[A-List] Afghanistan: the blowback continues

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

US campaign against terror hits uncertain ground
The US is preparing for a sustained campaign in Afghanistan. But it must
choose its tactics with care if it is not to be caught up in ethnic
rivalries, says Alexander Nicoll and Charles Clover
Financial Times: March 20 2002

Carrying a 50kg pack and an 81mm mortar tube, Corporal Ryan Herron of
the US 101st Airborne Division got off a Chinook helicopter last week
after eight days in the Shah-i-kot valley in eastern Afghanistan and
headed for his tent.

"Bin Laden thinks the US is too soft to fight a ground war in
Afghanistan," he said, with a grin and an Indiana twang. "But we're
kickin' his ass. You can ask anyone in this tent. Everyone is ready to
refit and get back out there."

They will get their wish. Increasingly, the Afghan campaign is turning
into a ground war - albeit one in which the American-led forces are
backed by formidable US air power and aerial surveillance. In the next
few weeks, 1,700 British commandos will join some 6,000 US, Canadian and
other foreign soldiers on search-and-destroy missions aimed at
eliminating remnants of the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the former
Taliban regime. This will be the largest deployment of British combat
forces since the 1991 Gulf war.

The growing number of "boots on the ground" suggests US commanders
recognise that a long-term campaign, using flexible guerrilla tactics,
is needed to get at pockets of people who lie low in mountain hide-outs
and, when challenged, escape along mountain paths. Early western
jubilation at the rapid routing of the Taliban has been replaced by
sombre appreciation of the task ahead.

At the same time, the steady rise in the number of foreign soldiers in
Afghanistan - there will soon be about 12,000 - poses big risks, defence
analysts believe. At the extreme, the west could be caught up in
centuries-old Afghan tribal warfare and become bogged down as the
Russians did in the 1980s with the loss of at least 15,000 soldiers.

Nobody is yet suggesting such a danger is imminent: the US is not trying
to subdue the whole country but to pinpoint pockets of resistance. But
Operation Anaconda, the battle at Shah-i-kot over the past three weeks,
has raised questions about the US's tactics in dealing with the
guerrilla threat and its ability to deal with the seething
cross-currents of Afghan tribal politics.

Major-General Frank Hagenbeck, commander of US ground forces in
Afghanistan, yesterday rejected suggestions that Anaconda was not an
unqualified success. "We destroyed hundreds of al-Qaeda's most
experienced fighters and terrorists. We destroyed their base of
terrorist operations and eliminated their sanctuary."

A senior aide to Mohammed Qasim Fahim, Afghanistan's defence minister,
does not agree. "Only 50 to 60 were killed. Most of them escaped," he
says.

There is also disagreement about who exactly the US-led forces, which
included Afghan troops, were fighting. According to villagers around
Shah-i-kot, the enemy were units of the former Taliban regime who had
invited the governor of the province to inspect their location to prove
they meant no harm. But against this must be set reports from US and
Afghan commanders that Egyptians, Sudanese, Indonesians, Chechens,
Uzbeks and Chinese were among the dead at Shah-i-kot - strong evidence
of the presence of al-Qaeda.

Though the Pentagon is backing Gen Hagenbeck's claims of success in
Operation Anaconda, the tone among his colleagues in Washington is more
muted. Pressed on how many enemy fighters had been killed, Brigadier
John Rosa, a Joint Staff officer, said: "I saw so many estimates. I
don't know who made the estimates." Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon
spokeswoman, said: "It's very, very difficult to have exact numbers . .
. It's just not going to be very useful to put a number to it."

Ms Clarke was also cautious on how much had been achieved in rooting out
al-Qaeda. Although she said "we have debilitated and degraded to a
certain extent the al-Qaeda network", she also warned that "somewhere in
the general vicinity of what we've come to know as Operation Anaconda,
something might pop up again . . . I just think it's likely".

The indications are that the specially trained troops of the US Army's
10th Mountain Division and 45 Commando of the British Royal Marines are
better suited to cave-hopping guerrilla tactics than their Russian
predecessors. They are backed by massive air assets, including
surveillance that should permit them to pinpoint small concentrations of
fighters, bombers dropping precision-guided bombs, heavily armed
helicopters and Spectre gunships.

Even so, the evidence so far suggests the task is difficult and that
efforts to co-ordinate with local warlords or Afghan government forces
have been awkward. US intelligence appears sometimes to have fallen foul
of rivalries between local warlords, each claiming their enemies were
al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters.

Using troops recruited in provinces where action is taking place means
supplying local commanders with arms and money, and could exacerbate
warlordism. A second option is to use mainly western soldiers, though
this would risk higher casualties and accusations of foreign occupation.
"The US is faced with a problem. On the one hand, it wants to disarm the
warlords. On the other hand, it doesn't want to disarm them, as it
doesn't know when it will need them again," says Ayatollah Mohseini, an
influential Shiite leader in the Northern Alliance.

The third possibility is to use troops from Afghanistan's defence
ministry. These were introduced late in the fighting in Shah-i-kot but
took several objectives that local Afghan commanders had failed to
capture. They are mainly from the Tajik-led Northern Alliance, which
overran Kabul in November.

The trouble is that sending northern soldiers - ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks
- into southern ethnic Pashtun areas risks exacerbating Afghanistan's
already brittle ethnic situation and further alienating the Pashtun
majority from the interim administration in Kabul.

"You could have a situation where you have Pashtuns fighting the
foreigners, with the foreigners supporting the Tajiks," says Christopher
Langton of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
Pashtuns are already complaining about lack of representation in the
government.

This danger exists particularly because of the dual nature of the
foreign presence in Afghanistan. On the one hand, the US is still
prosecuting a war against al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants, with its
operational base at Bagram airfield, 40km north of Kabul. At least some
of the enemy is in mountains not far from Kabul, to the south and east
of the capital.

But in Kabul itself, 4,000 British-led foreign soldiers are helping to
provide security: officially they are not peacekeepers but most are
crack troops well able to deal with any outbreak of violence. Though
nominally a separate command, the troops are effectively under US
control because the American military controls the airspace.

The longer this dual role of foreign troops persists, defence analysts
believe, the greater the risk of their becoming intertwined. This would
directly link the west's involvement in assisting the Afghan government
with its pursuit of a war in which foreign commanders could be caught up
in local political in-fighting.

What will determine success in the US-led campaign? According to
Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute, a London
think-tank, Washington has managed to reduce expectations of the
imminent capture of Mr bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the former Taliban
leader, both of whose whereabouts remain unknown.

But that leaves a problem for commanders facing an open-ended guerrilla
war: they may never be able to declare victory with certainty. According
to Mr Langton, that means the duration of the campaign is a question of
organisational stamina: for how long will US casualties be tolerated?

Full article at:
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT36OG750ZC&live=true

Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney@xxxxxx