This war won't be measured in weeks

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 28, 2001

LONDON -- Stung by the stubborn resilience of the Taliban, senior American and British officials are bracing themselves for a military campaign in Afghanistan that promises to be more prolonged and difficult than they hoped as recently as early October.

After proclaiming that American airstrikes had "eviscerated" Taliban forces, Pentagon briefers are now trying to prepare the American public for a long haul by describing the Taliban as battle-hardened survivors.

To hear the United States' most important military allies speak, the hope is not to wrap up the fighting before the Muslim holiday of Ramadan begins in mid November but to try to prevail before Ramadan 2002.

"It is the most difficult operation ever undertaken by this country post-Korea," Adm. Michael Boyce, the chief of the British Defense Staff, warned his nation Friday. "It may not be the most dangerous because we are not facing an enemy like the Iraqi army, but it is the most difficult in terms of the objectives we've set ourselves."

Certainly, almost three weeks of American and British strikes have achieved some results. American warplanes have command of the skies -- at least when they fly at high altitudes, out of the range of the Taliban's antiaircraft guns and shoulder-fired missiles.

According to the Pentagon, the Taliban's air force is no more. Taliban command centers have been pulverized. Barracks and ammunition dumps have been blasted and many channels of communication sundered. Several camps at which Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida trained terrorists, abandoned at the start of the military campaign, have been leveled.

Those successes have made it easier for Americans -- and now, potentially, the British -- to venture on the ground as U.S. Special Forces did for several hours a little more than a week ago. But none of this has produced any decisive results. The road to victory may be long and full of pitfalls, as the allies and the Taliban each try to turn time to their advantage.

American and British senior officials still assert they will prevail over time and seem intent on sticking with their plan. It calls for constant bombing raids to wear down the Taliban. Commando raids will be used to capture or kill al-Qaida or Taliban leaders if the allies receive good intelligence on their movement. They can also be used to gather intelligence, as the American special forces did in their raid on Oct. 19.

"I believe that what we should try to do is not let them think that we are going to give up and go away or lighten up," Boyce said in an interview. "The squeeze will carry on until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed."

While the Taliban may be a rudimentary fighting force, it appears to have thought through its political strategy carefully. Their aim is not to challenge directly the vastly superior American and British military forces.

According to reports from people who have recently left Afghanistan, Taliban fighters are digging in and hiding out in civilian neighborhoods to elude American bombs.

At the same time, they are trying to use the Americans' bombing errors and the unintended attacks on civilians to stir up support for themselves in the Islamic world. Waging war against the Taliban would be far more difficult if objections in the Muslim world deprived the United States of access to bases in Pakistan and in the Persian Gulf.

This makes the diplomatic efforts to hold together the American-led coalition against terror as important as the military action itself.

Even in its most optimistic moments, the Bush administration was careful not to promise an easy war. Still, there are indications that the conflict is turning out to be more difficult than expected.

At the start of the military campaign, Rumsfeld quipped that the air raids were going so well that American and British forces were running out of targets in Afghanistan. Nobody talks that way at the Pentagon now at the end of what officials concede was not the best week.

"I am a bit surprised at how doggedly they're hanging on to their -- to power," Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week, referring to the Taliban.

The New York Times quoted one senior Republican senator, who wasn't named, as saying the Bush administration had underestimated its foe.

To be sure, the military problem is inherently difficult.

Unlike the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States and Britain have only very limited access to bases in the region, a constraint that has led the U.S. Army's Special Operations forces to use an aircraft carrier as a floating base, a model that Britain said Friday that its Royal Marines will copy.

In contrast to the strategy in the Gulf War, Washington and London have all but ruled out the insertion of a major ground army to take the fight to the Taliban. The idea is to avoid the mistakes the Soviet Union made in Afghanistan and the political repercussions in the Islamic world of a Western occupation. But the lack of ground troops -- even supposing that they could function well in Afghanistan's rugged terrain and negotiate the shifting loyalties of its warlords -- limits Washington's options.

The Taliban is not a traditional adversary. In a country that is now in its 23rd consecutive year of war, it is not even a government in the conventional sense. Its control of almost all of Afghanistan -- slivers of territory are still under the sway of the rebel Northern Alliance -- cannot be loosened by bombing telephone exchanges and knocking out state television, as was done in Yugoslavia in the 1999 war over Kosovo.

In addition, the Americans' potential proxy force in the north, the Northern Alliance, seems less than accomplished and is drawn from ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras -- minorities that are unacceptable to the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group.

The lack of effective allies in the south was graphically illustrated by the capture and execution on Friday of Abdul Haq, the Pashtun guerrilla leader. The CIA did not support him because it thought his efforts were too quixotic, but the agency has failed to find an alternative standard-bearer.

Boyce, who disclosed to the New York Times last week that he had made an unpublicized visit to the Pentagon and to Tampa to meet Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, who is running America's campaign in Afghanistan, said, "This is not like Kosovo.

"It's not like Desert Storm, where you had very clearly defined phases and relatively straightforward objectives. This is a much more murky area in which to work, obviously because the prime element is not actually visible -- Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida -- in the same way that Milosevic and the Serbs were or the Iraqis were. This is something much more intangible."

Still, the difficult nature of the campaign has sparked the first serious criticism of the Western powers' strategy and tactics, including some from experts who support the idea of military action.

"I cannot say who has the strategic initiative in this conflict," said Francois Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. "This is learning the hard way. It is starting to look as if they are bombing and bombing and bombing just because it is what they know how to do."

Heisbourg said the United States was wrong to defer bombing the Taliban front lines north of Kabul, a move widely interpreted as a step to keep the Northern Alliance from advancing on the capital and thus to satisfy Pakistan, a needed American ally that opposes any Northern Alliance government in Kabul. Pakistan seeks a coalition government with a hefty role for Pashtuns, who also have a strong presence in Pakistan.

The early seizure of Kabul, Heisbourg asserted, would have undermined the Taliban's legitimacy and given Washington a tangible strategic gain.

Some Bush administration officials disagree, fearing that the capture of Kabul by the Northern Alliance would encourage Pashtuns to rally around the Taliban.

These officials argue that it would make more sense for the Northern Alliance to attack to the west to seize Mazar-e-Sharif, a strategic crossroads in northern Afghanistan, and Herat, the main city in western Afghanistan, which is on the main routes into Iran, a Shiite Muslim-ruled country firmly at odds with the Sunni Muslim Taliban.

In the last week, as Washington casts around for ways to step up the military pressure, it has begun to strike Taliban forces in the north.

In any military campaign, there is a lot of second-guessing. There were critics who said that NATO could not win its 1999 war with Yugoslavia, but after 78 days of bombing it did.

American and British officials say they will succeed this time as well, especially since the campaign has become a litmus test of the West's ability to fight terrorism. But nobody can say exactly how or exactly when.

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