The new American strategy for wiping out enemy fighters in the most lawless area of Afghanistan calls for mounting continuous counterinsurgency operations on both sides of the border with Pakistan that could last beyond this summer, senior officials at the Pentagon say.
The operations, including day-and-night raids and methodical sweeps, are far less reliant on airstrikes or on friendly Afghans than the earlier stages of the war were. Instead, they are being carried out by rapidly moving and highly trained Western soldiers with intensive intelligence-gathering elements. Already, the operations involve about 150 American troops and several hundred British, Canadian and other coalition forces in an area of southeast Afghanistan roughly the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Their mission is to hunt relatively small numbers of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have dispersed to avoid detection. In some ways, it is more like what the United States Army tried to do in the middle of the Vietnam War than it is like the last seven months in Afghanistan. The operation also carries considerable risks: of suffering American casualties, of mistakenly attacking the wrong people, of being misled by faulty intelligence and of inflaming local hostility to foreigners on Afghan soil.
"The goal here is to apply unrelenting pressure, so wherever they turn, they never can find any breathing space," a senior defense official said.
After seven months, the war's new phase features a new level of cooperation with Pakistan, senior officials say. In just the last few weeks, handfuls of American military intelligence and communications specialists have joined Pakistani forces who had been searching for fugitive fighters in the mountainous tribal border areas traditionally outside the control of the government in Islamabad.
The assistance of American Special Forces may help squads of elite troops drawn from Pakistan's Frontier Corps to move quickly to block the mountain passes chosen by enemy fighters fleeing from coalition forces in Afghanistan, the Americans say.
In addition, another official said, small numbers of American Special Operations forces are conducting cross-border reconnaissance missions into Pakistan, ready to strike at Qaeda fighters if they are found. The Pakistani and American forces have been treading gingerly, however, since they are operating for the first time in the Pakistani tribal zones and do not want to provoke resistance from locals who have ethnic ties to the Taliban.
From now through the summer, and probably beyond, the American commanders intend to mount similar operations. That is meant to buy time for a new Afghan government that will be chosen next month. Another bonus, officials said, is that the operations are expected to produce more intelligence about opposing forces' activities and plans.
What is not lost on those building this strategy is the continuing search on both sides of the rugged border area for their most notorious quarry, Osama bin Laden. "If there's a large pocket left in that tribal area, bin Laden is most likely in it," a senior military officer said. But he added that American officials had no firm intelligence on Mr. bin Laden's precise whereabouts.
What is just as important to guarding the success of the campaign in Afghanistan, senior Pentagon and military officials said, will be the American military's influence on Afghan warlords, whose rivalries in recent days have resulted in shootouts and dueling rocket attacks.
Teams of American Special Forces, who built relationships with anti-Taliban commanders during the first phase of the war, have been assigned to remain with those leaders as they have become provincial governors wielding control sometimes greater than the nascent government in Kabul.
"They are the centers of power," a senior defense official said. "We have influence we can exert in subtle ways with regional leaders, and we are using that influence to reinforce stability."
The dueling priorities of stamping out the remnants of the enemy and ensuring that simmering factional rivalries do not boil over combine to require a long-term American military presence in Afghanistan, senior defense officials said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week that "the situation in Afghanistan is far from over," and Bush administration officials have quite purposefully avoided setting any exit date from Afghanistan.
Just over 7,000 American troops are now stationed throughout Afghanistan, but Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the war's overall commander, is likely to reduce that force over time and to tailor it to meet specific threats. The United States is acutely aware of the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan, and is consciously keeping a relatively small military presence in the country and conducting operations as discreetly as possible.
American officials rush to note the two starkest differences from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980's: that many Afghans welcome the American combat role today and that the United States is not itself trying to occupy or pacify the entire country.
"If you look out ahead six months or so, I think gradually you're going to see the number of U.S. forces come down and the number of coalition forces go up," a senior Defense Department official said this weekend.
In southeast Afghanistan, coalition forces are playing an increasing role in an array of missions. About 1,700 British royal marines are now in Afghanistan conducting missions. Canadian light-infantry forces began a mission over the weekend.
Scores of Special Operations forces from several other countries -- including Australia, Denmark, Germany, France and Norway -- are also conducting operations.
While those activities center largely on three southeastern provinces -- Paktia, Paktika and Logar -- military officials have briefed Mr. Rumsfeld on what they call their "crescent of concern," an arc of territory sweeping from west of Kandahar to just south of Kabul.
The difficulties include those that have plagued the military campaign since the end of sweeping battles under cover of substantial aerial bombardment that toppled the Taliban: sorting friend from foe as the adversary melts into the rugged terrain or hides among the population. Because of confusing, uncertain and occasionally contradictory intelligence, Americans have killed suspected Qaeda and Taliban fighters who turned out to be neither.
But officials say their planning acknowledges the fact that the land and air battles have long since peaked in Afghanistan. On Friday, eight B-1 bombers based in Oman began returning home to Dyess Air Force Base in Texas. Last month, the Pentagon cut its commitment of naval forces to Afghanistan in half, to one aircraft carrier and 2,000 marines afloat.
Yet with the country's long-term security question still unresolved, and America's commitment to help Afghanistan build a multiethnic army loyal to the central government in Kabul, a senior defense official declared, "we'll have some number of forces on the ground there for a couple of years."
In fact, the United States appears committed to be Afghanistan's de facto air force, national intelligence service and emergency ground force until an Afghan national army proves that it can maintain security. President Bush last week spoke by phone with Hamid Karzai, the interim Afghan leader, pledging $2 million to help equip and train an army.
"Having done all this to liberate Afghanistan," a senior Defense Department official said, "we're not going to walk away and leave a vacuum, a vacuum either for terrorists to fill or for certain neighboring countries to fill."
In the latest sign of the long-term American military commitment, Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, a three-star officer who heads the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C., will soon relieve one of his subordinates, Maj. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, a two-star officer who commands the 10th Mountain Division, as commander of ground operations in Afghanistan.
The change, announced on Friday, does not reflect unhappiness with General Hagenbeck, defense officials said. General Hagenbeck was sent to Central Asia last fall. During the ground campaign this year, his blunt, candid descriptions of encounters with the enemy in the mountains of southeast Afghanistan might have been more than officials in Washington wanted to hear, but they did not contradict him. He was one of the first to say that American forces might venture into Pakistan.
The change was made because General Franks wanted a more senior officer with a larger headquarters staff to consolidate the growing international coalition forces under a single command reporting directly to him, officials said.
To balance their worldwide troop commitments, the individual armed services have already adopted schedules to rotate troops in and out of Afghanistan. "The Air Force, along with the other services, are gearing up for having to deal with pursuit of terrorists over the long term," said Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff.
In fact, senior military planners express a grudging respect for the tenacity -- and flexibility -- shown by their adversaries in Afghanistan. "Al Qaeda and Taliban are evil, but they're not stupid," a senior defense official said. "They are very much of a learning enemy. If they try something and it works, they'll try it again. If they try something and it doesn't work, they stop."
That is why the military is paying so much attention to the small numbers congregating in southeast Afghanistan, which they have been able to do apparently because there is no single powerful warlord who has been policing that area.
"What we're finding is that there are worse things than having warlords in place, and that's having nobody in charge," a senior official said. "Then you have chaos. That's worse."
(China Daily May 6, 2002)
