of war that the combat mission of U.S. conventional military troops in Afghanistan is largely over and that what fighting remains is likely to be carried out by small numbers of Special Forces troops and CIA operatives, the Washington Post reported. This new phase represents a sharp shift from the U.S. military posture of last spring, when thousands of regular U.S. infantry troops fought al-Qaida positions in the Shah-e-Kot Valley and then conducted sweeps farther east along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Now, officials tell the Washington Post, the Afghan war is reverting to the methods used last October and November, when small teams of Special Operations troops spotted targets for bombers and worked with Afghan fighters. These units, which are trained to conduct covert raids and to work hand-in-hand with the CIA and foreign militaries, are focusing on small-scale efforts to track down Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan and al-Qaida fighters who have fled across the border into Pakistan. The Washington Post's sources stressed that the situation in Afghanistan is fluid and unpredictable and that conventional troops could again take a central role if the government in Kabul isn't able to establish its hold on Afghanistan. The uncertain state of President Hamid Karzai was underscored Saturday by the daylight assassination of Abdul Qadir, one of his three vice presidents. But the intention is that almost all of the 7,000 U.S. soldiers in the country should increasingly play less a purely military role and more a political one, in effect acting as a reassuring presence to deter challenges to the Karzai government and to the international peacekeeping force in Kabul. The conventional troops are unlikely to be withdrawn soon, officials told the Post. Rather, units from the 82nd Airborne Division are deploying to Afghanistan to replace those from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne divisions, and such troops are likely to be required for years to come. The shift in approach hardly means that Pentagon officials think that their antiterrorism efforts in Afghanistan are finished or becoming much easier to prosecute. Many defense experts, including some who have consulted with the Pentagon on the conduct of the war, think the lull in fighting offers an opportunity to assess the U.S. approach and make crucial adjustments in tactics and policy. "We're at a point where we have to decide what we're up to there," said Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan who was deeply involved in the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. "This is the time to sit down, take off the rucksack and assess where you are." Among other things, he said, the Bush administration should stop bombing Afghanistan, as it did earlier last week in Oruzgan province. U.S. officials were reminded of the difficulties they face in recent days when it appeared that Uzbek and Tajik factions from its old allies in the Northern Alliance were about to fight in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. That near-breakdown into localized civil war was averted only after determined intervention by the CIA, Special Forces officers and the Karzai government, officials said. Some military experts predicted that this more political phase of the war could prove more troublesome than last winter's bombing of the Taliban front lines and the pushing of al-Qaida out of the country. "I am fairly pessimistic," said Andrew Krepinevich Jr., a defense strategist at the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a frequent Pentagon consultant. "We won Phase One of the war, but Phase Two, supporting the successor regime, is the kind of military operation that is more difficult." To be sure, the majority view among U.S. officials and military experts is that U.S. policy there is on track. But the strong minority view is that the United States could face real trouble in Afghanistan, especially if it fails to adapt its tactics as conditions change. "We may be sliding into a losing dynamic," said retired Navy Capt. Larry Seaquist, an expert in security strategy. "There is not much positive data in view." As evidence of a drift in the U.S. approach in Afghanistan, he and others pointed to the incident last week in which more than 100 Afghan civilians were, according to Afghan accounts, injured or killed by a U.S. airstrike aimed at suspected Taliban hide-outs. "Our forces seem to be chasing hither and yon, and stumbling into one friendly-fire mess after another," he said. Pessimists such as Seaquist worry about three trends they see, all related to the Pashtuns, Afghanistan's predominant ethnic group. Together, they fear, these trends could snowball into surprising trouble for the United States and for its allies in the Afghan and Pakistani governments. The first is the resentment engendered by the monthslong hunt in southern Afghanistan for Mullah Mohammed Omar and other Taliban leaders. To some defense experts, the Oruzgan friendly fire incident underscored the diminishing returns of this effort. "We are now doing things that appear to give marginal return but at a potentially very high cost," said John Warden, a retired Air Force strategist who played a key role in planning the air campaign in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Others worry that the hunt for Taliban leaders continues only because of a strategic drift. "We are running the risk of letting our participation degenerate into continuous tactical scrapes without decisive action," warned retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, an expert in tactics and strategy. The second trend is the Pashtun suspicion that the United States backs the Tajik and Uzbek commanders who formed the core of the Northern Alliance, to the detriment of Pashtun ambitions to play a larger role in the government. At last month's meeting of the loya jirga, or grand council, to select a new Afghan government, Pashtuns complained that Tajiks held onto too many cabinet posts at their expense. "There are extraordinary levels of discontent among the Pashtuns," said Robert Templer, Asia program director for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization. "It's hard to see a long-lasting peace based upon the political arrangements that exist in Kabul at the moment." Those arrangements were further called into question by Saturday's killing of Qadir, one of the few ethnic Pashtun leaders in the Northern Alliance who had protested last month what he called the loya jirga's discrimination against that group. Templer thinks the U.S. government should stop pursuing al-Qaida and Taliban and address other issues. "I don't think the Taliban and al-Qaida will be much of a problem in the future, but everyone else (in Afghanistan) might be," he said. The United States could lose the war in Afghanistan, warned Bearden, "if the Pashtuns decide that we're the enemy or an occupying force." U.S. officials say they are sympathetic to the Pashtuns' concerns. "There are some in the Pashtun community who feel that they lost ground, or they didn't command as many of the (cabinet) portfolios as they might have hoped," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage conceded in recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Behind the scenes, officials tell the Post, the U.S. government twisted arms to limit the number of cabinet seats that Tajiks from the Northern Alliance took in the new government. The third Pashtun-related trend is the recent expansion of the war into Pakistan, arguably a more important front than the war in Afghanistan. Tribesmen along both sides of the border mainly are ethnic Pashtuns. There the war is harder to follow than it is in Afghanistan, with neither the United States nor Pakistan disclosing much about operations. If Pakistan's recent crackdown on al-Qaida falters, then the U.S. effort in the region could crumble, experts warned. But how to bolster the Pakistani effort remains controversial. Pakistani officials disclosed last week that the U.S. military recently rushed reconnaissance equipment, including five sophisticated surveillance helicopters, to help in the hunt for al-Qaida. Some CIA officers and Special Operations troops are working with the Pakistani military in the border area. Few doubt that the destabilization of Pakistan would represent a major defeat for the United States in the war. "If Pakistan falls apart, our ability to pursue al-Qaida in the region falls apart with it," emphasized former U.S. diplomat E. Wayne Merry. To avoid that, Armitage recently told Congress, it will be necessary to prevail against al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "I don't think we're actually going to have a success unless we're successful in both countries," he said.
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